I’m not a fan of the genre but Adventures in Zombieland had a funny trailer and if I waited for a good Hollywood flick these days, I’d never get to the movies.
Now there’s an obvious social commentary to zombie flix: that Americans are just walking consumer zombies (anyway), driven by the 24-hour media barrage into a relentless, compulsive hunger willing to suck the blood out of anything and everything — including each other. You could say that’s the subtext for everything from Night of the Living Dead to the Thriller video to Tarantino’s Dusk Till Dawn. But in a two-minute montage, Zombieland gives it the direct treatment via iconic images: a groom awaits his bride, who charges down the aisle then ravages him; a soccer mom is trapped in her minivan by a band of maniacal tween fairy-princesses; father-and-son teams walk away happily from a pick-up football game then suddenly devour each other. It is right after this series that the protagonist — a virgin freshman at UT-Austin (really) — is awakened by the beautiful girl-next-door. Fresh from a breathless escape of a zombie pursuer, she snuggles closely with our hero in a fantasy come true. An hour later she wakes up transformed into a hunchbacked vampirella and the UT virgin has to whack her with a toilet seat.
This five-minute satire on American icons may be the film’s only social commentary but it’s killer: our ideal images are oppressive and infect us like plague. They may even wind up killing us.
And yet of course the film has a happy ending. In this occasionally funny cross-country buddy road flick featuring two guys (35 and 19) and two con-artist sisters (21 and 12) speeding on interstate highways and swerving around piles of bodies and cars, the four eventually come together as a family. The younger sister gains a father figure while the older man triumphs over his grief, re-established as a traditional male protector. The bad girl lets down her guard in return for the adoration of the virgin freshman.
Conclusion?: You gotta love Hollywood formula.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and the Kid still gets the Girl.
... and everyday life 
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