Shaun of the Dead: 2004, dir. Edgar Wright. Seen at Alamo Village (Oct. 24).
Oh, my. Shaun of the Dead was delightful, better than I expected. It is strange to say that a movie with zombies was delightful, but then this movie is just that kind of strange.
Shaun of the Dead is the rare film that has extremely funny moments in it but also delivers an overall solid and entertaining storyline. It doesn’t let comedy get in the way of the action—there are intense, serious scenes as well as hilarious ones. I would say that Shaun of the Dead is a romantic comedy, but my boyfriend is not generally fond of romantic comedies and he liked it a lot.
The plot is fairly simple: Shaun is trying to sort out problems with his girlfriend and his roommates when suddenly the zombies start taking over the planet. Is his girlfriend okay? Is his mom okay? What’s wrong with his roommate Peter? And where should they all go to be safe? You get the idea.
What I like about this movie is that it follows the rules of the horror/zombie genre, but also ridicules the genre. It tweaks gentle fun at its characters, who are so absorbed in relationship angst that they don’t notice the neighborhood is full of zombies, without being mean or unsympathetic to those characters.
Also, it made me laugh a lot. The bit where Shaun and Ed think the girl in their yard is waaaaay drunk, before they realize she’s one of the undead? The Queen songs? The “you’ve got red on you” line?
Hell, I even thought the fart jokes were funny, and you know I usually roll my eyes at that kind of thing.
One of the recurring comedy bits of this movie is that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the zombies and people who are stumbling through their everyday routines. In an early scene, Shaun walks to work and it is obvious that the same things happen every day, not to mention that he’s half-asleep and not paying much attention to the world around him. In a later scene, he makes the same morning trip, but everyone around him has turned into a zombie, cars are smashed, blood is everywhere … and he’s so hung over that he doesn’t notice. Shaun staggers into the convenience store, grabs a soda without noticing bloody handprints on the cooler, and then slips in something that is probably blood, but he’s still oblivious.
The movie riffs on all those adorable British romantic comedies from the past 10 years—Shaun’s girlfriend even has Renee Zellwegger hair, recalling Bridget Jones’s Diary. Shaun is having a turbulent relationship with his girlfriend, and he doesn’t get along with his stepdad, and his job is dead-end: he’s 29 years old and he needs to do something to get his life in order. It’s right out of Nick Hornby, except Hornby’s record buffs in High Fidelity do not evaluate their record collections to determine which ones are suitable to fling at the undead in the hopes of decapitating them.
It turns out I didn’t really need to have seen Night of the Living Dead in order to enjoy this movie, as there’s only one direct reference (“we’re coming to get you, Barbara!”) and I don’t think we missed a thing by turning off Dawn of the Dead early.
Alamo Village showed a lot of clips from various zombie movies (and one scene from the TV show Buffy) before the movie. I have had enough of gory movies for the time being, so I looked around the theater and in my purse during the more graphic bits. Shaun of the Dead had a few gory moments, but even those were kind of silly, and didn’t look particularly realistic. If you are not a big horror movie fan, you can still enjoy this movie—and if you are a horror movie fan, you might like this movie’s refreshing and amusing approach to the standard zombie plot.
My boyfriend says Shaun of the Dead may be the best movie he’s seen all year. While I was delighted with the movie, I am not sure I would say it was “best” (it faces some pretty stiff competition, no pun intended). It is definitely my favorite zombie movie, beating out Re-Animator, although I liked that one too. But wait … do Evil Dead 2 and Dead Alive count as zombie movies? Because I really like those a lot. They’re not quite as hilarious, though.
Let’s just say that Shaun of the Dead was funny as hell, smart as hell, and a top-notch comedy. If you haven’t seen it, go now.