Shaun of the Dead

A zombie comedy set in London. Shaun is twenty-nine and doing nothing. He works in an electronics shop, goes to the same pub every evening, and his girlfriend has had enough. Liz leaves him. That night Shaun gets drunk at the pub. The next morning he walks to the shop and notices nothing. People behave strangely in the street, cars have stopped, and he buys milk and walks back. The same walk is repeated later in the film; this time everything has come apart and Shaun still does not notice. From there the film is a plan to gather. Collect his mother, collect Liz, and get to the pub; the plan rests on the pub being safe, which is plainly absurd. What the narrative is interested in is not zombies but stagnation: the film shows from the start that people were already living like the dead, and says so quietly in the first scene. The fight in the garden runs on records; the characters argue about which ones can be thrown while throwing them. The fight in the pub is cut to the rhythm of a song and is the film's best known scene. The last section is genuinely hard. The narrative drops the comedy and really loses a character. The film is taken as the first of a trilogy; the same team made the next two. A director considered a master of the genre liked it and gave both men small parts in a film of his own. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran and Bill Nighy are in the cast. Edgar Wright directed and wrote the screenplay with Simon Pegg. Who it is for: anyone who likes genre parody and British humour. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by blood; the film is a comedy but spares nothing in its violence.