Anvil and Sprocket Movie Review

It’s easy to miss small details when hung over.

Shaun is thirty and stuck in the rut that runs between home, his dead-end job as an electronics salesman, and the Winchester, his favorite pub. He still lives with his college friends. His girlfriend Liz is fed up with Shaun’s lack of motivation, and on the verge of breaking up with him. Shaun’s upwardly-mobile roommate Pete no longer gets along with Shaun’s obnoxious, couch-potato pot-dealer roommate Ed. Shaun has a barely civil relationship with his step-dad and a strained relationship with his mother. And then, just when all seems darkest and Shaun is about to drown in his own ennui, there are zombies.

Yes, it’s a zombie comedy movie. But let’s be clear on what this movie is not: it is not satire. It is not farce. It is certainly not parody. It is blessedly-free of self-referential humor. And although the forms of zombie monster-movies are there — how could they not be? — they are executed so well that it’s hard to see Shaun of the Dead as just another hackneyed horror film.

Oh — no doubt the movie does poke some fun at other zombie films. After we’ve established the mundane concerns of the film, we get to follow Shaun through his daily routine. He knows he’s about to lose Liz. He’s already had arguments with both Ed and Pete. All of this has made him jumpy — and the camera jumpy as well. As is traditional in monster movies, there are plenty of false scares: A shuffling person that turns out to be drunk. A threatening hand coming out of nowhere that is really Shaun’s perfectly-normal roomate, and so on. In a lot of films this can quickly become tiresome, but it works here for two reasons: firstly, we can see that there is some odd stuff starting to happen in the streets. And secondly, we already know that Shaun has mundane reasons for being on edge.

With friends like these, who needs the restless dead?

Later, when there really are zombies, their speed is ripe for mocking: in one scene Shaun and Ed have plenty of time to argue about which Prince albums in Shaun’s collection are crap enough to be hurled Xena-style at an oncoming pair of the shuffling dead. But that doesn’t mean the scene is not tense — where most zombie-comedy films do the cinematic equivalent of making hyuk-hyuk noises and elbowing you repeatedly in the ribs, director Edgar Wright still films the scene with increasing threat. While Shaun and Ed argue — with panic glossing thier voices — the zombies are getting closer. And you can clearly see that, slow or not, Shaun and Ed really have nowhere to run.

After awhile the movie does settle down into more expected monster-survival patterns. There’s bickering about strategy. There’s the person who’s been bitten who is trying to keep it a secret. There’s the safe location that turns out not to be so safe. And so on. But unlike other films, domestic and mundane concerns are not forgotten. They are, instead, forced to the surface much quicker by the zombie-pressure. The characters may not be on screen long, but before they are pulled to pieces by Thriller video rejects they grow, learn, and repent. They are, in creative-writing parlance, three-dimensional characters.

We all deal with stress in our own ways.

Overall, Shaun of the Dead is a genius combination of comedy, horror, and drama that demonstrates just how far genre fiction has come in the last fifty years. A generation raised on Soap, Mash, Terry Pratchett, and Stephen King is coming of age and making movies. And some of them have learned some very important lessons about storytelling: even characters in the most ridiculous situations can have mundane motivations and concerns. Just because a story is supposed to be funny or scary does not mean it can’t also deal with real-world problems at the same time.