Zombieland is exactly what you would expect from its title and marketing, it’s a movie, about a land full of zombies, there’s no time for back-story, explanation, or exhibition about how, why, where, or what turned almost everyone into mindless, feasting machines, instead we (as an audience) are simply introduced to the post-apocalypse and to a few survivors who are each searching for something, and trying to stay alive.

The majority of the story focuses on Jesse Eisenberg’s Columbus (everyone is named after a city to keep from developing emotional attachments with real names) who is trying to get back to his namesake hometown and see if his parents are still alive. After Jesse introduces us to his “Rules” for staying alive in a zombie infested land, he eventually meets up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) and the two of them eventually happen upon Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) and a tenuous alliance is formed.

There are stories of an amusement park where zombies don’t roam free, the girls are trying to find it in Los Angeles and reclaim some of young Little Rock’s youth while Tallahassee is running from his former life and Columbus listlessly wonders after being left with nothing.

The film is lean, mean, and incredibly well written and well acted. Harrelson in particular looks like he’s having the time of his life working on this picture as a redneck with a penchant to crack wise, kill everything in his way, and paint the number “3” on every care he’s able to steal. Eisenberg also excels playing a Michael-Cera-lite role of the fumbling everyman who eventually gets the girl and turns out to be more than he thought he could be.

First time feature film director Ruben Fleischer busts onto the scene with a love for beautifully crafted action sequences and slow motion cuts. His opening credit sequence is amazingly well done and immediately gets you in the mindset for this film.

The most surprising thing, like Shaun of the Dead before it, is that the combination of guts, gore, and guffaw is perfectly presented, easy to follow, and, most importantly, perfectly executed. Hearty belly-laughs are interplayed with sight gags and even a little bit of emotion as the four survivors grow closer.

Zombieland may very well be one of the best films of the year and easily one of the funniest, everyone owes it to themselves to partake in the experience and remember to keep up on the cardio an avoid the theater’s restroom.

Missouri’s Cavo feel like valedictorian graduates from the Nickelback School of Hardly Rocking employing the same hook-line-and-sinker method of attracting fans that the aforementioned band has used to garner platinum selling CDs. Churn out a radio-friendly, risqué single that is highly polished and over-produced (and over-played) then pull the rug out from under all the new fans and release a CD full of power ballads that would make Poison and Extreme blush.

It isn’t that Cavo’s debut full-length is necessarily a terrible CD, it just isn’t very good or anything original that we haven’t seen a dozen times (this year) and hundreds of times over the last decade. In this post-grunge hard rock era where band’s with a ballad can draw in legions of lovely ladies to worship them because they’re sensitive its hard to believe this sort of thing hasn’t happened a few hundred more times. If anything Cavo and producer David Bendeth know what they are doing to make a multi-platinum selling CD.

Everyone, by now, knows the lead single “Champagne“; which lit up rock radio and hit number one on the mainstream rock chart. “Let It Go,”; the band’s original power ballad, was featured on the Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Soundtrack this past summer. The rest of the disc is filled with bleeding heart, emo-inspired tracks that ask you to look deeper into yourself, but sloppy been-there-done-that lyrics detract from even the most tolerable songs. From the song “Ghost”; we get this gem: “I’m taking scissors to all of the pictures of us / I’m cutting you out but it won’t be enough / It’s never enough / You’re still walking through my memories / I’ll never solve this mystery / I lie awake with echoes and whispers of you / I’m still haunted by you.”; You almost need to check and make sure you don’t have a Cure album in your CD player when running through some of these tracks.

Again, it isn’t that the band even has ballad(s) on the disc, it’s that they were marketed and presented as something different, months before the album debuted to build up anticipation, when the disc finally dropped there had to be more than a few people who basically asked themselves, “Who the hell is this? This is the band singing about champagne and cocaine?”; Maybe with a sophomore album that harkens back to a more pure rock focused mix of tunes the band can overcome, after all they’ve already used up their sophomore slump on their debut.

Phil Messerer’s Thicker Than Water: The Vampire Diaries Part 1, is realistic stab at the vampire genre that has become the hot item as of late with TV shows, books, and that Twilight fanaticism that seems to permeate from every junior high in America. Yet, Messerer breaks from the traditional way of looking at vampires and integrates his own lore in creating a neat indie film that is running through festivals at a blazing pace bringing in praise and teasing fans with sequels.

