At The Fleapit: Zombieland (2009)

Zombieland is a textbook example of compact movie making. It gets in, tells its story in 80 minutes and gets out before it outstays its welcome.

In a post-zompocalypse America (aka "Zombieland" or "Zee-land"), a friendless geek (Jesse Eisenberg), survives by sticking to a certain code of rules.

Columbus, as he becomes known, teams up with tough, no-nonsense Southerner, Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, channeling the lighter side of Mickey Knox from Natural Born Killers).

Their combined efforts to scavenge food (led by Tallahassee's quest to unearth the last edible Twinkies in America) and find somewhere safe leads them to a supermarket, where they run across a couple of young sisters, beautiful Gothy chick Wichita (Emma Stone) and her 12-year-old sibling, Little Rock (Abigail Breslin).

Eventually, Columbus discovers the girls are heading for Pacific Playland amusement park in California to give Little Rock a chance to remember what it was like to a be a child, before all their worlds fell apart in the apocalypse.

Naturally, nothing goes smoothly.

Zombieland, however, ticks all the right boxes. It's wall-to-wall laughs; there's enough downtime between the action to make each sudden moment of excitement special; there's an excellent, pumping soundtrack; there's a grizzled zombie-killing hero who is ultracool (but has a soft heart); there's a hot chick; and there's lots and lots of brutal, violent zombie deaths.

One way you can always judge a good zombie film is the obvious amount of thought that has gone into imagining creative ways to off the living dead and evidently in Zombieland a lot of brain power was exerted in this area.

A lame review on the BBC's Film 24 programme (top reviewer Mark Kermode was absent and they'd brought in some D-list, no-namer who was clearly out of his depth and teamed with an equally snobby news anchorman) made a lazy comparison between this and Shaun Of The Dead (because both happen to be zombie films that are also comedies), which is about as valid as comparing Schindler's List with The Great Escape because they are both war movies that feature the Nazis.

The only valid comparison, in my mind, is Zombieland is as American in its humour as Shaun Of The Dead is British, but where Shaun is also a siege movie (in the style of Assault On Precinct 13), Zombieland is very much a road movie and a slice of survival life in a world infested with zombies - with no hope of an end in sight.

It's full of in-jokes and lot of knowing fun is made at the expense of Hollywood, and movies in general. One of the many highlights comes from the hilarious appearance by Ghostbuster's Bill Murray as himself (again, this was supposed to be a surprise cameo, but the Film 24 reviewer blurted it out, so I am doing the same), hiding away in his 90210 mansion and trying to get by as best he can.

The film's succinct and fat-free structure may come from its TV series roots. It was originally written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick as a series for CBS, but when the studio dropped it, the writers turned it into a movie.

Whatever the reasons, it should stand as an object lesson to future horror movie writers in how to pen a tight script, free from padding, but still with character development, sharp action sequences and a surfeit of witty one-liners, comebacks and put downs.

Zombie kill of the week? Most definitely. Film of the year? Quite possibly.