Shaun of the Dead

Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg
Released: April 2004
Starring: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Nick Frost, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton
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The best black comedy of all time.

I have a weakness for zombie apocalypse movies anyway. However, this film has taken every zombie cliche` in the book and ends up pointing fun at themselves, which is hilarious!

The creators called it a “Rom Zom Com” aka a “Romantic Zombie Comedy” and the “perfect date film” because it has a heart line of a romantic comedy that happens to be set in a time where zombies are attacking the world.

It starts out with Shaun (Simon Pegg) and Shaun’s girlfriend Lizz (Kate Ashfield) at a bar on yet another date at the Winchester Pub, as Lizz bickers about how they never do anything different. The shot slowly widens to show, Lizz’s friends David and Di (Dylan Moran and Lucy Davis) and Shaun’s foul-mouthed best friend, Ed (Nick Frost). Of course, what better to change the monotonous situation than have their lives bombarded with the living dead!?

That’s what I like about the Wright-Pegg-Frost trio. Their ideas are crazy!
Yet they always work.

These zombies are the classic, lazy walker-types where unless you got trapped or are a really slow walker, you would probably not get caught, unlike the kind that is on the TV series The Walking Dead where they run when they are desperate. But these zombies imitate the world we live in – we wake up, go to work, come home again, miserable. So it does have a bit of a wake-up call feeling to it.

Edgar Wright’s signature fast pans, quick cuts and cut always were present which definitely suited the shocking humour and gruesome occurrences.

Another of my favourite things about this film is the parallels between the start and the ending. Such as the trolley boy collecting stray trolleys in the car park of a shopping centre with little enthusiasm. By the end, the remaining zombies are trained and take over the chore in an equally unenthusiastic way… I don’t know. I just find it amusing…

This is the best black comedy because, unlike some others I’ve seen of the same genre *cough* Zombieland *cough*, the comedy element runs through the entire film, not just random crucial parts. Shaun of the Dead make fun of the terrifying situation at every turn.

This is a must-have item in every film-watcher’s collection.

Jodie’s rating: 8/10