Zombieland (88 minutes)

"I haven't cried like that since Titanic."

I first want to thank Amanda for letting me guest here on The 90-Minute Movie, but also curse her for coming up with such a cool idea for a Substack before I did. As I mentioned in my message to her when I asked for the gig, I was a video store clerk back in my salad days as a film student and, ok, film school alum when I needed a job after graduation. It was the 90s, and without the benefits of smartphones, streaming, or much else to waste time on, people went outside of their home and went to a video store to physically take a movie off the shelf and pay cash money for the privilege of taking it home to watch it. Those same people would then be expected to return it, usually to that same store a day or two later. And I was one of the proud clerks to whom they gave their cash, and checking in their movie after they had dropped it off, probably not re-wound.

One of the things I was thinking about while reading Amanda’s columns was that all of the movies in this mom-and-pop video store where I worked had stickers with our inventory number on them, and as a courtesy, we added the movie’s length to the sticker (in minutes, which made me laugh when people had to ask me how long the thing actually was in hours. I didn’t get paid to do math!) This was a huge deal to a lot of people, especially considering that they only had one or two days to watch their movie or risk paying the dreaded late fee (Saturday and Sunday rentals were for two days. Such a deal). So, Monday through Friday, almost no one with a job or a life wanted to rent a movie that was much over ninety minutes long. And don’t get me started on those movies that took up two tapes. They were basically taboo during the week.

Yeah, no.

So, thinking back on those crazy times, plus remembering my screenwriting professors who told me that some studios wouldn’t even read your script if it was over 120 pages (which would translate tol about 2 hours of movie time), and a comedy more than 90 minutes was out of the question, I thought it was really cool to see that Amanda was tackling this premise here in the 21st century. Our time was precious then, and it is precious now. Maybe more so for me, because as you probably figured out from the fact that I worked in a video store in the 90s, I’m old and half-dead. And when she posted about looking for guest columnists, I just had to respond.

But what concise cinematic masterpiece would I write about? One from my video store days? A weepy independent film that couldn’t afford to be any longer? Something from the children’s section that has to be under ninety minutes to hold a kid’s attention? No. I’m an adult. So I chose the 88-minute, flesh-eating romp Zombieland.

Written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who would go on to give us the Deadpool movies, and starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrellson, Abigail Breslin and Emma Stone, with maybe the greatest cameo ever from Bill Murray, Zombieland is a zombie apocalypse story that shows that people can still connect with each other despite the fact that they have to do all they can just to survive. Eisenberg’s Columbus - every character in the movie only goes by the city they’re from, a fun screenwriting trick which also helps to illustrate that names don’t matter in Z-Land, only where you’re from and how many guns you have - is our narrator. And he points out that he had trouble making connections before the zombie apocalypse. It took everyone being dead, or undead, for him to realize that people can be different but still the same. Despite not being much of a bad-ass, Columbus has managed to get by mostly by adhering to his Rules for Survival in Zombieland, which includes #1. Cardio, # 6. Don’t be a hero and maybe most important, #3. Beware of bathrooms (which all could probably apply to 2025 America, as well). Even though “bonding with other survivors” isn’t on there at first, he eventually learns that it should be. Plus, he had a real thing for Emma Stone’s Wichita, but who can blame him, amiright?

Columbus first meets up with Woody Harrelson’s rough and tumble Tallahassee, and even though Tallahassee rightly identifies him as “a bit of a bitch,” the two decide to stick together, until they run afoul of Wichita and her little sister, Little Rock (Breslin), who use their feminine wiles to scam people out of whatever they need, and are able to finagle Tallahassee’s truck from them. Despite all the scamming, the foursome ends up staying together for survival. The two sisters are actually driving west to California because of rumors that Pacific Playland (the movie’s stand-in for Disneyland) is untouched by zombies. Wichita later admits to Columbus that she doubts that those rumors are true, but she just wants to give her sister something to be excited about. Upon their arrival in L.A., the group decides to seek shelter in a celebrity’s home, but not just any celebrity. Tallahassee insists they find the home of his favorite celebrity, which leads us to one of the greatest cameos of all time. Spoiler warning: they end up at the house of Bill Murray.

And another spoiler warning, it doesn’t end well for Bill. Since Little Rock is in fact too “little” to know who Bill Murray is, Columbus takes her into Murray’s screening room to watch Ghostbusters. Meanwhile, it turns out Bill is actually home and has survived the zombie apocalypse by dressing up as a zombie himself, because they don’t attack their own, and “he likes to get out and do stuff.” They try to prank Columbus by having Zombie-Bill sneak up on him, but the easily spooked Columbus ends up shooting him in the chest. As Murray lay dying, Little Rock asks him if he has any regrets, and he responds, “Garfield, maybe.” And they all nod in agreement.

Later that night, Columbus and Wichita share a moment, and he almost gets lucky until they are interrupted. However, it only causes her to reconsider their connections, and come morning, she and Little Rock ditch their male counterparts and take off for Pacific Playland. Unfortunately, once they turn on all the rides, the nearby zombies are drawn to the lights, and the two sisters are stuck on one of those tower-drop rides. Thankfully, Columbus decides Rule #6 is bupkis, and he and Tallahassee come to the rescue. After Tallahassee draws off the zombies, Columbus saves the two sisters, conquering his fear of clowns in the process.

After such an act of heroism, Columbus finally gets to kiss Wichita, and just to show the audience that things are changing and people are connecting for real, she tells him that her actual name is Krista. As the foursome gets ready to move on together, Columbus concludes in his final voiceover that they all really do belong together because, without people, you may as well be a zombie. And so ends their story because I try to pretend that Zombie: Double Tap did not happen.

One of the things I remember about this movie is that when I first saw the trailer, I assumed it was a silly, brainless, money-grabbing horror-comedy. Looking back now, I feel like I only thought that because my mind had been hard-wired to hate certain movies because of my video store days. Like most video stores, the one I worked in had TVs placed strategically around the store, and the owner gave us strict orders that we could only play trailer tapes on them. The distributor where he bought the movies would periodically send trailer tapes promoting the new releases, and the logic was that a customer would see a trailer playing on one of the TVs and think, “Hmmm, I think I’m going to rent that.” But a full trailer tape was only about an hour long, and we only had so many of them, so if you worked an eight-hour shift, you could pretty much go through most of the trailers in one night, and if you worked four or five days a week, well, you would get pretty damn sick of them by that last day. So, after memorizing so many trailers, I learned to judge them rather harshly.

So, when I saw the trailer for Zombieland, I immediately decided that I would not be seeing that. Then, a friend of mine who I trusted told me that I had to see it, because it was my kind of movie. At first, I doubted the friendship, but I took her advice and went to see it, and we are, of course, still friends. It was, in fact, my kind of movie: a silly, brainless, Sam Raimi-style, bloody, funny, well-made, well-acted piece of cinema that only comes along once in a great while. I’m glad I took my friend’s advice and went to see it. I’m glad it came out when it did, and I didn’t have to see the trailer on a video store tube TV. And I’m really glad Amanda let me write about it here on her Substack. Thanks for reading, and if you liked it, feel free to subscribe to my Substack, Dursin’s Dungeon. Thanks for reading, and always remember Rule #3: beware of bathrooms.