With Zombieland, the undead shuffle into the mainstream with big names, laughs

When Woody Harrelson received a copy of the screenplay for Zombieland last year, he stuffed it into his duffel bag of unread scripts and promptly forgot about it.

Even after his agent started pestering him, Harrelson couldn't be bothered to dig it out and have a look.

``I just thought `It's a zombie movie; it's gotta be stupid,' '' the actor says. But Harrelson changed his mind when he finally read Zombieland , in which he plays one of four survivors of a plague that turns the United States into a country overrun by the flesh-eating undead.

Review | Zombieland (R) ***

The zombies of Zombieland don't shamble and shuffle like those of George A. Romero's seminal living-dead pictures. These flesheaters are of the run-and-sprint variety: They come at you with alarming speed, like the ones in the Dawn of the Dead remake or the virus-carriers in 28 Days Later . These zombies are post modern -- Undead Version 2.0; so is the movie. More comedy than horror show, Zombieland is the latest -- and arguably most irreverent -- attempt to wring laughs from a doom-and-gloom scenario in which the world has been overrun by the dead who have risen to eat the living.

``I wish I could tell you this was still America,'' laments Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), the film's narrator, a timid college student who is one of the few remaining survivors of the unspecified plague (an offshoot of mad cow disease) that has decimated the country. Columbus has devised a list of common-sense rules to ensure survival in this hostile new universe, such as ``Cardio,'' because you'll need to run pretty fast

A review of Starz Inside: Zombiemania that appeared Tuesday in Tropical Life misstated the name of the 1943 movie I Walked With a Zombie.

Review | 'Starz Inside: Zombiemania': Who knew the undead was such a lively crowd?

Starz Inside: Zombiemania, 10-11 p.m. Tuesday, Starz

I was concerned last year when Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy began ripping one another's steaming entrails out in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a rewrite of Jane Austen's classic novel. I was downright alarmed when the American cinema embraced the sensuality of rotting ambulatory corpses in Zombie Strippers. And I began marking off the days until the Apocalypse after reading the public taunt a friend left her brother while playing last spring's ubiquitous zombie-combat game on Facebook: ``I sucked out your brains and spit them to the floor, you zombie dog!''

Still, after watching the berserkly funny documentary Starz Inside: Zombiemania , I've concluded I didn't know the half of it. Patrons of the fine arts are paying artists to paint their portraits as zombies. ``A head wound. A complete side of their face gone. Deluged with maggots and flies and stuff. Or, you know, pustules,'' says one zombie artist, ticking off the customized

Got a zombie problem? UF has the answer

The University of Florida is prepared for all sorts of disasters. Even zombies.

A disaster-recovery exercise that explains how the school could respond to an outbreak of the undead was posted on the UF e-Learning Support Services website. The site also contains plans for events such as hurricanes.

The zombie attack exercise lays out the university's response to attacks by ``flesh-eating, apparently life impaired individuals.''