Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #231: Shaun of the Dead

If a movie is made by filmmakers who hardcore genre fans, odds are those filmmakers are going to make sure fans like them are pleased. Thus the success of Shaun of the Dead (2004) is explained. Horror comedies can be a hard sell, and a British horror comedy even more so, but since co-writers Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are both fans of George A. Romero’s Dead trilogy, they were going to honour the genre while having loads of fun. Fortunately for the audience, the result was a new zombie classic that was so good it earned Pegg and his frequent co-star Nick Frost cameos on Romero’s Land of the Dead.

Before the movie came out Wright the director and co-stars Pegg and Frost had already made a name for themselves in the U.K with the sitcom Spaced, but it was Shaun of the Dead that put their names on the map. It was also the beginning of their Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, named after a running joke about the British ice cream product and its supposed effect as a hangover cure. Like many international viewers, Shaun was my introduction to the trilogy. I had a ball watching the first instalment on DVD while in Quebec City with my brother, which is appropriate since you could argue this is a guy film. I had just finished high school, so I was probably the core target audience for a movie about video-game loving dudes who must suddenly get off their butts to fight zombies.

A key reason for the film’s success is that unlike most zombie movies the main characters are not action heroes, but ordinary Joes with ordinary problems. The titular Shaun (Pegg) is a man with an uninteresting job at an electronics store whose main interest in life is sitting on his couch to play video games with his best friend Ed (Nick Frost) who has no job at all. His girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) is getting sick of Shaun’s lifestyle and of their social life, which mostly consists of hanging out with Ed at The Winchester, their favourite pub. When Liz decides to dump him, it would seem Shaun must do what slackers his age have to do and grow up a little.

Shaun’s wake up call actually comes from the last thing he would have expected: a zombie apocalypse. In one of the movie’s funniest sequences, he gets up in the morning, walks to a grocery store to buy a cornetto, and walks back home completely oblivious to the fact the dead are now walking the streets. It takes a TV news report for him and Ed to realize zombies are slowly invading their backyard and that if they want to survive the day the must do the impossible and get off the couch.

As this is a love-letter to classic zombie movies, these characters are fully aware of the rules of dealing with the undead, although are reluctant to call them “the Z word.” They try to decapitate them with old vinyl records they don’t listen to anymore, and when that fails Shaun arms himself with a cricket bat, reminding the audience this is England after all. Whereas in America they would arm themselves with automatic weapons and head to the mall, Shaun and Ed decide to go get Liz, Shaun’s mom (Penelope Winton), his stepfather (Bill Nighy), and hole up at The Winchester. Their eventual arrival at the pub leads to another reminder of the film’s British identity, as the characters fight a zombie while Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now is playing on the jukebox.

Moments like these cover the comedy aspect of Wright’s horror-comedy, but he and Pegg make sure there is plenty for horror fans as well. Even though these characters stop and argue about their relationships amidst the carnage, they are fully aware and scared that their former neighbours might tear their limbs out.

It’s a difficult balancing act, but the entire cast and crew pulls it off. This was a brilliant opening to the Cornetto trilogy and I had just as good a time watching the conclusion, The World’s End, last year on the big screen in Edmonton. A lot has changed since 2004, with Pegg now starring in the Star Trek franchise and Frost making it out on his own, but the biggest change must be how Shaun of the Dead started out as a film influenced by zombie classics and is now influencing other filmmakers. That’s the power of genre fans for you.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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