Zombie films are a favorite at Cinescare. No other iteration of the modern horror film makes its mark on sociopolitical cinema as the dead walking. That is, the shuffling hordes are all too familiar. The mindless masses are every conscious adult's nightmare. Isn't Romero and company's listless, hungry apocalypse the feared eventual product of every drone worker's experience, of too many bleak florescent-lit days between beige cubicle walls?
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Ruben Fleischer is set to lens "Zombieland," a comedic horror starring Woody Harrelson. This follows, of course, in the shambling footsteps of Edgar Wright's 2004 "Shaun of the Dead" (not a sequel, think of it as The Office effect — the reinvention of the successful British property through safer, blander American methods).
But in anything, repetition breeds a kind of inoculation. Romero's last installment, "Diary of the Dead" in 2007, was horribly earnest, and it showed seams. Rumors of a direct followup from Romero, and coupled with new plans for funny corpses, the zombie film faces a threat worse than bullets to the head: brainless activity.
The issue here is twofold: Approach and dilution.
First, comedy has never needed to be explicit in the zombie film. Romero's Dead franchise has always exploited the ridiculous, presenting the lumbering decomposed as dark imitations of the vacant lives too many humans already lead in urban and suburban America.
While "Shaun of the Dead" was fine piece of postmodernism, it also wasn't a terribly valuable contribution to the zombie canon. One reviewer, upon its release, noted that main character Shaun (Simon Pegg) fails to notice any difference between the walking dead and the living, at the start of the movie. A brilliant execution, in "Shaun of the Dead," but the same is true of the unwitting Barbara and her brother at the beginning of "Night of the Living Dead."
The point is, the newest iterations of the undead are not necessarily any fresher. And loading the leads with one-liners is not an approach that brings anything necessarily new or salient to the context. The dead, walking, have been the objects of nervous laughter for at least 40 years. Forking them onto the bonfire of belly laughs leads us to the second component of comedic horror zombie films — dilution.
The reduction of the source to a parodic form, at best, recasts the original as important. But Hollywood loves to repeat itself. "Zombieland" is "Shaun of the Dead," in concept, only the continent has changed. Does anyone really need this picture? Or any others like it?
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