Zombies seem to be all the rage lately. Recently we've had 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. And then there was the recent announcement of George Romero finally getting to make the fourth film in his zombie series, Land of the Dead. Of the recent examples, this is far and away my favorite. What made Romero's films so great was the way he slipped a bit of social commentary in with the zombie action. Shaun of the Dead does the same and adds a lot of laughs to boot.
The hero is Shaun (Simon Pegg, also a writer on the film), an electronics salesman living in a London suburb. He reminds me a lot of Dante from Clerks. He's a smart young man who seems to be going nowhere. He works a job mostly populated by people as much as a decade younger than him. He lives with a couple of old friends from school. One of them, Ed (Nick Frost), is even less ambitious than Shaun. His life seems to consist entirely of playing video games, occasionally selling pot and drinking at the local pub. Shaun's love life is rapidly unraveling as his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) grows sick of his rut. So distraught over this is Shaun that he completely fails to notice for quite some time that the world is being taken over by zombies.
This is the sort of movies where you really want to pay attention to the background. Shaun isn't so you can find a lot of laughs at what he inexplicably fails to notice. There are also plenty of laughs in the countless ways the movie manages to connect living in the modern world with being a zombie. It isn't the sort of movie where they set up a joke and then go for the punch line. The laughs just flow naturally from the action. There are countless moments where the movie samples very ordinary moments that everyone will recognize from real life but drops them into the middle of an apocalyptic scenario, making the come across as truly ridiculous. It also plays a bit like the Simpsons, in that it never abandons even the tiniest of characters. Virtually every minor character or extra you see in the early going comes back as a zombie.
In many ways, this is just like every other zombie movie. There is the slow building of dread, the breakdown of civilization, the confusion as to what is happening, and so on. But the main difference is that this is almost like a side story to a typical zombie movie. Shaun is nobody important. He has no idea what is going on and even when he starts to figure it out is more concerned with winning back his girlfriend. Shaun's circle seem pretty much in the same boat and no level of zombie induced chaos seems to put them off their particular quirks and troubles in life. Ed for instance, remains virtually useless throughout the movie.
While definitely a comedy, the movie isn't a parody of other zombie movies. It's actually very respectful of them. It plays by the same rules and pays homage to classic zombie movies. Clearly the filmmakers did their homework and figured out what made the better zombie movies tick. It is plenty gory when it needs to be, which makes sure that we never think just because it's a comedy, that things are safe. It also goes back to the old convention that zombies are slow shambling creatures mostly only dangerous in huge crowds or in confined spaces. Some recent movies have made them speedy hunters, which never sat well with me. I like the creepiness of the sluggish zombie and in this film I particularly like how the slow motion zombies leave lots of time to get some jokes in like when Shaun and Ed use records to throw at zombies and debate the quality of each one before throwing.
Shaun of the Dead is a real fresh of breath air, a movie that takes something very familiar and turns it on end for solid laughs. Writers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (also the director) are people who should be encouraged to keep doing their thing. I'd love to see what else they could come up with.
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