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Before there were any zombie comedies, there was Edgar Wright's pioneering film, Shaun of the Dead. Mixing Dawn of the Dead nightmare nausea with sharply penned comic dialog and staging, Wright's debut feature became a major success, and rightfully so.
I am still in love with this movie. There is so much care put into the writing. Most lines are classic, and a lot of the quick editing makes you think you can't keep up. But you can. This is genius film making disguised as a silly comedy. What separates this from just a silly comedy is the attention to detail and the use of scenes that would not belong in any other movie that tried to be a romantic zombie comedy. Such a thing was set as precedent with this. This movie allows itself to throw in some emotional scenes, and mostly this works seamlessly with the other frat pack mentality taking up a large amount of screen time. The jokes are fast but they aren't wasted. They reverberate. Pop references are aplenty. There's a very strong sense of friendship working behind this movie, and I believe, for me, that is why I enjoy it as much as I do. You can tell that the writing and casting is done amongst either friends, esteemed peers, or admired legends.
Many imitations have followed this film to much less appeal. Some folks even try and compare a movie like this to films that aren't even in the same ball park. Word of warning, you may have to try hard to understand that this is actually a comedy and not a serious horror film like Romero's trilogy. The beauty of Shaun of the Dead is that even though this may be the case, it works as a few different films in one. It does manage to lay the atmosphere on fairly thick at times.
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Director: Edgar Wright
Director: Edgar Wright
Before there were any zombie comedies, there was Edgar Wright's pioneering film, Shaun of the Dead. Mixing Dawn of the Dead nightmare nausea with sharply penned comic dialog and staging, Wright's debut feature became a major success, and rightfully so.
I am still in love with this movie. There is so much care put into the writing. Most lines are classic, and a lot of the quick editing makes you think you can't keep up. But you can. This is genius film making disguised as a silly comedy. What separates this from just a silly comedy is the attention to detail and the use of scenes that would not belong in any other movie that tried to be a romantic zombie comedy. Such a thing was set as precedent with this. This movie allows itself to throw in some emotional scenes, and mostly this works seamlessly with the other frat pack mentality taking up a large amount of screen time. The jokes are fast but they aren't wasted. They reverberate. Pop references are aplenty. There's a very strong sense of friendship working behind this movie, and I believe, for me, that is why I enjoy it as much as I do. You can tell that the writing and casting is done amongst either friends, esteemed peers, or admired legends.
Many imitations have followed this film to much less appeal. Some folks even try and compare a movie like this to films that aren't even in the same ball park. Word of warning, you may have to try hard to understand that this is actually a comedy and not a serious horror film like Romero's trilogy. The beauty of Shaun of the Dead is that even though this may be the case, it works as a few different films in one. It does manage to lay the atmosphere on fairly thick at times.