director
Edgar Wright
screenwriters
Simon Pegg
Edgar Wright
producer
Nira Park
cinematographer
David M. Dunlap
music
Dan Mudford
Pete Woodhead
editor
Chris Dickens
cast
Simon Pegg (Shaun)
Kate Ashfield (Liz)
Nick Frost (Ed)
Lucy Davis (Dianne)
Dylan Moran (David)
Peter Serafinowicz (Pete)
Bill Nighy (Philip)
Jessica Stevenson (Yvonne)
Penelope Wilton (Barbara)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 95m
u.k.
release: 4/9/04
u.s.
release: 9/24/04
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
u.k. website
official
u.s. website
|
The zombie film is ripe for
comedy -- how could it not be? All those shambling, moaning corpses,
drooling vacantly as they pursue living flesh, then slurping
intestines with a gourmand's brio. The genre's modern-day innovator
George Romero understood its inherent farcical qualities perfectly
well; in his seminal Night of the Living Dead, we find
a guy on TV summing up the zombie epidemic with "Ah, they're
dead -- they're all messed up," and in 1979's Dawn
of the Dead more than a few walking dead literally catch
pies in the kisser. Even in a grim rip-off like Lucio Fulci's
Zombie there's the well-loved underwater face-off between
a zombie and a shark (guess who wins).
Edgar Wright (director and
co-writer) and Simon Pegg (co-writer and star) understand just
as well, and the film they have wrought, Shaun of the Dead
(already a big hit in Britain), is not only a loving, teasing
homage to the Romero Dead films. It's also a superb zombie
film in its own right, its humor always grounded in character
reality and those characters' plausible reactions to extraordinary
circumstances. Wright and Pegg, like John Landis in An American
Werewolf in London, first give us funny, recognizable human
beings, and then let loose the wolves and flesh-eaters. Horror
fans will devour it whole, but the squeamish or easily-spooked
shouldn't avoid it; it's also a superb comedy in its own
right.
The eponymous Shaun (Pegg)
lives in a cluttered London flat with childhood buddy turned
slacker roomie Ed (Nick Frost, hilarious even when his sometimes-thick
accent baffles American ears). Shaun toils in an appliance store;
at age 29 he's settled for whatever life hands him, as long as
he can go to his favorite pub at the end of the day and get sloshed
with Ed. His girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) is sick of waiting
for him to grow up. For about the first reel, Shaun deals with
the various mundane aggravations of his life, with odd things
always happening in the backgrounds of shots. That Shaun and
his self-absorbed friends -- including aspiring actress Dianne
(Lucy Davis) and her wimpola boyfriend David (Dylan Moran) --
would ignore the growing evidence of the undead is perfectly
credible. "Panic on the streets of London," sings Morrissey
on the telly in one scene. Well, not quite yet.
Soon enough the infection spreads,
literally into Shaun and Ed's back yard -- a forlorn zombie woman
they take for a drunk. Other zombies quickly join her, and the
two slackers decide on the ideal place for holing up -- not a
shopping mall, but their favorite pub. Along for the ride are
Liz, Dianne, David, and Shaun's sweetly oblivious mum (Penelope
Wilton, the best mom in horror movies since Mimi Rogers in Ginger
Snaps). What follows hews closer to gut-wrench than to belly-laugh,
though our heroes remain riotous in their consistency; when the
power comes back on, and everyone is straining to keep quiet
to hide from the zombies outside, Ed does something spectacularly
stupid yet absolutely in character. The writing is so sharp that
nothing anyone does rings false, even when a newly zombified
character reaches out with a mottled claw to ... turn off an
offending stereo.
I picture George Romero howling
with glee at Shaun of the Dead (the American ads carry
his enthusiastic blurb), maybe because the movie so successfully
continues his legacy. Romero's films are uniquely American, and
Shaun of the Dead is inconceivable anywhere but London,
where survivors take stock of the situation over Guinness and
crisps. But the movie is far from a Mel Brooks-style lampoon;
it takes the rules seriously (even when ribbing them) and isn't
afraid to nudge the audience into true horror or even pathos
when the story calls for either. In spirit, it's far closer to
Romero's vision than last spring's dull Dawn of the Dead remake.
It knows when to play for laughs and when to play for keeps.
|