The zombie comedy is like the zombie itself - nothing if not resilient.
"Shaun of the Dead" felt like the ultimate zombie comedy - so funny, so comprehensive, so steeped in genre know-how, so densely populated with clever zombie jokes - it loomed as the zomcom to end all zomcoms.
It wasn't, though, and we can be glad of it. Its Americanized mutation, "Zombieland," is an unexpectedly funny repatriation of the form.
The Yankee version is about what you'd expect - less wit, more action, more product placements. Survivors traverse the zombie-plagued wasteland in a Hummer, searching for Twinkies, with the goal of reaching Disneyland, or an approximation of it.
"Zombieland" is skewed a bit more to teens, with Jesse Eisenberg as the putative hero, a cheerfully spineless college kid nicknamed Columbus who survives by rigorously following his sensible rules of zombie survival (based mostly on fleeing rather than confrontation).
He meets a funny foil in the heavily armed, two-fisted Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who tries to get the younger man to "nut up" in the presence of both zombies and girls.
When they fall in with a pair of resourceful sisters, Eisenberg falls for the older girl, giving the movie a romantic angle that pays homage to "Shaun," the original romzomcom.
The romance actually works, as does Columbus' tutelage under the shoot-first, shoot-any-who-asks-questions-later Tallahassee. The funniest feature, though, is an "as himself" celebrity cameo by an actor who shall remain nameless, even the though the movie's advertisements and credits name him.
It's much funnier if you don't know it's coming, so if you want to be surprised, stay away from the ads and the reviews.
The cameo is unfortunately brief, or maybe fortunately brief. Brevity is the soul of wit, and in the zombie comedy it's the soul, the head and the headless body. The movie, at a scant and punchy 85 minutes, will be over before you've stopped laughing.
