It’s no secret that Hollywood, and by extension the Western world, is in the grip of full-fledged zombie fever (does anyone else like the idea of Spike Lee writing and directing Zombie Fever?). As one of the world’s foremost zombie fetishists, this is a trend I can I absolutely get behind. I’m sometimes even tempted to give this trend a little reach around.
I love zombie movies. I love the slow, creeping threat they represent; I love that they can be hilarious and terrifying at the same time; I love the shambling ones and I love the snarly, sprinty ones. I’m glad the zombie sub-genre has made such an emphatic return since its heyday in the ‘70s, and the likes of 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and a host of zombie-dismembering videogames have done an admirable job of keeping that fetid fire alive.
I reckon the zombie genre’s still got legs, too. Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic books are a great read and could provide the basis for a brilliant, brutal HBO series. News is also just breaking that Natalie Portman is set to star in the film version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a parody novel that splices our favourite face-gnashers into our favourite book that we’ll get around to reading someday, in our own bloody time. That’s exactly the kind of iconoclastic middle finger to the establishment for which zombies make the perfect foil.
However, as with all trends, zombie fever™ does encourage a certain amount of rose-tinted gush-o-vision. We all saw it with Romero’s recent Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead – despite being mostly incoherent rubbish (sentient zombies? Dennis Hopper as an authority figure? Come on!), reviewers at the time displayed a leniency that, looking back in ten years, simply won’t make sense.
The most recent beneficiary of the zombies+camera=awesome formula? This year’s hugely overrated Zombieland. Both Empire and Total Film, two UK publications not usually given to hype-manipulation or excessive giddiness, awarded the film four stars. All over the internet, reviewers happily swapped out their critical faculties for more of an “Ooh, Woody Harrelson and zombies! LOLZ!” approach. Aintitcool’s Quint neatly exemplified this brainless hype-train in the first couple of lines of his Fantastic Fest review: “Basically ZOMBIELAND is Woody Allen and John Wayne paired together in a buddy road trip zombie apocalypse comedy. If you’re not sold you don’t exist to me.”
Zombieland is the anti-Shaun of the Dead, stripping away all the elements that made Edgar Wright’s zom-com such a charming and riveting watch and replacing it with a bland, gutless, emotionally hollow product which reeks of the middle of the road. The film is competently directed and acted, with some amusing slapstick and, admittedly, an extremely fun cameo, but that’s almost all I’ll say for it.
Every element of Zombieland feels like it has been workshopped and pieced together by studio committee, from Harrelson’s character Tallahassee, who is little more than a cipher for all the characteristics that 14 year-olds might think of as cool, down to the absence of any genuine threat posed by the zombies, undoubtedly the film’s most serious misstep. Shaun’s zombies are slow and shambolic but, like cinema’s best zombies, represent a merciless meatgrinder that’ll suck your bones dry if you make one wrong move. Zombieland’s deadheads have been so thoroughly de-fanged that the film loses any dramatic tension, resulting in a neutered experience akin to a zombie videogame that you can’t actually play. All the characters are so blissfully, effortlessly alive (including Tallahassee, who seemed a character practically tailor-made for a heroic death scene) at the end of the movie that you can’t help but feel that the movie’s producers were more interested in protecting a new franchise than creating an involving story.
I could go on and on about this movie’s flaws (oh, the plot contrivances! Why would LA, one of the world’s most densely populated urban areas, be entirely empty after a zombie holocaust? Answer: because several million zombies would be inconvenient for the characters), but I have to end this at some point. Suffice to say, zombie fever™ is one of the best pandemics to sweep the world in years, but it’s still a trend, and trends need to be carefully monitored or we’ll all end up indoctrinated and no better than...well, you know.
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