London. Shaun, an electronics salesman, is under stress: his girlfriend Liz wants him to ditch his friend and roommate, Ed, who only plays video games all day. The stress becomes even worse when a zombie pandemic breaks out, so Shaun picks up Liz, Ed, Dianne, David, and Shaun's mother, whereas his stepfather has to be abandoned after he was bitten by zombies. The group hides in the Winchester pub, and finds a gun, yet has to shoot Shaun's mother who herself became a zombie. When David and Dianne get killed by zombies, Liz and Shaun flee back to the street, where they are saved by the army. Sometime later, people has beaten the zombies and things get back to normal, while Shaun still holds a zombie Ed hidden in his shack.
Zombie movies have been so overused and excessively exploited to death that it is surprising how the director Edgar Wright and actor-screenwriter Simon Pegg managed to make something new and fresh out it with "Shaun of the Dead", a fun horror comedy that uses the zombie pandemic as a catalyst for character growth and detemination of personality. In this edition, the "zombie intervention" manages to reconcile characters Liz and Shaun who broke up, but teamed up again to stay alive, yet at the same time Shaun never ditches his "third wheel", the slob friend Ed who is even kept in the end, since old habits die hard. Some ideas work (when Shaun and Ed spot the first zombie in the backyard, a woman, they at first assume she is drunk), and most of the jokes are funny (a zombie in a wheelchair; Shaun and the gang pretending they are zombies themselves to simply walk pass hundreds of zombies on the streets; TV clips showing an altered world where zombies are used as participants in survivial game shows), whereas Wright's sense for just plain wacky mood is contagious. However, the movie isn't that inspired, since the typical splatter kills of zombies seem mostly banal, and a more abundance of jokes (and not just the bare happy "hang-out" mood of these characters) would have been welcomed ("Hot Fuzz" is the funnier Wright-Pegg movie). As with most disaster movies, they show the characters what's truly important to them, and here the protagonist realizes he must let go of some habits to embrace the other ones which suit him more.
Grade:++
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