Hollywood, Stay out of Zombieland!

I love zombie movies and Zombieland is a great addition to that genre. It's fun, funny, clever, and even the acting's good (and with this kind of movie, the acting is usually what you have to forgive to enjoy yourself).

Woody Harrelson is great as this cowboy/ psycho/ zombie-killing badass who is both awesome and hilarious. Jesse Eisenberg is, well, he's the same indie/ poor man's Michael Cerra that he's always played, but he's good at it, and you like him despite how little you might actually want to be stuck with him in case of a genuine zombie apocalypse.

Anyway, so I loved the movie, and, clearly, so did a lot of other people. However, here's my issue: if zombies are the new vampires, and Zombieland's success points to more zombie flicks on the horizon, it's only a matter of time before a big budget Hollywood zombie movie is made, and this would probably suck.

Now I'm not one of those "all Hollywood/ mainstream/ mass market movies suck" kinds of people. Hell, Dark Knight and Wall-E were my picks for last year's two best movies.

But, a big Hollywood budget comes with certain expectations. Like, the movie has to make as much money as it possibly can, so we have to make it appeal to as wide an audience as possible, so right away, we lose the over-the-top violence which (let's face it) is one of the best parts of a zombie movie. Zombies aren't vampires; if you stab them in the heart, you don't expect them to just disintegrate into dust. Zombies are like Monty Python's Black Knight, if you shoot off a limb, that bleeding, rotting, hideous thing just keeps coming. And we expect it to, just like we expect a human's death by carnivorous, still-moving corpses to be delightfully disgusting.

Also, in order to milk movie-goers of as much moolah as possible, a big budget Hollywood film must have so-called "stars." Now, it's purely debatable if the addition of that guy from Las Vegas and a Black former male model had anything to do with the ridiculous financial success of the Transformers movies, but the fact that they've made as much money as they have "proves" (in the half-blind eyes of Hollywood execs) that you must have someone easily recognizable to sell a film.

Now, I ask you, would Zombieland have been half as good if it starred Tom Cruise and Zac Efron? NO, IT WOULDN'T!!

Hell, I'll go one further: would more of you have automatically gone to see District 9 if it had starred that guy who plays Kenneth on 30 Rock, instead of some foreigner you'd never heard of? (If anyone answers "Yes" to that, I will hunt you down.)

Oh, and the biggest reason why a big budget/ we're aiming for mass appeal while sucking the life out of a genre about living dead things/ Hollywood zombie movie would suck? Because it might be made by Michael Bay. That guy's movies are horribly acted, too damn long, and so cliche-ridden and unoriginal that I'm convinced his scripts are written by an automatic screenplay-generator. He did his best work on the Playboy Video Centerfold of Kerri Kendall (and, in my opinion, he didn't get that great a performance out of his lead actress in that one, either).

So, Hollywood, do the whole world a favor: leave the zombie flicks with smaller budgets that they can actually make back, let me keep my deplorable violence, ignore the urge to ruin the genre with over-saturation, and keep out of Zombieland!

You'll make more money that way, and that's really all you care about in the end isn't it, you heartless, greedy bastards?