The New York Premiere of Zombieland was Thursday night and Columbia pictures hired Doug Sakmann and the New York Zombie Crawl team to paint and deliver several hundred zombies to Times Square for a free screening to anyone wearing Zombie makeup.  I think the amount of people was a bit underestimated because there were lines around the block waiting to get their makeup done by Doug and his team at The Mean Fiddler.  After two straight hours of doing zombie makeup they had given out 600 tickets to the undead and Doug led them on a crawl to  the Times Square AMC.  The crawl turned into a run as they realized things were running late and Doug started charging down the street.

I am not sure if you have ever seen well over 600 zombies running down Broadway a 8PM on a Thursday, but I can tell you this… the police hadn’t.  There is a police station in the middle of Times Square and there were cops everywhere.  They had no idea how to handle this.  They would arrive on the scene, pull out their batons, and then sort of put them back, looking confused.  The mob almost got out of hand when zombies started attacking cars and knocking over chairs and tables, but after several cop cars with sirens blazing started escorting the zombies down Broadway, things calmed down a bit.  That did not stop a limo driver from punching a zombie or stopping a 16 Wheeler from crashing into a Lexus outside the movie theater.  How does he explain a zombie attack to his insurance company?

Once we go to the theater it was sort of madness getting everyone inside.  Even with 600 tickets tons of zombies didn’t get any.  The movie theater played it on three screens and from what I could tell, they packed them. When I walked in all these press photographers were lined up behind a red rope ready to shoot Woody Harrelson standing in front of the Zombieland poster.  They were furious because zombies kept getting into their shot.  Luckily I had free reign and I grabbed Doug and got shots of him and Woody as well as getting a better shot of Woody and the poster than any of the pro guys did.  It was pretty funny.  They even let me in the movie with my camera even though most people had to check theirs.  It pays to know the undead.

The movie itself was way better than I thought it would be.  I was expecting some dumb horror comedy, but it turned out to be a really great dumb horror comedy. It was very violent, very funny and the romantic subplot was only slightly lame and cheesy.  I don’t really like the idea that zombies can run, but the amazing Bill Murray cameo made up for it.  I am not going to tell you anything about Bill Murray’s cameo because I don’t want to ruin it, but it might be the best of his career, and I have seen pretty much every film he has ever been in. That’s fact.

After the movie I had an entirely different adventure.  I rode the train home with a friend of a friend and he didn’t have a metro card on him.  I didn’t want to wait, so I convinced him to go in at the same time with me.  He didn’t want to but he did anyway and the cops stopped us.  I didn’t really know why but when they stopped us he started losing his shit. He didn’t have his ID on him so they took us to the Subway police station while they ran my ID and tried to find him in the system.  Turns out he had just been arrested for having a knife on him.  When they searched his bag they found crack, heroin and a fucking crossbow.  So this time, while he had no Medieval weapons on him, he did have two bags of dope and was on probation.  When they weren’t looking he pulled them out of his pocked and fucking swallowed them like we were in a cop movie.  It was nuts.  We ended up just getting tickets and it was the happiest I have ever been to pay a $100 fine.

Anyway, it was a crazy evening and here are the pictures to prove it.  NSFW for gore and a zombie nip.

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