BACK FROM THE DEAD WITH GAGS AND GORE
THE 2009 movie Zombieland was a sizeable hit and, even though it’s taken fully ten years to unveil, this sequel should delight fans of the original . . . and maybe a few million more besides.
For those of us who don’t really get our kicks from flesh- eating comedies, and don’t especially venerate the first film, watching this one feels like being excluded from a whole barrage of in-jokes.
As before, the director is Ruben Fleischer (I can at least revel in the fact that fleisch is the German word for ‘ flesh’), and the screenwriters are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, whose postZombieland credits include Marvel’s two Deadpool films
It’s slickly done and, in Zoey Deutch — an addition to the original core cast of Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin — the film has a shameless scene-stealer.
She plays Madison, who, in less enlightened times, would have been called a dumb blonde.
With America now devastated by a zombie apocalypse, our motley survivors first get to hole up at what’s left of the White House and then at Elvis Presley’s home, Graceland, where they encounter Nevada (Rosario Dawson). She is as resourceful as Madison is thick, and sexy with it. The triggerhappy Tallahassee (Harrelson) is duly smitten. There are lots of pop culture gags of fluctuating success, with nods to The Simpsons, Stephen Hawking and Miami Vice, as well as Elvis, and the movie breezes along with undoubted energy towards its climax at a kind of skyscraper commune called Babylon, on which an army of zombies is marching. If you remember the original, by the way, you’ll recall that Bill Murray played himself. He’s not (much) in this one, mostly because he snuffed it the first time around, but perhaps also because he stars in Jim Jarmusch’s recent, dis - appointing The Dead Don’ t Die. A second ‘ zom- com’ in only six months might have felt like overkill, even more to him than it does to me.