Daily Archives: October 3, 2009

“It’s an overcast day at the beginning of April on a two-lane highway an hour outside of Atlanta, and the end of the end of the world is nigh. It’s the final week of shooting for director Reuben Fleischer’s horror-action-comedy “Zombieland,” and an abandoned group of buildings that used to be a market or restaurant has been hastily, but efficiently, modified to stand in as a Southwestern “Indian Trading Post” souvenir store hawking trash and trinkets.

Written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, “Zombieland” is a post-zombie-film zombie film, one where the subgenre’s conventions are lovingly savaged but also savagely loved. Yes, there’s a small band of survivors making a trek across a ruined land, including Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. There are widescreen scenes of chaos and carnage. There’s a film-ending action piece. All of this is under the tattered umbrella of what we’ve come to expect when the dead walk.

But walk around the Georgia set and talk to the stars and filmmakers, and you get a very real sense of how “Zombieland” is going to be different. Director Fleischer explains how Harrelson’s character Tallahassee is a “real, weird cowboy kind of post-apocalyptic zombie badass,” which sounds familiar enough, until Eisenberg (“Adventureland,” “The Squid and the Whale“) explains that one of Harrelson’s character’s biggest motivations is how “his character is obsessed with finding a Twinkie in a post-apocalyptic world, and every time we go somewhere, for one reason or another, the Twinkies are not there.  …”

– From my MSN Movies Set Visit