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Zombieland is exactly what it appears to be: an action-comedy gore fest that is every inch a roller coaster ride. After decades of too-serious zombie movies, it’s kind of a relief.

Well, this was inevitable. Between the time I wrote this and the time you read it, thirty zombie movies were produced in North America. Zombies are the poor horror filmmaker’s shortcut to social relevance and easy gore, and the genre now finds itself so overworked that any new zombie film that throws in a dash of genre bleed—say, the “alternative lifestyle” faux-doc like American Zombie or the Norman Rockwellian Cold War spoof Fido—is heralded as a minor work of genius before disappearing mere months later into merciful obscurity.

It’s an oversaturated field, and one in which every zombie movie, no matter how trite, feels the need to make some concession to the gravitas of the Romero films or the nihilistic undertow of Return of the Living Dead. It’s damned refreshing, then, that Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland has the guts and the will to acknowledge what we’ve all secretly known for some time: that in today’s film world, where nearly every big budget film must make some concessions to the action genre, zombies aren’t much good as anything anymore than video game targets. And God bless ‘em for it.

There is no attempt to explain the how and why of Zombieland’s apocalypse, and that’s perhaps for the best. As Romero first acknowledged in Day of the Dead, it doesn’t much matter what caused billions of people to die. It only matters that they did. So when we run into Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), named like everyone else in this movie for his hometown, he’s already on the run north from Austin, Texas, picking his way through a zombie apocalypse well past the time human society collapsed. He’s a nervous kid prone to irritable bowel syndrome, but he’s mastered the art of extreme caution, and his many “rules for surviving zombie land” mostly center around pragmatic nuggets like “don’t be fat,“ “limber up,“ and “stay armed in the bathroom.”

In short order Columbus bumps into the boisterous hick Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, playing exactly the kind of character he is most gifted at playing), who smashes zombie heads with an almost lusty zeal. After a—well, let’s call it a series of misunderstandings—Columbus and Tallahassee add Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin, respectively) to their coterie before setting their sights for LA and the “Pacific Playland” theme park, which Wichita swears is free of zombie infestation. Hijinx ensue.

There are two states of being for protagonists in a zombie movie: traveling and holing up. Tallahassee, Columbus et al do a fair bit of both, and it’s to Zombieland’s credit that it drags for only a few minutes during its “holing up” middle passage. The rest is breezy fun.

A lot of this can be laid at the feet of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick’s script, which adamantly refuses to be anything but a gory action-comedy. (There’s very little sadness to be found, and only a smattering of what might constitute “scares.”). Fleischer, a first-time feature filmmaker, is up to the task, and it’s clear right from the opening credits—which seem to be a send-up of the opening titles to Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead—that he’s here to have a good time, and it‘s hard to pick out any day on the set that wouldn‘t have been a blast. The fun translates.

None of this is to say Zombieland is a dumb film, exactly. There’s enough wit and comedic chemistry at work to keep the thing meaty enough that it may be awhile before you notice—hey, there really isn’t much of a plot to this thing, is there? Just four funny people going from one place to another, and the zombies they maim and destroy on the way there. Sometimes, that’s all right.

Oh, and stay after the credits.

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