My reviews of “Dawn of the Dead” and “28 Days Later” were rather sparkling, so you know that I quite enjoy zombie movies. The gore, the paper-thin plot, and watching the characters fail hopelessly at making it through alive are all fundamental parts of any zombie flick. Lately, they’ve been changing the formula around, making for zombies that aren’t really zombies, but star athletes and spies that just happen to have a hunger for human flesh. And not since the Evil Dead trilogy have we seen a funny zombie movie.
But “Shaun of the Dead” has got it all. Being a parody, it was bound to be funny, but I never quite realized the true potential funny that it had. “Shaun of the Dead” is straight-up, stripped-down, kickass Hilarious. In between all the zingers and fart jokes are some genuinely amusing sight gags and other stuff that I’m not sure how to categorize. It’s a movie that other movies should look up to. Not since “Goldmember” have I seen a movie that kept me laughing almost the whole way through.
And for the other standards, how does “Shaun of the Dead” stack up as a zombie parody? Well, there’s gore. Not boatloads of it, but when you do get to see blood and innards flying about, it’s absolutely beautiful. The plot is great and you can really relate to it, but more on that in the next paragraph. All the characters are rather realistic. I mean, most of the time, the heroes are regular joes, but this bunch of loonies, they set the regular joe standards. Our hero, Shaun, works in an electronics store, and his roomie is a fat, unemployed bum who just plays Timesplitters 2 all day long. Oh, and having Timesplitters 2 in the movie was really awesome. Best of all, the zombies in this movie are actually zombies! None of this running around and being smart crap we’ve been getting lately. These are your good old-fashioned, stumble-around-slowly, fooled-by-impersonators, hungry-for-brains, dead-if-decapitated zombies. It’s nice to see they’ve not been forgotten with all the new Hollywood zombies around.
The plot in this movie is just excellent. It all starts with our hero Shaun getting a lecture about needing to change his ways from his girlfriend, Liz. You see, they spend pretty much every night at Shaun and Ed’s favorite pub, the Winchester. She’s sick of it, and wants him to take her somewhere nice. So the next day begins and you really get the impression of how tedious his life is. Short version of this day’s events: he goes to work, blows it with Liz, gets drunk and is left without a hope or a girlfriend. The next day, he does the exact same morning routine, but it’s his day off, so he heads home when he’s done with his errands. Only you’ll notice that while Shaun’s actions don’t change at all, the scenery does. He doesn’t even notice, showing how repetitive his life it, and that he pretty much goes through on autopilot.
So he gets home, and then the rollercoaster of laughs really gets going. Ed discovers a girl in the garden and the two go to find out why she’s there. At first, they think she’s drunk, but then they accidentally impale her on a pipe or something, and when she gets up, they realize they’ve got a problem. Then a fat zombie shows up and they run inside. From the TV, they find out what’s going on, and they learn how to kill the zombies: by destroying the brain or decapitating them. So, they got back outside and huck everything from old records to pottery at them. After exhausting their supply of throwables, they get a paddle and shovel and just beat the zombies into submission. And I’ll tell you now, this scene is positively hilarious. The banter between Shaun and Ed is gold, and the fact that they don’t really seem phased at all considering that they’ve got two zombies in their back yard is great.
After their close encounter, Shaun resolves to go save his mum and Liz, and take them to the safest place he knows: The Winchester. And I’m not going to give away the rest of the story, because you need to see this movie. It only goes uphill from this point on, although the first encounter scene is really hard to top. Again, you need to see this movie. I loved it, and I am definitely going to buy it when it comes out.
If there is anything at all I can complain about, it’s that unlike most movies where they pick of one or two characters every once in a while (depending on the size of the cast), in this movie they pretty much get it all over at once. Really, once the first of the team of six goes, the rest will shortly follow. Sorry for the little spoiler, but I was a little annoyed at how it played out. Seriously, I think they all die within five minutes. It just ain’t right. But on the upside, all the death is followed up by a spectacular ending with more than a single twist. Oh boy, it’s great.
So yeah. There’s my review of “Shaun of the Dead”, currently competing with “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” for the title of best movie I’ve seen this year. It was awesome, and it had everything I need to enjoy a movie and then some. Sadly, there wasn’t any nudity, a strange twist because most zombie movies have at least one breast in them, but that’s neither here nor there.