Halloween Horrors: SHAUN OF THE DEAD

SHAUN OF THE DEAD  (2004)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Starring Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy, Jessica Stevenson
R for zombie violence/gore and language.
SCAREmeter: 7/10
GOREmeter: 8.5/10
OVERALL: 4 out of 4 stars

 In August, the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, also known as the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy, came to a glorious conclusion with THE WORLD'S END.  Before it was even identified as a trilogy, Three Flavours began with SHAUN OF THE DEAD almost a decade ago in 2004, the breakout film for the team behind the cult classic British comedy series, Spaced.  Written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Wright, starring Pegg, and co-starring fellow Spaced cast members Nick Frost and Jessica Stevenson, SHAUN OF THE DEAD was met with intense critical acclaim and rocketed Pegg, Wright and Frost to stardom.
If nothing else, SHAUN OF THE DEAD may just be the most incredible example of effective tonal shifts in any film ever.  It actually is a lot more than just that, but what stands out most to me is how the film switches so seamlessly between gut-busting comedy, poignant tragedy and harrowing terror.
Shaun (Pegg) is a typical man-child schmuck shuffling his way through a directionless life as an electronics store salesman, where most of his co-workers are teenagers who don't respect him.  Liz (Kate Ashfield), his girlfriend of three years, has grown wearisome of their droll dating life that consists almost entirely of spending the nights throwing back a pint at the Winchester Tavern with her friends David (Dylan Moran) and Dianne (Lucy Davis) and Shaun's even less disciplined flatmate and best mate, Ed (Nick Frost).  One particularly bad day, an utterly put-out Liz dumps Shaun and after a night of heavy drinking with Ed, Shaun resolves to get his life together at long last.  That next morning however, Shaun and Ed find themselves in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, with the undead stumbling through their backyard and their priggish flatmate undead in the bathroom.  Bringing Ed along, Shaun decides to go "rescue" his Mum (Penelope Wilton) and Liz, then barricade themselves in the Winchester and have a nice cold pint while they wait for all of it to blow over.  Naturally, none of this goes over with ease; not at all.

Zombie acting class with Lucy Davis

While all of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy films are excellent, SHAUN seems to be the most popular and it's my personal favorite.  The "Three Flavours" name comes from the three films' placement of Cornetto-brand ice cream cones (factory-packaged ice cream cone desserts popular in the UK, and similar to Nestle Drumstick ice cream sold in the United States), the flavor present in SHAUN being strawberry, in association to the bloody/gory zombie subject (the cop action HOT FUZZ features (police) blue original flavor, and alien-invasion-involved THE WORLD'S END features (alien) green mint chocolate chip).  The trilogy name is also a parody of art house filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors film trilogy, but the Cornetto trilogy name was originally a joke after the Cornetto connection was pointed out between SHAUN and FUZZ during a promotion tour for the latter.  In addition to the ice cream relation, each of the three films are written by the duo of Pegg and Wright, directed by Wright, and star Pegg and Frost, also including a few similar running gags and comedic interpretations of well-established sub-genres.
SHAUN is not purely a parody of zombie films though, certainly not in the sense of Jerry and David Zucker (AIRPLANE, THE NAKED GUN), Mel Brooks (BLAZING SADDLES, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN) or the godawful "films" of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (EPIC MOVIE, VAMPIRES SUCK).  Yes, SHAUN is a comedy in a typically serious genre, but its almost purely reactionary to the conventions of the genre, rather than making fun of them, either affectionately or derisively.  This could just as well be the same zombie apocalypse of any George Romero film like DAWN OF THE DEAD or the like, but taking place in a different area, where the characters involved have more comic interactions with the scenario.  People are still being gruesomely devoured by virus-infected humans who can only be killed by "removing the head or destroying the brain," and the threat is still very real, but Shaun, Ed and their group of friends/rivals happen to be going to the pub whilst dealing with relationship complications.  And it really is funny. There's something special about British comedy that I think can best be summed up by a pair of quotes:

"A man wearing a funny hat is not funny. But a man who doesn't know he's wearing a funny hat ... ah, now you've got something." -Roger Ebert, reviewing DR. STRANGELOVE (OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB) in Great Movies

"British is like the .gov of accents" -Photo caption from Cracked.com article, 5 Awesome Ways Plot Twists Were Kept Secret

We take the British so damn seriously because of their classy accents and their regularly-scheduled tea times so that when they're acting silly, it comes off as ten times as funny as 'regular silly'. 
SHAUN is not just one of the most laugh-out-loud hilarious movies ever though; it's also heartbreaking and terrifically intense.  This is still a zombie movie, and there are casualties, a couple of them more typical with the demise of more despicable, and yet ultimately redeemed, characters (including the most gruesome kill), but also some very likable characters.  This could all too easily have come off as distasteful and mean-spirited, to have highly-sympathetic die in the mix of raucous comedy, but these moments are treated with honesty and sincerity that the film sneakily slips into with effect but without our notice.  Towards the end, it also becomes terrifically intense, as zombies are swarming in from every corner, and the heroes are forced to contemplate the less messy deaths of suicide, while coming up one short in the bullet count.

BMF- Best Mates Forever

Today, several of those who first got international notice for SHAUN OF THE DEAD, and some who were involved but not so noticed, are now major presences in Hollywood films. Wright is currently working on the hotly-anticipated upcoming MARVEL'S THE AVENGERS franchise tie-in, ANT-MAN, due out in 2015, and co-wrote the Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson collaboration, THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN (2011) (in which Pegg and Frost appeared as a slapstick comedic duo of Interpol officers, Thomson and Thompson), and Pegg has become a major action-comedy star in films like STAR TREK (2009) and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL (2011).  Martin Freeman, who stars as Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's billion dollar franchise, THE HOBBIT trilogy, makes a cameo appearance as one of the doppelgangers in a group of survivors Shaun's encounter on the way to the pub.
It's a super well-crafted piece of pop entertainment, the sort that Wright has proven time and again to excel at, and arguably the best horror-comedy of all time.