The film firmly establishes vampires as a species, similar in the way Underworld established vampires and lycans as offshoots of the same bloodline, but the core values of vampire lore are firmly in place, no sunlight, need blood, have super strength, etc. Everything a life of watching Whedon-created TV shows and Marvel comic books have established as the way things should be is here.

The story focuses on a small town family, the Baxters, who at one time may have lived the perfect life with three kids, a happy little home in a happy little town. Twin sisters are the film’s focus, Helen (Devon Dionne) is the lovable, likable one with guys clamoring over her and generally making fun at her cemetery loving, Anne Rice stalking sister Lara (Eilis Cahill). One morning Helen wakes up profusely bleeding out the nose, after only a few hours she’s dead, and after a few more she’s back at the front door, complete with a body bag and a host of questions on just what the hell is going on.

There’s a lot going on in this little indie especially in the fresh take on vampires in general. While the genre is nothing new, and was nearly killed as the films got more and more aggressive in the way they changed the mythology, Thicker Than Water has a clear direction on where its going, although that sort of tapers off at the end. When Helen initially returns and the remaining, living, family members are debating what to do, the possibility of abducting townsfolk and tourists comes up surprisingly fast and Mom’s (Jo Jo Hristova) explanation of doing what ever it takes not to lose what she’s already lost before is completely ridiculous. It would have been a lot deeper for everyone, even Helen, to take a look at the moral implications and debate what they were doing; instead the family goes from slightly dysfunctional to homicidal in no time flat, Charlie Manson would be instantly impressed.

Still this is a missed opportunity in the script to really dig deeper into the ethics of the family, you have a hard time believing that a deeply religious mother would suddenly be okay with her son coming out of the closet and dismembering a body, all before dinner. There’s also a certain level of absurdity when other vampires finally seek out Helen and show up in eighteenth century blouses and wigs, something tells me that strolling through a New England town, especially a small one, would turn a few heads. But you could attribute this to the movie’s overarching, Army-of-Darkness-like B-movie feel that oozes campiness from every pore start to finish. It’s the take no prisoners, and make no qualms about it attitude by the director that makes these shortcoming feel like an organic part of the picture, like the film would be worse off without its faults.

Messerer takes on a lot, here editing, writing, directing, et al. While the editing is generally tight, there are some overused shots and wonky camera angles that are almost too, “I have a camera, where can I stick it to give me a kick-ass shot.” The use of time-lapse could have probably been cut in half the shots it was used, it’s a great effect in certain cases but it usually wears out its welcome pretty quickly because its breaking you away from the story in a way. Still, the general cinematic direction is excellent and the inter-spliced story of the first vampire escaping and rampaging Mayan civilization is excellent and just as intriguing as the film, especially when you start to think about how its all connected.

There’s a lot to see and take in with Thicker Than Water, and while there are some growing pains for a first time director, its also a learning process, something that should make the sequel even better and hopefully pick up more awards and more notice from the powers that be in the industry and maybe take Thicker Than Water to the next step. Even if that never happens, anyone with the opportunity to see this independent feature at a festival near you should take up the opportunity and enjoy themselves.

For more information on the film, check out www.bloodjunky.com.

NBC’s long list of great comedy shows can add another entry in Community, which is aptly being called The Office in Community College. The series doesn’t present itself as a documentary like the aforementioned workplace comedy, however the cast of characters is every bit as memorable and the writing is top notch throughout the pilot.

The series focuses on Jeff, played by the very funny and criminally overlooked for years Joel McHale (The Soup, The IT Crowd), the series centers on the happenings of a group of students from all walks of life at Greendale Community College. From the opening speech by the school’s dean till the end credits role there’s a lot of clever moments even while some of the problems borrow from the sitcom cliché handbook.

Jeff is a washed up lawyer whose degree from “Columbia” has been brought into question. Now he needs to secure a degree from the United States to prevent himself from being disbarred. Our introduction to him and Danny Pudi’s Abed is just one of the episodes shinning moments. Jeff wants to get with Britta (Gillian Jacobs) so he organizes a Spanish study group which grows to eventually include several other students including Chevy Chase’s Pierce whose grandiose stories could only be true if he owned the college and was just milling about.

