'Zombieland' a funhouse of gross giggles

Zombies - you know, those ravenous, re-animated corpses with the insatiable munchies for human-body bits - have been chewing up the big screen for more than 50 years. Their latest appearance, in this big-budget horror spoof that which mixes equal parts carnage and comedy, has become a bona fide box-office hit.

It's no surprise. "Zombieland" is a wild funhouse ride of grossness and giggles that should coast into Halloween as a must-see for fright-flick fans who agree that laughter makes any zombie popcorn apocalypse easier to digest.

In a decimated, dead-zone America with rabid flesh-eaters springing from every nook and cranny, Woody Harrelson is Tallahassee, a good ol' boy survivalist with a fetish for weapons and a sweet tooth for Twinkies. Jessie Eisenberg plays Columbus, a lovelorn nebbish with irritable bowel syndrome who outfoxes zombies by adhering to a long list of precautionary, common-sense rules - like "Check the back seat" and "Beware of bathrooms."

When Tallahassee and Columbus come across two wily young damsels in faux distress (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin), they eventually join forces and head to the comedic centerpiece - an audaciously out-of-left-field encounter in the Hollywood home of a movie icon. To say more would spoil the surprise, and it's a whopper.

The splattery conclusion is staged in an amusement park, which provides several opportunities for inventive, zombie-fied interludes on the midway. If you thought the Drop Zone was dangerous under normal circumstances, just try it with a horde of hungry zombies drooling for you to come back down. And if you've ever thought clowns were creepy, wait until you come face-to-face with one that wants to slurp your brain through your skullcap. Yikes!

The dialogue is fast, funny and full-on R-rated, and Harrelson is a hoot as the drawly daredevil at the epicenter of all the merry, macabre mayhem, nursing a secret hurt inside the tender heart of his hard shell. "Mama always said I'd be good at something," he notes at one point. "Who woulda known it'd be zombie killing?"

Sociologists and pop-culture pundits say that various social, political and economic situations are represented by movie zombies, from the lumbering graveyard ghouls in George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" to the turbo-charged carnivorous sprinters in Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later." But all that's just so much blah-blah-blah when it comes to the experience of sitting in a dark theater, surrounded by a bunch of other giddy moviegoers, everyone primed for goosebumps.

If you've outgrown Halloween's little-kid-stuff sugar rush, "Zombieland" can help put some chewy, gooey, scary, grown-up fun back into fright night.