Movie Review: Shaun of the Dead (2004)

You know, we haven't had nearly enough zombie comedies.

Think about it. The undead have been lurching through our cinematic nightmares at least since 1932's White Zombie, but how many outright comedies have been generated by this popular subgenre? Zombies on Broadway? Return of the Living Dead and its immediate sequel? A few scattered direct-to-video efforts?

Now we have Shaun of the Dead, which has plenty of fun with past flesh-eating films--the title is a riff on George Romero's classic, Dawn of the Dead, and there are references aplenty to Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series and even contemporary horror movies like 28 Days Later....

But if Shaun were just a spoof of classic splatter, we could get a few good laughs and forget about it. But it also aspires to be a romantic comedy and a social satire as well--and succeeds at both admirably.

Shaun (Simon Pegg, who co-wrote the script with director Eric Wright) has a dead-end job as an assistant manager at an electronics store in the greater London area. His relationship with his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), might be at a dead end, too: She's tired of spending her evenings hanging out at the local pub, the Winchester, with Shaun and his best friend/flatmate, the rude, crude, obnoxious and occasionally amusing Ed (Nick Frost). She wants to know where their relationship is going. When Shaun screws up dinner reservations the next night and suggests that they instead go to the Winchester, she dumps him. Shaun and Ed then go out and get good and drunk, not aware that, for whatever reason, the dead are rising and putting the bite on the living. (This is consistent with Romero's approach, where the plague of zombies is explained in, at best, vague terms.)

This leads to what has rapidly become one of my favorite scenes in any movie ever: Hung over and depressed about his breakup with Liz, Shaun pops out to the neighborhood convenience store, so wrapped up in his own misery that he's entirely oblivious to the walking dead all around him. It's funny and thought-provoking at the same time: How much of what goes on around us--immediately before us and in the world at large--do we miss when we're so self-involved?

Shaun and Ed find out about the situation soon enough, though, and come up with a plan: Pick up Shaun's mom (Penelope Wilton) and stepdad (Bill Nighy) and Liz, along with her flatmates, bubbly actress Dianne (Lucy Davis) and cynical, dour David (Dylan Moran), and head for the safest place they can think of: You guessed it, The Winchester.

The script is extremely tight and well thought out, with hardly a line thrown out that isn't referenced again later in the movie, while references to other zombie movies aren't so overt that they alienate those unfamiliar with the genre. (Musical cues are lifted from Romero's Dawn of the Dead, while character names and dialogue from Night of the Living Dead are called out, with Ed shouting, "We're coming to get you, Barbara!" to Shaun's mom through the phone.) And the horror and comedy aspects are balanced well, with Shaun's efforts to win back Liz while fighting off the living dead (Shaun swings a mean cricket bat).

The zombies themselves are the butt of some jokes, but are for the most part treated as real threats to life and limb. Because of this, the conclusion does have some downright serious, emotional moments, but this by no means negates what has come before. It only underscores how thin the line between comedy and drama--or life and death--really is, and how one can straddle the line deftly to produce a comedy/loving tribute also capable of causing scares and effective parody at the same time.

Shaun of the Dead is not only one of the best horror comedies ever made, but it so impressed Romero that he gave Wright and Pegg cameos in his own most recent undead epic, Land of the Dead. You can't get a much better endorsement for a zombie movie than that.