Look: I get it. It’s a horror comedy. True, the non-horror comedy parts were a bit shopworn. Of course the neurotic guy’s phobias include clowns, and when a zombie clown finally appears, of course he says “Look at this fucking clown.” Of course the redneck carries a banjo he uses as a weapon, and when he uses it to lure out zombies, of course he plays “Dueling Banjos” on it. And of course the junk food he’s obsessed with is fucking Twinkies.

But the horror-comedy aspects were pretty top drawer. I’m sort of astonished by the credit sequence, for example. A series of shockingly gory kills, played for laughs, shot in super slow-mo so they look like a cross between one of those stagey horror photos by Whatsisname and that Spike Jonze video with the burning guy chasing the bus (referenced outright, by the way), and soundtracked by the ever-awesome “For Whom the Bell Tolls”? Add in the slightly overripe, saturated color palette that medium-budget studio efforts all seem to use these days, and the whole opening plays like an Opposite Sketches version of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead. Hey, well played!

The four main characters, they’re okay. Jesse Eisenberg must feel about Michael Cera the way Gollum feels about the Ring–he hates and loves him, as he hates and loves himself–but he’s pretty game in this the second film in which he’s a one-man Cera cover band who has some adventures in an amusement park. Woody Harrelson’s genial shitkicker is woefully underbaked, a collection of pro forma cliches that coasts entirely on Harrelson’s CV full of genial shitkickers, but that meant I could pretend this was an unofficial sequel to Natural Born Killers, which was a ton of fun. It’s entirely plausible that Harrelson played this role while all the while thinking of himself as an older, slightly mellower, but no less lethal Mickey Knox. Abigail Breslin is spunky and seems to be aging into teen roles pretty gracefully, while the other girl they gave the raccoon-eye make-up to was fine in a cute tough girl with a soft streak kinda way. Mostly I like dark-haired girls in jeans and t-shirts with rock and roll make-up, so, you know, mission accomplished there.

And the movie had its moments. I liked the fourth-wall-busting use of Columbus’s “rules,” popping up and getting knocked around by the action. Riffs a little bit on Tarantino, presages what I’m assuming will happen in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim movie, which you can’t help but think about when you’re watching a post-Shaun of the Dead zombie comedy starring a guy who’d play the other Michael Cera character if they did a new version of The Twelfth Night. Great bit with the girl from the next apartment. Some nice music on the soundtrack, “Oh Sweet Nothing,” “Kingdom of Rust,” ” Everybody Wants Some.” And though it was thoroughly spoiled for me by now, great cameo.

But then! They fucking kill the guy, act like it’s no more big a deal than if they broke his television, crack jokes during his death, dump his body off his balcony, and carry on having target practice and goofing around and doing the romantic-comedy bit as though nothing had happened. FUCK that. I seriously almost walked out. Not because I was so ouuuuuutraaaaaaged or anything, but because how the fuck could I care about anything else that happened? Like I said, I get it: It’s a horror comedy. But it’s a horror comedy predicated on the notion that these four people grow to care about each other and act accordingly–I mean, you could see that ending coming a mile away. (Though its wonky timeline was a surprise.) And yet they run into another living person, a person that for reasons I won’t spoil they already feel enormously attached to, a person who’s being really, really nice to them–and, might I add, a person who was in a far better and more tonally consistent horror comedy!!! And then they fucking kill him and act like they don’t care? Blam, there goes the whole movie. I was thrown so far out of it it was like someone hit the eject button. I didn’t care about Tallahassee’s tragic backstory anymore, I sure as shit didn’t care about the romance, I didn’t care about the pointless “big climactic battle” at the amusement park. Totally, utterly movie-ruining misstep. To paraphrase the movie itself, “[NAME REDACTED] was a photo in someone’s wallet, too.”

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