Kara and I went out last night to catch Zombieland on opening night.  What a blast!!!  This has to be one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time.  Set in the typical post-apocalyptic world, Zombieland has all the trappings of a great Zombie-story; a worldwide virus that turns your next-door neighbors into growling, scratching, sprinting cannibals, a desolate and abandoned world left to inhabit, a lifestyle of perpetual scavenging to survive, and lots and lots of the walking dead.

But Zombieland is not a horror film, like so many other Zombie movies with the same setting.  Zombieland is a closer relative to the 2004 comedy Shaun of the Dead than 1979 horror classic Dawn of the Dead.  To its credit (and much like predecessor Shaun of the Dead), Zombieland still happens to be a pretty good zombie movie in its own right.  There are scary scenes, some tense moments and plenty of gore… but this is a comedy.  And it is drop dead hilarious.

Many of the laughs come from the general awkwardness of Columbus, a college kid with serious paranoia issues that happen to come in handy in a world overrun by the walking dead.  Columbus narrates the film and occasionally tells us about some of his many rules for surviving zombieland.  Examples include Rule 1# Cardio, Rule #2 – Beware of Bathrooms, Rule #3 – Seatbelts, Rule #4 – Double Tap.  Columbus’s hand-sanitizing, rule-abiding personality is a great match with Tallahassee (played by Woody Harrelson) who plays the zombie-butt kicker extraordinaire.  The laughs really start rolling when Columbus and Tallahassee team up with Wichita and Little Rock (played by Little Miss Sunshine star Abigail Breslin) and find a mansion in Hollywood to crash at.  This mansion, formerly inhabited by someone Tallahassee calls “an A-list celebrity” is the setting for some of the funniest scenes and what has to be one of the best cameos I have ever seen in a film.  Remember Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder?  This cameo blows that one away.  Oh, and stick around for all the credits, there’s a gem waiting for you at the end.