Unlike its scabby, slavering subjects, the zombie subgenre is hardly dead, and the spritzy horror-comedy "Zombieland," with its clever gyrations in themes and tone, won't be changing that prognosis. Wedding the shock frights of "28 Days Later" and the cathartic laugh-shrieks of "Shaun of the Dead," this well-rounded lark by first-time feature director Ruben Fleischer deftly juggles violence, humor and heart for a friendly, disarming package that still delivers the horrific body count that genre fans hunger for.
"Zombieland" springs out of the gate on a rush of self-aware comedy and lets up only for blasts of fast-paced action — zombies are picked off with guns, garden tools and baseball bats — and calmer episodes of unironic human bonding that lend the movie unexpected warmth. Unavoidably, it runs on some familiar genre fumes, but there's enough originality and wit to make the movie hum.
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Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick place humor before horror, using a post-apocalyptic plague of zombies as the framework for a classic buddy comedy featuring Jesse Eisenberg, twerpy and neurotic, and Woody Harrelson, irascible and no-nonsense. The story starts with a wink, as Eisenberg describes in wry voice-over how a viral infection has decimated the American population, creating the "United States of Zombieland," where almost every person in the country has become a zombie craving "human Happy Meals."
In fact, Eisenberg and Harrelson are only two of five surviving humans in this wasteland of burned-out cars, crashed planes and evacuated buildings. Eisenberg's obsessive-compulsive coward, equal parts Albert Brooks and Woody Allen, has devised a list of 47 rules of survival that pop up in towering letters on-screen whenever he's about to apply one. (For instance, "Rule No. 2: Beware of bathrooms." You had to be there.)
When Eisenberg's character, Columbus, meets Harrelson's Tallahassee on the desolate open road, the opposites make a hesitant team that you've seen a hundred times before. Tallahassee's leather-clad outlaw redneck is the self-reliant road warrior to Eisenberg's wuss, but the two need each other in vintage buddy-movie fashion. (Harrelson swings in the role of a caustic bad boy; Eisenberg plays the same easily rattled young man he played in last year's "Adventureland.")
Along the way, the men, who gradually rub off on each other in beneficial ways, join forces with a pair of steely young sisters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin), and the quartet makes a snarky and — after grisly zombie run-ins, romantic flirtations and a doozy of a star cameo — quite happy family. "Zombieland" is edited with the honed beats of a comedy and the fine-tuned propulsion of an action flick, and its overriding affability pulls you with it.
It's a road trip odyssey smattered with the infectoid dead, who move fast, screeching as black-green fluids gush from their mouths. These aren't PG-13 zombies; these beasties tear out viscera with their teeth and make a gory mess of it.
Everybody learns something along the way, "Wizard of Oz"-like, and everybody finds what they're looking for. Given the movie's buoyant mode, that's not revealing too much.
"Zombieland" offers a newish way to view the zombie form. It's more playful than next-generation, but it at least pushes and stretches for something fresh. At a time when even genre granddad George A. Romero has a new zombie picture ("Survival of the Dead"), any little bit of invention can wake the dead.
