Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Halloween Horrorfest: Shaun of the Dead


I fell completely and utterly in love with Shaun of the Dead from the moment I first saw it. There was such a fresh wittiness to it that was unlike anything I had seen before. It was both a loving satire of Zombie films while also being a full blooded Zombie film itself. Layered with plenty of humor and callbacks makes for a memorable and funny film.

The film begins with Shaun (played by Simon Pegg) feeling a bit trapped in his life. His girlfriend, Liz (played by Kate Ashfield), wants to spend more alone time away from their friends. He lives with two roommates, slacker Ed (played by Nick Frost) and high strung Pete (played by Peter Serafinowicz). He doesn't get along with his stepfather, Phillip (played by Bill Nighy), who comes around his work to remind him to visit his mom (played by Penelope Wilton). When he forgets to make reservations for dinner, Liz finally reaches her breaking point and dumps him. Distraught, Ed takes him out to the local pub, named The Winchester, for drinks. They get drunk and in the process completely fail to notice the beginnings of the zombie apocalypse. This continues into the next morning when Shaun makes his routine walk to the corner store for a paper, only this time he fails to notice the crashed cars, bloody handprints on the shop's fridge door and people running for their lives. 

It's not until Ed spots a girl in their backyard that they begin to realize something's up, especially when she impales herself on an umbrella stand and then proceeds to stand up again with a large hole in her gut in an impressively gruesome effect. The two come up with a plan to retrieve Liz (because surely she would take him back if he rescues her, or so he thinks) and Shaun's mother and head for their beloved pub to ride out the crisis. Things go wrong almost from the get go as Phillip winds up coming along as well as Liz's roommates Dianne (played by Lucy Davis) and David (played by Dylan Moran). Nonetheless, they all press on, determined to make their way through the zombie apocalypse to their desired refuge.

The film's director, Edgar Wright, wrote the script with Simon Pegg and the two created something very special. It's a film that is at once both a zombie movies and a satire of zombie movies. There are great gags throughout the film, including ones mocking the slow shamble of the zombies with Ed and Shaun ransacking their house for stuff to throw at them, miss with every single item, go back for more and come back with them more or less in the same place. The real brilliance in the film is in the set up. Many of the background characters in the beginning of the film show up later as zombies. Many of the exchanges between characters are also repeated in the second half in a completely different context. And then there's Ed's speech in the pub of what they should do that night  at the beginning of the film that perfectly foreshadows the rest of the film. Jessica Hynes, who collaborated with Pegg and Wright on their TV series "Spaced" (which also starred Nick Frost as well), pops up as Yvonne. Yvonne is more or less Shaun's female counterpart and at one point shows up with her own group, made up of practically doppelgängers of Shaun's group. These are just the tip of of the iceberg as the jokes, winks and callbacks come rapid fire and most certainly rewards repeat viewings. I've seen the film countless times and I'm still picking up things I've missed before. The film also contains several references to Romero's Dawn of the Dead, including Shaun working at Foree Electronics (named after Dawn star Ken Foree) and actual music cues taken from Romero's film. It's a nice nod to the film's primary inspiration. 

Shaun of the Dead is a comic treat, a sort of Rom-Zom-Com as it was called. With a smart script with a wicked sense of humor that is at once both a spoof of zombie movies and is at the same time a zombie movie (it gets considerably darker as the film goes on and our bad of misfits starts getting picked off). But it never stops being a funny and genuinely memorable comedy. It also kicked off the "Cornetto Trilogy," a series of three films made by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost, with three films inspired by the three flavors of Cornetto sundae cones (a popular UK ice cream treat, similar to our Drumsticks). It was followed by Hot Fuzz, which lovingly parodied buddy cop films and concluded with The World's End, which similarly parodied alien invasion films.   

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