+ Best Zombie Movie of the Year
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| Four game stars look ready to create mayhem on this poster for Ruben Fleisher's Zombieland |
A phobic, neurotic young man partners with a gun-crazed Texan in America, or Zombieland, after a zombie apocalypse has spread death and destruction everywhere, but the two are tricked by a pair of sisters.
The highly sarcastic, reference-laden kind of dialog that runs through Zombieland rarely works for movies, as it mostly gets tiring after a while, but somehow it does work here. Certain parts of Zombieland is likely to have made Zombie Godfather, New Yorker master filmmaker George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead (1968)) proud, not least the section in the theme park.
SPOILER Best in this great zombie horror-road movie-romcom genre-mixer, however, are the scenes with Bill Murray (Groundhog Day (1993)), in what purports to be his Hollywood mansion, which reaches a level of post-modern brilliance that is wholly unexpected, hilarious and delightful. Zombieland also contains some amazingly cool slo-mo shots of zombie attacks, (cinematography by Michael Bonvillain (Wanderlust (2012))), and may or may not beat Shaun of the Dead (2004) as the great modern zombie horror-comedy, according to your taste. It's a fun neo-classic in my book.
Zombieland is written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick (Deadpool (2016)) and directed by feature-debuting, great Washingtonian filmmaker Ruben Fleischer (Superstore (2015-17)).
Related posts:
Ruben Fleischer: Gangster Squad (2013) or, Good Men vs. Bad Men!
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
30 Minutes or Less (2011) or, Idiots and Lesser Idiots
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2009 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
Cost: 23.6 mil. $
Box office: 102.3 mil. $
= Big hit
[Zombieland premiered 25 September (Austin Fantastic Fest) and runs 87 minutes. Harrelson only took the part in the film on conditions, including that the set be 'environmentally conscious' and Fleischer not ingesting dairy products for a week. Shooting took place in Georgia and in Los Angeles from February - April 2009. The theme park section was mostly shot at Georgia's Wild Adventures Water and Theme Park, with 160 zombie performers in one scene. The film opened #1 to a 24.7 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it stayed in the top 5 for another week (#2) and grossed 75.5 mil. $ (73.8 % of the total gross), becoming the top-grossing zombie film ever there, beating Dawn of the Dead (2004), - until Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were the UK with 5.5 mil. $ (5.4 %) and Russia with 3.9 mil. $ (3.8 %). Roger Ebert gave the film a 3/4 star review, equal to a notch harder than this one. Home video sales of the film in North America alone totaled another 55.4 mil. $. If added to the theatrical gross, it would change the film's status to that of huge hit. Sequel talks began with the film's concluding production, and Harrelson talked enthusiastically of another film but later backed away from that stance. A TV-series pilot without the stars but with the writers was made for Amazon in 2013 and not picked up for serialization. The writers and Fleischer still seem intent on making a sequel (by 2017). Zombieland is certified fresh at 90 % with a 7.4 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]
What do you think of Zombieland?
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