Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Zombieland ::
by William the Bloody
So, the zombie apocalypse has happened, as we all knew it would. This go around reports being due to contaminated beef which ended up swelling up peoples brains and turning them into cannibalistic monsters. We are following a college student who has managed to survive so far. How has he done so? Well, by following an ever growing set of rules to-keep-living-by. Keep in shape. Know your exits. Buckle up. Travel light. The list of thirty-odd rules is working for him now, but it also didn't hurt that before the whole mess he was mostly a loner type. No close family besides parents who lived across the country and no close friends or a girl friend. It made it easier not be attached when the shit went down. He's decided that it feels good to have a goal in mind, and so has begun his trek across America back to Ohio to see if his parents managed to survive. But, well, you kind of need a people to have a country. There are no people here. This is Zombieland.
The Good: This is as close to The Perfect Zombie Movie as you're going to get. Truly. This film had actual, talented actors in it, it was fun, funny, and it took itself the right amount of serious. The primary character is the geeky college student (played by Jessie Eisenberg), but on the road he meets fellow survivor played by Woody Harrelson in the role I'm pretty sure he was born to play: a Southern no-nonsense guy in the business of kicking ass and business is good. Then the two of them meet up with two sisters who are played by Emma Stone (Superbad) and Abigail Breslin (Academy Award nominee for Little Miss Sunshine!) who are two go-it-alone grifters. The film does a really nice job of capturing survivor life after the zombie apocalypse, in my book. Not every second of every day involves running for your life and killing zombies here, in fact there are a couple of great stretches that are zombie-free. Sometimes I would find this boring, but here they had characters you liked and cared about and they kept you interested and entertained even without the undead always on screen. The comedy is honest and genuine, and they make terrific use of "The List" as a running gag that NEVER gets old, but somehow manages to get more fun the farther along you are. I was so glad that this film DIDN'T fall victim to certain movie clichés, especially in the second and third acts. I felt like they were going right into cliché-town a couple of times, but they totally didn't, thus endearing the whole movie even more to me. Oh, and the "secret" celebrity guest star but is practically worth the price of admission alone.
The Bad: There were some special effects that weren't so special, mainly a certain carnival zombie death-by-ride event where the digital effects were pretty apparent. I'm a whiny nit-picker when it comes to zombies, so to me some of the whys and wherefores weren't sufficiently explained concerning the zombie plague. I just can't see why this type of zombie doesn't chow down on other zombies.
Overall: SO WORTH IT. One of the best new movies of the year! I had a great time, never got bored, and actually laughed out loud more than once. In the vein on Shaun of the Dead, just to give you an idea, so if you liked that, you'll LOVE this. And I did and do.
A+, baby!
