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Horror-larious By Cheryl Eddy A NE'ER-do-well who's about to turn 30 but is still living like a college-age slacker, Shaun (Simon Pegg) is cemented in the worst kind of rut. His soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), and uptight roommate, Pete (Peter Sarafinowicz), have both recently exploded over Shaun's attachment to best friend Ed (Nick Frost), a couch-dwelling sloth who's clearly the cause of Shaun's suspended adolescence. His dour stepfather, Philip (Bill Nighy), guilt-trips him about paying more visits to his mother, Barbara (Penelope Wilton). At his dead-end electronics-store job, his teenage coworkers openly refer to him as "Grandpa." Shaun's in such a fog that he doesn't notice the strangeness afoot in his London hood: a girl collapses, a homeless guy takes a bite out of a pigeon, and ambulances and military trucks squeal by with alarming frequency. Over a pint at local hangout the Winchester, the equally heedless Ed consoles his bud: "It's not the end of the world!" The chuckle is, of course, that it is the end of the world, or damn near close, and it's apparent to absolutely everyone (audience included) except Shaun and Ed. Already a Brit blockbuster, Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead is jam-packed with similar instances of comedic foreshadowing ("Next time I see you, you're dead!" Shaun scolds the bratty, soon-to-be-zombified kid next door), not to mention sight gags, pop culture references, double entendres, and running jokes galore. Sure, some of Shaun of the Dead's nuances may be lost on us American types – coscripters Wright and Pegg previously collaborated on the U.K. sitcom Spaced, which is freely referenced in Shaun – but the film's good-natured splatstick hardly gets lost in translation. Zombie fans aren't exactly hurting for fresh meat of late, what with the Dawn of the Dead remake, assorted Resident Evil entries, 28 Days Later, a glorious 25th anniversary two-disc DVD set of Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, and gossip about George A. Romero's 2005 release Land of the Dead ripe for the chomping. Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later both do Britain proud, though they couldn't be more different in tone and execution. Where 28 Days Later offers a gruesome, keenly emotional view of an undead apocalypse informed by a post-9/11 world, Shaun of the Dead illustrates how the reflexes gained from playing way too many violent video games can actually come in handy in certain survival scenarios. Once Shaun and Ed realize – finally – that the streets are under siege, they discover the meaning of proactive (go back to the first paragraph, reread Shaun's mother's name, and you'll know which classic Night of the Living Dead line is recycled, with perfect timing). Though Shaun's officially been declared a loser by Liz and her snooty pals Dianne (The Office's Lucy Davis) and David (Dylan Moran), he convinces them to hole up in the Winchester, where there's tons of booze, one shotgun, a temperamental jukebox, semisturdy walls, and plenty of room for arguments and reconciliations. In terms of its plot, Shaun of the Dead doesn't exactly break any new horror movie ground. But it's got that rarefied Evil Dead 2-style mélange of antiheroics, gore, and relentlessly witty dialogue, and a champion cast to boot. Real-life pals Pegg and Frost are particularly memorable as brain-dead slackers who (unlikely as it seems) pull it together to battle the undead. Indeed, if there's a message – besides the fact that howling zombies make excellent backup singers on drunken renditions of "White Lines" – it's that Shaun's urban-dwelling drones are actually not that transformed by zombification. In either form, it seems, they shuffle through the city unaware of what's going on around them. Throughout much of the film, the zombies are more annoying than scary; they're also shockingly oblivious, not noticing when Shaun and company surreptitiously hatch a plan to blend in with the moaning masses. But it's really not so deep as all that. Shaun of the Dead is the funniest zombie movie since Return of the Living Dead, not to mention the funniest movie period in recent memory; if there's any justice, it'll find its audience stateside. 'Shaun of the Dead' opens Fri/24 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for theater information. |
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