Zombieland

[Donovan]

Hard to say, zombies are pretty huge right now. My big concern would be that any horror/comedy combo shot for tv would turn into a Buffy style show, with lots of wacky crap but not too much horror. And the story that already exists for Walking dead is so powerful it'd be hard to top it with fresh writers doing original material.

 

[CaptainWacky]

Well Zombieland wasn't really anymore serious or scary than Buffy anyway. Maybe if it had been a tv show they would have tackled the whole "everyone in the world is dead except four people" thing a bit more in depth. Like even the wallet scene was pretty sad at first but then he just made a joke about not crying this much since Titanic.

I hope they do Walking Dead exactly like the comic. I'd imagine they'll have more problems with getting the graphic rape scenes on tv than all the zombies eating people parts.

 

[CaptainWacky]

A friend of mine described it like this, "five minutes of zombie fights and another 80 minutes of teen drama. It's akin to making a movie named Awesome Killing Death Spectacular and then only showing 5 straight minutes of explosions bracketed by Degrassi-esque bullshit."

Even though I didn't LOVE it as much as Menty, your friend clearly saw a completely different movie.

 

[Donovan]

Well Zombieland wasn't really anymore serious or scary than Buffy anyway. Maybe if it had been a tv show they would have tackled the whole "everyone in the world is dead except four people" thing a bit more in depth. Like even the wallet scene was pretty sad at first but then he just made a joke about not crying this much since Titanic.

I hope they do Walking Dead exactly like the comic. I'd imagine they'll have more problems with getting the graphic rape scenes on tv than all the zombies eating people parts.

There's a lot of graphic stuff in WD that'll be tough to get by standards and practices, even for cable. The whole arc where Rick is prisoner of that General guy...brrr.

I think Zombieland had a fine mix of scary/comedy, if they'd gone too far to the horror side of things it would be jarring. Shaun of the Dead has excellent comedy all the way through, then suddenly remembers it's a gory zombie flick in the last twenty minutes and the effect is disconcerting. Jarred me out of the movie, and pacing is everything.

The bit with the wallet really struck me square in my center, partly because it caught me by surprise and partly because it instantly turned Woody Harrelson from a one-note douchebag character into a believable and sympathetic anti-hero with a single short scene. I appreciated the genius of that scene as a writer, even the lame joke he tells, not because it was a good segue back to the comedy but because it was exactly what a "tough guy" would do after embarrassing himself in a moment of emotion. He wasn't joking to let the audience off the hook, he was re-burying something so painful he couldn't cope with it wholesale without jokes.

Powerful moment, and very underrated IMO. There are a lot of under-rated moments in this film that really resonate. I had to see it several times for various reasons, and each time it got better as I noticed subtleties I had missed. I'm not a big repeat-viewer, but some movies deserve it and Zombieland is one of them.