Premise: In the midst of a zombie apocalypse, four people band together to kick some undead ass! Comes out this October. Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin star.
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick (Dated Sept. 18, 2007)
Okay, so Comic-Con is the place where people take their films to showcase to the world, the geeky, nerdy world. Avatar's underwhelming buzz started there, and now look at the backlash the teaser is getting. The very positive District 9 buzz started there, and look at what that thing's doing. Great box office and great reviews. Well, there was another smaller-ish film at Comic-Con that got people talking, and it's name was Zombieland.
I read Zombieland a while ago. Before there was a poster. Before there was a trailer. Before any of this great hype started building. So I knew while the hype was building that it was well deserved. That's right, this sucker delivered. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Zombieland starts off with a voiceover from Flagstaff. He's giving us the rules to Zombieland. The rules you have to follow, or you're going to die. We know it's the truth, cause as he's giving us the rules we witness helpless people get killed in gnarly ways by bloodthirsty zombies. What are these rules, you ask? 1. Cardio, 2. Zip-Loc Bags, 3. Double Tap, and Rule #5: Seatbelts. Once this sequence is finished, we meet Flagstaff. A borderline good-looking nerd, who is about to show us how to follow these rules. They obviously work, or the film wouldn't have it's hero. Anyway, he meets up with a man named Albuquerque and the two set off across a zombie filled America.
So Flagstaff and Albuquerque team up. Flagstaff is heading home....to Flagstaff. Albuquerque is just a lone ranger, in search of.....a twinkie. Yep, that's the motivation for our two leads. Anyway, the writers also throw in two con artist sisters named Wichita and Stillwater. These sisters cause our leads a LOT of trouble. But it gets pretty repetitive. Every ten pages it seems the sisters are stealing the guys' ride and leaving them to die, only for the guys' to get another ride, to be stolen by the sisters. Like I said. It gets repetitive.
But does it deliver on the goods? The gory zombie killing glory? Hell to the yes. Reese and Wernick come up with some crazy shit to throw our protagonists into. And it's all great. There's even a scene where Flagstaff and Albuquerque find themselves in California and need a place to stay. Well they pick Patrick Swayze's house. And I think you can guess what goes down next. That's right, Flagstaff and Albuquerque versus the Dirty Dancer himself.
So yeah, This script was a blast to read. There were some problems I had, but judging by the trailer, they fixed most of them. For instance, the repetitiveness of Wichita and Stillwater always screwing Flagstaff and Albuquerque over seems to be tones down, as the sisters are seen in the trailer doing scenes that didn't include them in the script. It also seems the studio had confidence, because there was no trip to an amusements park that appears to be the film's climax in this version of the script. So I'm very excited to see the changes that have been made, and I'll be there opening weekend when Zombieland hits theaters this October.
[] Somebody should be fired
[] Bad
[] Mediocre
[xx] Worth the Read
[] Great
[] Amazing
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