Hotly hilarious, leaves a Fuzzy glow

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2017)

A friend told me that I would be amused by this film, and I was!
It took me about a minute at the beginning to realize that I was going to be in for some deep satire, as the cop played by Simon Pegg works up the ladder of his superiors to find out that he's "too good to be kept on staff because he makes everyone else look bad." I had previously seen Pegg only in a Star Trek cameo, where his talents were wasted at the hands of JJ Abrams. Here, he shines.
As he is reassigned to a quaint British village, it slowly dawns on him that not all is as it seems, and that mysterious deaths are a grand collusion of the villagers. His sidekick is a naive but eager learner, and the two work off each other really well. The quips are hilarious.
The British villager characters are drawn wonderfully, even the little lady with her crossword puzzles is really a demonic killer. The plot proceeds from more of a cop mystery-and-detective story to outrageous action set pieces as we approach the climax.
In a way, the structure of this film is a little like Blues Brothers, an equally quirky movie: things start out reasonably normal, but by the end, things are so over-the-top that you're not quite sure where it transited from improbable to impossible.
I'll have to go see Shaun of the Dead now, even though the title did not sound very inspiring!