Best Part: First Half Hour

Rating: 7/10 (25 October 2009)

The first half hour of "Shaun of the Dead" is the best part for viewers like me who love movies and wanted to see this cult classic but who don't like seeing human beings disemboweled and cannibalized. The first half hour is also the funniest part. The zombies don't come out in full force until later in the film.
The first part of the film brilliantly parodies the conventions of zombie films. "Shaun" looks and works like a zombie film, but it's depicting average, working class Britons going about their daily lives. This isn't just funny, it's pointed social commentary. Simon Pegg, the writer / star, is suggesting, with as much depth and more cleverness than Becket, that daily life is a struggle through crushing routine, and that escapes and rewards like booze, cigarettes, video games and friends who suck us into lives of low expectations, dull and blind us all. In the best scene in the movie, the zombies have already taken over, and Shaun doesn't even realize it. He crosses a street full of zombies, enters a store wrecked by zombies, selects his standard snacks from a freezer case covered with handprints, slips in a pool of blood, and never notices a thing.
Eventually, of course, the inevitable gore splatters across the screen. Loved ones turn into zombies and must be killed. Friends are eaten alive by zombies. Ravenous zombies menace the few remaining humans. It gets pretty gross and scary, and stops being as funny as it had been.