By my reckoning, the last zombie movie to splatter our screens was last year’s Zombie Strippers. It starred pornstar Jenna Jameson – you may remember her from her triumphant performance in Blown Away or the seminal Please Cum Inside Me – in her first starring role in a feature film. It was so awful to be beneath even her dignity.

Thank goodness for Zombieland then. It begins with one of the most stylish opening sequences of any movie this year: a ballet of comic and gratuitous zombie violence, perfectly complemented by James Hetfield’s growling through ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’. The movie doesn’t exhibit that same level of inspiration over the whole 84 minutes, but there’s certainly enough to make it worth your while.

Jesse Eisenburg (Adventureland) plays a social misfit in the Michael Cera mould whose reclusive habits, he tells us in narration, are well-suited for life after the zombie apocalypse. He’s wary of public toilets, for one thing, and having no attachments means he won’t suddenly become someone’s next meal when they get a case of the munchies.

Setting out for Columbus, Ohio to see if his parents are still alive, he meets a fellow traveller, played by Woody Harrelson, a badass with a badass car who despises zombies almost as much as he desires Twinkies. Lest they get too attached to one another, the traveller calls him Columbus, on account of where he’s headed, and calls himself Tallahassee. With Columbus’s brains and Tallahassee’s brawn, they’re a zombie ass-whupping odd couple and a force to be reckoned with – until they’re outwitted by a pair of savvy sisters (Emma Stone from Superbad and Abigail Breslin, having emerged from the puppy fat since Little Miss Sunshine).

Zombieland has laughs, but not just the slapstick horror kind of laughs you’d expect – you know, the usual way that the tearing of flesh from people’s bones is funny – it also pulls off a smart-alecky post-Juno kind of funny. It’s the kind of zombie flick where the hero happens to have irritable bowel syndrome and can’t help but apologise to his demented zombie attackers (“Oh my God I am so fucking sorry!”) even as they’re trying to maul him. There’s a cartoonish Zombie Kill of the Week segment and a very silly montage of banal road-trip conversation.

Eisenburg and Harrelson make an excellent comedy duo, but the real show-stopper is Bill Murray’s appearing as himself in his ludicrously extravagant Hollywood hideaway. It’s extraordinarily out of place, the kind of mindless cameo that belongs more to a film like Fanboys than this one, but it’s funny as hell, so that’s that.

Sadly, the Bill Murray sequence heralds the beginning of the weak, more formulaic latter act of the film – a human mutating into a zombie isn’t half as shocking as the way this film mutates into something like a family comedy. But, for the most part, first-time feature director Ruben Fleischer has created a fantastic American response to Shaun of the Dead. It may not be the best zombie film ever (it’s clawed its way past even the work of George A. Romero at the box office), but it is a worthy addition to canon, and a very good reason to lurch to the cinema.

Zombieland opens in cinemas tomorrow (December 3).
You can view the Zombieland movie trailer here on TheVine.