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Overall Rating
 Awesome: 52.69%
Worth A Look: 27.42%
Average: 7.53%
Pretty Bad: 4.3%
Total Crap: 8.06%
13 reviews, 108 user ratings
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| Shaun of the Dead |
by Kevin Thomas
"Don’t worry, even if you laugh yourself to death…you’ll be back for more..."
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Though I’ll try to resist opening the review with an abysmal pun along the lines of ‘Zombies movies are back…FROM THE DEAD’! (after all, I do want you to carry on reading), the simple fact can’t be denied. The 20 year drought has ended with a surge of movie such as 28 Days Later, Resident Evil and Dawn of the Dead. But just as the post-Scream slasher movie renaissance led to ‘Scary Movie’, this one has led to Shaun of the Dead.But this time, it’s not just vaguely amusing (there’s no awkward ‘Look! A penis! It’s funny coz I’m stupid!’ moments in this little gem), it’s side-splittingly hilarious. Shaun is a mild mannered shop assistant whose total inability to take control of his dead end life loses him his girlfriend. But his recently single status suddenly seems less important when zombies appear out of nowhere and start eating his housemates. How do you deal with hell spilling all the cursed souls it can spare onto the streets of London? Well, you grab your mates, and you go to the pub.
Horror and comedy are certainly difficult to combine (intentionally anyway), and Pegg makes an admirable stab, but can’t quite succeed on all fronts. Going from beating in a zombies head with a cricket bat to sitting on the couch with a cup of tea is hilariously juxtaposed. But *Spoilers* farewell speeches with best friends and tearfully shooting your mum in the head to save her from her zombie fate *End of Spoilers* is not quite as easy to comfortably sit and watch. Watching him handle areas of the story that actually require him to act is fairly odd as he seems to spend all of his time building up to a punchline that never comes. You spend the whole time expecting him to crack a smile and toss off a one liner, and when he doesn’t, you feel robbed.
However, he succeeds in bringing his delicious brand of surreal humour (which he perfected on cult TV comedy ‘Spaced’ with Jessica Stevenson) to almost every other scene. Watching him calmly walk to the newsagents and back to buy an ice cream whilst oblivious to the groaning dead surrounding him is a wonderful contrast to the screaming panic of ‘Dawn of the Dead’.
His supporting cast are brilliant, with one particular scene basically being a ‘who’s who’ of top-end British comedy. But the stars never seem to shake off their small screen shackles. They simply don’t command the same screen presence they did on the smaller box, and as a result, the whole thing feels like an extended, novelty episode of the TV show that created the stars ( Pegg himself has admitted that this whole movie was born from the half-episode storyline of an earlier Spaced show where a pilled-up marathon on Resident Evil 2 causes him to have apocalyptic hallucinations).
That said, the endless in jokes, references and slight nods to everything from 80’s electronic music to every zombie movie ever made ever make this a movie obviously made by a hardcore fan for hardcore fans.Compared the level of comedy genius we know Pegg can achieve, this comes as a very slight disappointment. But calling it rubbish as a result is akin to insulting Mozart for not being quite as good as Beethoven. This is comedy at a level of brilliance that most writers will only ever dream of, but it’s also a level that’s a bit below what we know Pegg is capable of.
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link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9265&reviewer=368
originally posted: 04/16/04 13:21:18
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USA
24-Sep-2004 (R)
DVD: 21-Dec-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
07-Oct-2004
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