The mixture of British humor with Romero-style horror is indeed a winning combination.

Rating: 10/10 (12 November 2004)

I had Shaun of the Dead pegged as one of those straight-to-video movies that pops up every once in a while, featuring a clever lampooning of something popular in movies at the time. In the wake of a spectacular remake of Dawn of the Dead, it was not hard to come to this conclusion. But not only in Shaun of the Dead more than a straight-to-video sideshow hoping for a few minutes of attention, it's a tremendous installment in the horror genre that shows that romantic subplots can indeed have a place in scary movies. What is truly amazing is that Jerry Bruckheimer can screw up romantic subplots in movies that seem to demand romance, and yet Director Edgar Wright is able to make it work in a gory zombie movie. This is outstanding!
The best parts of the movie are the gradual evolution from a romantic comedy and into a horror film that takes place over the first third or so. The movie opens in a serious conversation between Shaun and his amazingly beautiful and adorable girlfriend Liz, in which they discuss how unhappy Liz is with the way their relationship is going. They each complain about the other's friends, all of whom are sitting right there listening. Shaun's inability to find anything else to do other than hang out at the same pub, the Winchester, and work at the same dead-end job have led to Liz issuing an ultimatum. Change things, or she's outta here.
I love that the movie is so effective both as a horror film and a romantic comedy, while at the same time going significantly out of its way to make fun of those two genres. My favorite is the way the sound is manipulated early in the film. Horror films constantly manipulate sound to create scares and tension (such as the Screeching Cat scare), and this movie makes fun of that tactic, giving extreme close-ups and vastly amplified sound for things like brushing teeth and spreading jam on toast.
As Shaun goes through a typical day the day after his conversation with Liz, he notices things here and there that seem out of the ordinary, like lines of massive military vehicles rushing past his workplace, a man obviously terrified running past him at full speed, and a staggering man across the street who picks up a pigeon with the intention of eating it. If you think about it, most of the more well-known zombie movies start out in the middle of the crisis. They don't take the time to show normal society, they just start out focusing on a small group of people, the last survivors in what is by now an almost complete decimation of the human race, which has consumed itself, you might say. Here, everything is normal, and the movie takes the time to show what it might be like for the average person if the walking dead started eating people and turning them into walking dead as well.
There are frantic news reports that offer vague theories as to what is causing 'the crisis,' but like the military vehicles and other strange things that Shaun noticed, he always gets distracted before he catches on to what is going on, which allows room for some of the most memorable scenes in the movie, like when Shaun and his best friend Ed, one of Liz's major complaints, leave the Winchester that night, pleasantly intoxicated.
In the morning, Shaun wakes up and walks across the street to the corner store, like he does every day, and doesn't notice the chaos that has erupted overnight. When he gets back, there is a hilarious scene where he and Shaun find a zombie stuck in their backyard, apparently unaware of where she is or where to go. This is a perfect example of where the movie most sharply departs from the traditional zombie movie. Shaun and Ed don't react like actors in a gore movie, they react like normal people would in such a situation. When the zombie girl turns around, they look at her shocked, and then laugh at how drunk she must be. When she falls and suffers a significant injury, only to get right back up, the looks on Shaun's and Ed's faces are absolutely priceless.
From this point, the movie turns into the more traditional horror film, but it maintains its originality and romantic comedy portion by stopping occasionally to remind you that the other plot has not been forgotten. There are times throughout the movie where the characters are surrounded by zombies and stop completely to argue about their personal differences. At one point, they are literally surrounded by hundreds of zombies only a few feet away, and Ed stops to sit casually on a nearby bench and talk to someone on his cell-phone. Shaun smacks it out of his hand and essentially tells him that that's exactly the problem with him.
I think that where Shaun of the Dead is most successful is in the blending of these two seemingly incompatible story lines. A lesser movie would have tried to mix together a romantic comedy and a horror movie and ended up screwing them both up, trying to please everyone and ultimately pleasing no one. Shaun of the Dead, however, tried to please everyone and succeeds because it doesn't disenfranchise anyone. It doesn't start as a romantic comedy, then turn into a horror movie that solves the romantic comedy because Liz fell back in love with Shaun, who in the course of the horror portion had become a hero. That's how you screw up a movie with a premise like this.
Instead, the movie weaves this tapestry of horror and romantic comedy, each infiltrating and playing off of the other, becoming in the process a success in both areas and something truly unique. And even if it had done nothing but make a zombie movie unique, it would have been a success, but there is so much more there. Don't miss this one.