While a lot of the pilot’s jokes hit, only accentuated by the wonderful cast, the predictable story about boy meets girl, boy lies to girl, tries to cover it up, girl finds out, etc. is so overplayed that the ending of the episode is pretty much known from the very beginning, however getting to the end is the fun part and that’s where Community is able to keep your interest for 22 minutes.

While it remains to be seen if Community can break out like The Office, or if it will disappoint like Parks & Recreation, but when the season starts in mid-September there will be at least one person firmly tuned in.

After Midnight Project’s full length debut, Let’s Build Something to Break, is an engaging mix of hard guitars, excellent vocal work, and the excellent producing of industry vet, and Goldfinger frontman John Feldmann. Feldmann’s previous work with the aforementioned Goldfinger, The Used, Mest, and Good Charlotte has turned him into the pop-punk go-to-guy for turning out infections songs that draw the audience in and disc that bloom with depth.

AMP’s debut is highlighted by Jason Evigan’s vocal work which makes the slickest song ever more so slick and the album’s few disappointments still bearable. Screaming out of the game with “Backlit“; and the aptly titled “Scream For You“; the disc sets itself up as a rock anthem of sorts, sport arena ready to be pounding through one million watts of power in front of 70,000 fans. Things start to slow down a bit midway through the disc, however never to the ballad level that many bands seem to stoop to in order to make a point.

The production and mixing is tight throughout, however there’s still some sloppy lyrical work here and there especially on the odd “More to Live For“; who’s intro and lead-out is generally spoken word nonsense and perplexing to say the least. This is the only low point of the album which, as mentioned before, comes together exceptionally well in the end with great hooks and Evigan’s restraint from screaming in the modern day alternative scene where screaming everything equals making a point about your emotions.

Let’s Build Something to Break is a strong full length debut for AMP, its not the most original work out there and casual listeners may lump them into a collective group of bands with similar pop-punk undertones, but the more hardcore rock songs are sure to at least let them stand out from the pack a bit. The band appears ready to break out, and there’s plenty of good material on this album to light the airplay charts on fire.

Sick Puppies’ third studio album, Tri-Polar plugs into the angst-fueled rock that was all the rage in the late 1990’s with bands like Papa Roach and Stabbing Westward, occasionally sentimental but hard driving in the point of broken dreams, bad feelings, and loneliness that drove them to write a particular song about it. Tri-Polar mimics this throwback to ten years ago but actually breaks out of the mold halfway through the album as the songs become more low key with juicier hooks, less in-your-face lyrics, and a more subdued, emotional embodiment of the aforementioned angst.

The album’s first single, “You’re Going Down“; is the radio-ready package full of combative hooks, hard driving guitars, suitable for WWE walk-ins (which is exactly what the song is currently used for). “Riptide“; nearly tricks you with its “Brain Stew“; slapping bass introduction, you almost expect Billy Joe to start talking about numbness.

More often than not albums are usually front loaded with singles and memorable tracks, but Tri-Polar actually gets better as it moves along with some of the album’s best tracks, “Maybe“; and “Don’t Walk Away“; hidden near the end of the disc. These tracks are less about screaming and more about melody as lead singer Shimon Moore’s vocal prowess comes into view more than simply yelling about stuffy every other Limp Bizkit-wannabe has been yelling about for ten years.

The album isn’t perfect by any means and for every genuinely deep song there’s a throwaway screaming to back it up, but as an package Tri-Polar manages to convey the feelings of angst in two distinctively different styles (maybe Bi-Polar would have been a better name). Far from an earth shattering release, Sick Puppies settles in and delivers a decent album with room to grow for the next.

Sandra Bullock hasn’t done a whole hell of a lot noteworthy since Speed, and let’s not even go into the debacle that was Speed 2: Even Speedier. Still, throw her in a romantic comedy with a good looking dude, and the date crowd is sure to flock in, even if the film is passable at best in the eyes of the normal viewer, a good love story knows its demographic, and gratuitous shots of Ryan Reynolds side-ass is sure to keep the ladies pining for more.

