SHAUN OF THE DEAD. (2004) DIRECTED BY EDGAR WRIGHT. WRITTEN BY EDGAR WRIGHT AND SIMON PEGG.
STARRING SIMON PEGG, NICK FROST, KATE ASHFIELD, PENELOPE WILTON, BILL NIGHY, DYLAN MORAN, LUCY DAVIS, PETE SERAFINOWICZ AND JESSICA STEVENSON.
REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
Motherfucker…
Don’t forget to kill Phil!
The front door is open. AGAIN…!
We’re coming to get you, Barbara!
Shaun to Ed- D’you want anything from the shop?
Ed- Cornetto.
Bill Nighy’s character on being bitten by a zombie- I ran it under the cold tap.
This is my kids’ favourite movie of all time, and yet I resisted watching it until recently, if you can believe it, because I’m such a film snob, mostly preferring ‘pure’ horror to spoofs-slash-horror comedy. But SHAUN OF THE DEAD is bloody brilliant!
It’s the warmest, cuddliest most feelgood zombie film ever written, despite the lashings of gore and violence, and it left me with such a good (hot?) fuzzy feeling inside that I immediately wanted to write about it and tell the whole world my opinion of a seventeen-year-old movie, lol. Talk about late to the bleedin’ party!
The first film in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (HOT FUZZ (2007) and THE WORLD’S END (2013), it was based on such films as George A. Romero’s own trio of classic zombie movies, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978) and DAY OF THE DEAD (1985).
It tells the story of Shaun, marvellously played by Simon Pegg, a twenty-nine-year-old Londoner who works in a shit job selling electrical goods. His girlfriend Liz is breaking up with him because she thinks he’s immature and never wants to do anything different or go anywhere new. As he spends every night in the Winchester pub with his soulmate, his bezzie mate Ed (played by an equally wonderful Nick Frost), this accusation might just be true.
Shaun hates his step-dad, the mild-mannered Philip (Bill Nighy), and is always fighting with his mum Barbara (Penelope Wilton) because of this. He also hates Liz’s mate David (David’s a twat!), one half of the couple David-and-Dianne, and he’s not getting on with his housemate Pete, because Pete thinks that Shaun and Ed are a couple of losers who waste their time on the Playstation or down the Winchester.
So, you see, by the time the Zombie Apocalypse begins, Shaun has been made to feel really bad about his life by Other People. I say Other People, because Shaun and Ed were both perfectly happy about the nice comfortable rut they were in before the Apocalypse (Ed still is!) until Other People started sticking their oars in.
But the Apocalypse, which the horribly hungover Shaun and Ed are quite slow to recognise for what it is, might just provide Shaun, whose pens have had the utterly banal bad taste to leak through the pocket of his white, short-sleeved work shirt, with a golden opportunity to display the proactive leadership skills that have hitherto lain dormant in his nature.
Can he win back Liz’s love (and, let’s face it, they’re perfick for each other) while simultaneously saving her, his mum, his step-dad, his bezzie mate Ed and David-and-Dianne as well from the Zombie Apocalypse? Will the previously reviled Winchester provide the gang, after all, with the fortress-like security they need to keep them safe from the onslaught of slavering zombies? It’s all to play for, folks.
Highlights include Shaun and Ed having a deadly serious conversation in the middle of a zombie attack about which records to chuck- or not to chuck- at the shambling, slobbering brain-dead brain-munchers, and the gang nipping over garden fences trying to get to the Winchester before the zombies do and discovering their friend Yvonne (played by the brilliant Jessica Stevenson, aka Cheryl from THE ROYLE FAMILY) leading an exactly parallel group to their own one but in a different direction.
The parallel group, though they don’t get to say much, features well-known comedy actors such as Matt Lucas (LITTLE BRITAIN), Reece Shearsmith (THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN), Martin Freeman (NATIVITY, THE HOBBIT) and Tamsin Greig (BLACK BOOKS, alongside its writer-creator Dylan Moran).
I also love that ordinary normal people like ourselves are portrayed as zombies as we go through the frequently mind-numbingly boring motions of everyday life. No wonder people like Liz sometimes yearn for a complete change of scene or direction, or even of watering-hole. Just to do something a little bit different, for once! We’ve all felt that on occasion, all been there.
I also love that scene in the garden where Shaun and Ed think the zombie lady is merely another Sunday morning still-drunk hangover victim, and also the sheer normal-ness of the Asian-run corner shop and the perfectly ordinary street where they live.
The separate scenes between Shaun and his step-dad, in which Bill Nighy as Philip tries touchingly to impart how tough it is to be a dad, never mind a step-dad, and also between Shaun and his lovely mumsy mum, are part and parcel of what gives SHAUN OF THE DEAD its enormous heart.
But the central love has got to be between, not Shaun and Liz, although they undoubtedly do love each other, but Shaun and Ed, his best friend. They love each other the way only real, true best friends can love each other, and each of their two final scenes together in the film had me in floods of tears.
I was laughing more than I was crying, though, because the comedy in the film is seriously well-written. Nearly two decades after it was conceived, penned and committed to celluloid, I finally get to watch it. And pronounce it practically perfick.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.
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