Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Edgar Wright co-wrote this, the first in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy with Simon Pegg, which can be pitched fairly succinctly as Spaced with zombies. Well, as long as you’ve seen that there previous Channel 4 sit-com. Otherwise “sit-com romance in a zombie apocalypse” will have to do you.
Before the dead start walking the Earth, we are introduced to high street electronic outlet sales assistant Shaun (Pegg) in the midst of his utterly familiar daily routine. The daily bus ride to work filled with the half asleep and the slog through work filled with the half witless. Quiet pint down the local with his slob of a flatmate Ed (Nick Frost), girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) who’s pining for a more interesting and stimulating life and her flatmates, the objectionable David (Dylan Moran) and the agreeable Dianne (Lucy Davis). For the majority of people, certainly those who’ve been sold into the wage slavery of modern day working this will seem like a familiar setup.
Business picks up when overnight the sleepy English suburbs are overrun by the old school lurching flesh chomping inconveniences that are Zombies. While many of the best gags come from Shaun and Ed’s blind ignorance of the zombie menace as they recover from a night of heavy drinking, caused by the breakdown of Shaun and Liz’s relationship, it’s not long before the two decide to take on the zombies, save Liz, David, Dianne, and Shaun’s mum Barbara (Penelope Wilton) and step-dad Phillip (Bill Nighy).
A lot of the most obvious humour in Shaun comes from taking a rather more grounded look at how ordinary joes would respond to such a crisis, rather than the usual horror movie tropes and / or becoming an action hero overnight. On that basis, it’s funny enough, although as with my first viewing through, if you can only take that surface reading of it then it’s a fine enough comedy to be worth a look.
However for podcast reasons I’ve since seen a lot more of the films that this affectionately prods fun at, as well as having seen it a few times, which certainly puts it up a couple of notches in my estimation. Not only for cleverly twisting the films it’s drawing from into amusing pretzels, but also for baking a rich and dense dough with quick throwaway gags and Easter eggs that reward repeat viewing as well as genre aficionados.
Not my favourite of the Cornettos, but the more I watch it the less of a delta there is between it and Hot Fuzz in my estimation and I would certainly recommend it widely, and of course in particular to horror movie fans.