than it turned out. We had the woman setting
a zombie on fi re with her torch and wrapping it
up in her sash. Discretion was the better part of
valour.” The duo, and director Ruben Fleischer,
were unsure whether Sony would give them
permission at fi rst. “Sony is pretty protective of
that logo,” says Wernick. “Fortunately, they let
the inmates run the asylum.”NEW THREATS
The movie begins with Jesse Eisenberg’s
Columbus, via voiceover, introducing us to three
new strains of zombie that have emerged-slash-
mutated over the decade-long hiatus: the dumb
Homer, the smart Hawking, and the silent and
deadly Ninja. “It allowed us to have some fun with
the idea that not all zombies are created equal,
which led us in the direction of the Homer,”
explains Reese. “We wanted to give the zombies
a little more personality.” Interestingly, you might
wonder why the Ninja is given such a big
build-up, only to never appear again, but Reese
says it does. “There’s one Ninja under the RV that
grabs Madison’s ankle,” he says. Maybe the Ninjawill get its moment in the spotlight in the next
sequel. Just ten years or so before we fi nd out.PISA PISS
“We always try to ground our stuff in reality,”
says Wernick, the man who co-wrote Deadpool
and 6 Underground. “This one pushed it a little
bit, but I think it’s fun.” He’s talking of the
sequence which upgrades the original’s fun
Zombie Kill Of The Week to Zombie Kill Of The
Year, with a hilarious moment in which a not-at-
all-stereotyped hotheaded Italian gent dispatches
a bunch of zombies by, well, toppling the
Leaning Tower of Pisa onto them. “There was
a Dave Callaham draft where the Washington
Monument fell over,” says Reese. “We were
looking to give it a little more international fl air.
And the Leaning Tower of Pisa is already leaning.”DOUBLE TROUBLE
Halfway through the movie, our heroes take
refuge at an Elvis-themed hotel run by Rosario
Dawson’s Nevada, where they encounter
Albuquerque and Flagstaff, a pair of zombieZombieland:
Double Tap
WRITER-PRODUCERS RHETT REESE and
Paul Wernick on the best bits of their zany
zombie sequel.
LOGO A-GO-GO
Ten years may have elapsed since the original
Zombielandtook a devil-may-care approach to
the zombie genre, but the sequel very quickly
establishes that nothing has changed by having
the Columbia logo lady use that torch of hers to
best some undead assailants. “That was the idea
of our visual-effects supervisor, Paul Linden,”
admits Reese. “We actually wrote it even crazier
A deep dive into the
must-see moments from
the month’s big releaseTHE
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