Luckily for everyone involved, especially Reynolds who doesn’t need to get pigeon-holed into roles like this so early in his career, The Proposal actually turns out to be a decent chick-flick that’s appropriate for both guys and girls and usually together in the theater. This is the quintessential date movie of the summer, and while some might argue that 40 foot robots are more romantic that a 40-plus year old Sandra Bullock, the film still succeeds in throwing all the romantic movie clichés into a pot, stirring them up, and serving up an appetizing dish that leaves you satisfied.

Bullock plays Margret Tate a cut-throat editor in chief of a New York publication that has everyone cowering for fear when she arrives for work. Her “secretary” is Andrew Paxton (Reynolds) who left his family in Alaska to experience the big city and become a writer. As we’ve all seen in the trailers, Tate is to be deported to Canada and seeks a phony marriage to Paxton to stay in the country legally with the plan to eventually get divorced. As you would expect there’s a grand helping of comedy in the center of this reheated storyline, some of it is great, some of it not so much, but what works, works well enough to keep you entertained for two hours.

Eventually everyone finds out what the wedding is about, Margret leaves Alaska to be deported, Andrew realizes he really does love her, totally for real this time, and goes after her, and supposedly they live happily ever after. The closing credits feature a montage of Andrew, Margret, and various other cast members answering questions at the behest of the Immigration Department about Andrew and Margret which proves to be the funniest part of the film by far, much like The Hangover’s end sequence sealed the deal on that comedy masterpiece.

Notable standouts are Betty White playing the same character she’s played for the better part of the last decade (see: Lake Placid) as the old-lady-slash-comic-foil and Oscar Nunez (The Office) as the versatile Ramone who steals every scene he’s in.

As mentioned before, The Proposal doesn’t set out to do anything new, mostly treading ground already worn bare by years of insufferable dribble, but with the charismatic Reynolds in a leading role, and the ability to envision Bullock as a self-centered bitch, you make a likeable pair that is almost worthy or repeat viewings.

There’s always something alluring about the fish-out-of-water turmoil that can result from plopping people into an alien land with different customs and a different culture. Such is the Mark Burnett-produced Expedition Africa on HISTORY, a Survivor-lite of sorts using the reality angle of the Emmy winning CBS show, but also throwing in a certain Man vs. Wild element to the whole thing with four adventurers attempting to recreate the journey of Dr. David Livingston and the journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, who sought him out.

War Journalist Kevin Sites, navigator Pasquale Scatturo, survivalist Benedict Allen, and wildlife expert Mireya Mayor are the brave ones to take on this reenactment of man vs. nature in the African bush. Well also throw in a film crew, dozens of native porters, and two Maasai warriors hired to protect the expedition as it traverses the planned 970 plus miles. While trying to recreate the journey taken by Stanley the show manages to represent this well, however facts like funding and compensation, and the existence of a film crew kind of mar the authenticity of the whole thing. Funds seem to be unlimited, and while the crew is never seen, are we to believe that if someone was seriously injured that the production crew wouldn’t have a satellite phone ready to go? It’s a fun trip, but the perceived threat of danger seems to be mainly manufactured by clever editing than anything really dangerous.

It would only be fair that the collection of characters would be ripped straight from every reality show known to man. There’s the crazy, all-knowing, old man who could go from sweet to cut-throat in a matter of seconds, the “true” leader of the group who uses public opinion to get what he wants, the collected handsome guy who’s going to last until the end, and the generic girl character, with tank tops and the ability to identify snakes and not run the other way.

Each act break presents another artificial cliffhanger for you to ponder for a few minutes. In the pilot Sites becomes separate from the rest of the group, however he has a trained warrior and a porter with him, as well as a loud whistle and is found within minutes of being lost. Akin to most reality shows, a confessional cam is used to get the four main adventurers reactions to events, such as the group leaving camp without water, deciding where to make camp, and a general disregard for basic logic.

Taking Expedition Africa at face value, its four trained explorers making a nearly 1000 mile journey through some of the most treacherous terrain on earth in some of the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, but it feels manufactured in ways to create an entertaining experience. For people who are almost in a life or death struggle with the elements, should there really be so much bickering and in-fighting, that doesn’t seem to let up throughout the eight-part series?