Reviewed by Gabriel Gonzalez
 |
| Simon Pegg plays Shaun the
zombie slayer in Shaun
of the Dead |
I’ve always felt that the Zombie movie was the lazy
man’s monster movie. Grab some oafish extras, dress
them up in homeless chic, get them drunk, and set them loose
on the set. The
rest of the filming would involve close-ups of a dapper young
scientist and his adoring starlet of the moment trapped in
a log cabin, staring out the window with wide eyes and wider
mouths. No
need to bother with the monsters. These zombies were
no mad genius creations or Counts. Zombies were the monsters
nobody wanted to love to hate or at least lament.
Nothing has really changed in the Zombie genre the past century
or so save for a convenient new hot social stigma now thrust
upon these poor unsouls; the VIRUS. When we die
our bodies are immediately devalued. We don’t
matter because we are no longer matter. Thus, the next
logical step would be to make the dead the punching bags for
the ills of the living. In this case, the ills would be
the emergence of some particularly nasty viruses.
And so, the zombie becomes the drooling doormat of human disease,
safely detached from the living by the unfortunate condition
of death. Death is now a condition. Pop culture has
turned the hereafter into the ‘what’s happening”. Movies
make the big bucks from turning death into the “it” rite
of passage performance for cute & cynical would be actors. Even
if you are the only survivor in the cast, there is always the
comfort of knowing that you will be bludgeoned in the sequel. If
you die, there is an even better chance that you’ll be
return as a sexy villain in the same sequel.
Enter, Shaun of the Dead. A comedy-spoof of the zombie-virus-slacker
genre(s) from Great Britain that tackles the zombie genre from
a fresh new perspective; it takes the zombie and puts him in
a new role. The zombie is now the neighbor, the Indian
drug store owner, the step-father, and so on, who once lived,
has tragically fallen pray to the ‘deadly bite’,
and is now a lost (un)soul rather than the cliché hungry
mongoloid. The zombie still enjoys brains and guts, but
we find, especially through the eyes of Shaun, that this is yet
another misunderstood segment of society (such as slacker Shaun
himself happens to be).
As a thirty-something slacker, Shaun, still lives with two college
buddies-one of whom is a fat, filthy, and, frustrating as all
hell, Jack Black type-and works as a salesman at an appliance
store. One fine day, Shaun is dumped by his girlfriend
and her friends (that proper British couple that seems to pop
up in every British comedy of late???) for being a slacker who
would rather hang out at the local dive pub than take her to
nice places. Also, Shaun’s cold as a cadaver stepfather
stops by to remind him for the millionth time that he must visit
his mum and bring flowers. Shaun is a neglectful son having
a shite day. The day turns downright catastrophic
when Shaun loafs about with his obnoxious roommate and forgets
about his dinner reservations and final chance to take his girlfriend
to a nice place. He, of course, also doesn’t get
around to delivering flower to his mum. And all the while,
his fat, filthy, and frustrating roommate, having been the main
culprit for his dismal day, continues to ruin everything.
The best of the film truly gets going when Shaun and his fat
flat mate, Ed, discover their first zombie in their backyard
and hilariously taunt her, assuming she is drunk out of her mind. They
soon discover she has no mind, or soul, or life and set off into
sloppy-slacker scared-shitless hero mode. Simon Pegg, as
Shaun, mugs himself into awkward misstep after misstep and falls,
pitch-perfectly, into the dazzling sketch comedy style that made
him so hilariously memorable on the British sitcom circuit (most
notably the recent Spaced). As the zombies begin to populate
the streets of England in increasing numbers (like ravers at
the Redding Festival), Shaun and Ed devise a plan to rescue the
ex-girlfriend, and Shaun’s mum, and flee to the sure-to-be-safe
dive pub. Unfortunately, this under achieving, and delusional,
duo make a hysterical mess of things in a sequence of events
that places co-writer and director Edgar Wright in his finest
element, having perfected his skill for brilliant sketch comedy
with the seminal Brit tele-series French & Saunders.
While I could have done without all the Guy Ritchie rapid jump-cut
editing gimmickry and with most of the Jack Black-lite, in bad
taste, urban-Americana one-liners from Ed, the actors managed
to maintain their scared shite-less sincerity and the film its
rapid-fire British sketch comedy sensibility. I would have
loved a bit more self-control in all the (unsubtle) set-ups and
forebodings. I really didn’t need to see Shaun move
past the Coca Cola and onto the more mature Diet Coke to know
he was a changed man. I definitely didn’t need mum
looking at her arm every other frame to know someone was about
to go Zombie on their assess. It also dawned on me that
a bit more attention, and perhaps dollars/pounds from the budget,
applied to the goriest scenes would have come along way on the
fright scale. After all, the saying does suggest, No Guts
No Glory.
All in all, Shaun of the Dead was the memorable little spoof
that could. A little gem of a Zombie genre film that had
a lot of fun taking itself seriously in all the right places. Simon
Pegg might have seemed like just another cool young actor sharpening
his star potential had it not been for the touching scenes of
tragic loss which he so potently delivered. His gave a
star-making perfaromance that would have merely been a make it
and move on role for a lesser comic. Not to be outdone,
however, the zombies also had a hand (and many other severed
limbs) in turning this British import into one giant step forward
for the zombie rights movement. After all, Ed seems to
have found himself a more fitting, and funny, role as a drooling
and subdued zombie in an England that exploits the remaining
and enslaved zombies much the same way that Hollywood now exploits
poor people from rural America.
I wonder if the inevitable Shaun of the Dead 2 could dig further
into unearthing more fully developed zombie characters living
their (un)lives in modern day London. Would this not be
a bold step forward for a genre once deemed dead. Would
this not be a new beginning for our least respected boogie-men?
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