"Take car. Go to mum's. Kill Phil, grab Liz, go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over. How's that for a slice of fried gold?!"
Twenty years on, let’s look at the inaugural film of Edgar Wright’s iconic ‘Cornetto trilogy’—one that started off his brand with a romantic comedy set in the suburbs of London that just happened to involve zombies. Between weaponized Prince albums and literal masterclasses in zombie acting, here’s my look at Shaun of the Dead.
In many ways, it’s a followup to Wright and Simon Pegg’s series Spaced, hitting the turn of the millennium with its sitcom look at nerdy twenty somethings in the British capital. With this catching the eyes of the likes of Tarantino, Shaun of the Dead now takes a look at Pegg playing a character who’s a bit older, now on the cusp of thirty—and like many around that age, finding himself still trying to figure out how to sort his life. His relationship with his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) is strained at best, the rest of his friends (abrasive Dylan Moran and his friendlier partner Lucy Davis) aren’t that much warmer, and he still finds himself tied down to his childhood pal Ed (Nick Frost)—now grown up into a drug-dealing slacker layabout whose ambitions don’t go further than the local pub. Things go worse when Liz dumps him, when he gets chewed out by his rather intense roommate Pete (by, er, Peter Serafanowicz)…and then that’s when the zombies start showing up.
Despite all this, Shaun of the Dead actually remains a pretty darn well structured zombie movie alongside the romantic shenanigans—we have a decent buildup harking back to the Romero classics, with tidbits on the radio giving a hint as to the situation to come, comments about bitey drug addicts and other such neatly inserted foreshadowing…and it even has classic staples played fairly well for drama, like sacrificing a doomed and infected loved one. Near the end it actually gets pretty intense and dramatic, and it all flows decently well. In this regard, it’s probably better than its two successors arguably (Hot Fuzz may have been tightly scripted, but as a police film it does go a bit off the rails at the very end!).
But there’s all the memorable and creative stuff in between—it’s set in the UK, making guns a rarity, so naturally you have to get inventive to fight off the undead hordes. Like that one highlight involving dangerous records, and the debates over which ones to save. Or, well, the logistics of barricading a pub. Between all this, there’s even considerate moments like Shaun managing to reconcile with his stepdad (Bill Nighy, memorable as always), or trying finally to figure out just what to do with Ed.
All in all, despite the limited budget, it’s all well executed and well shot, giving itself actually a pretty unique look with London residential areas—and it’s ironic that it was this and 28 Days Later, both Brit zombie movies, that give that subgenre a shot in the arm back in the 2000s. George Romero returned to that with Land of the Dead not long after, complete with Pegg and Frost in cameos…and the general response was along the lines of ‘it’s okay I guess’.
Indeed, between that and Walking Dead and even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies…Shaun of the Dead still remains pretty darn memorable amid all these 20 years later. In some respects it manages to outdo them in some areas, even in realism—here, the zombie epidemic gets cleared up in a fairly conventional way, since hey, if rednecks with guns can put ‘em down, how dangerous are they really?
Wright went on to bigger things, some of them perhaps not entirely as rife with his more youthful and down-to-home energy here, and Pegg’s career was certainly jumpstarted. But going back to where it all began, for all of the dead people coming out graves, this one still remains a pretty nicely well done and quotable birthing point for them as big names. If you haven’t seen it a while, or haven’t seen it at all, check it out—it still holds up.
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