Last night’s movie Shaun Of The Dead is one of my favorite films. Co-written by and starring Simon Pegg (Many people will not get to know him as Scotty in the rebooted Star Trek.) it is a film that exists in a relatively small genre of Zombie Comedies. (The next best zombie comedy is The Return Of The Living Dead, which is a sequel to George Romero’s Night Of The LIving Dead.) Shaun Of The Dead is billed as a romantic comedy with zombies and that is spot on.
The story is fairly simple. Shaun has a dead end life which he is not managing very well. His has a troubled relationship with his step-father, his girl is dumping him, and his flat-mate has no job and no motivation. All this comes to a head during the Zombie uprising turning London into a city of the damned and about to be damned.
This film works as a zombie movie, hitting all the marks expected of that specialized genre, and it works as comedy. The more you know about zombie movies the funnier the film will become.
This is not a film for the squeamish or for those for whom violence is never funny. If you can take your laughs with your blood then this is a film to take in.