Insert Noun of the Dead

Rating: 1/10 (1 June 2010)

Zombie films are something that many people have tried to make and many people have failed to make well. Even George Romero and Lucio Fulci, it must be admitted, do not have the Midas touch in this genre. This goes ably to show that even when it's a single genre of horror, it's difficult to pin down.
Multi-genre combinations are typically even more difficult to accomplish successfully, and unfortunately that's exactly what Shaun of the Dead tries to do. It fails in more or less every way that it possibly can: it's not well-acted, it's not funny, it's not scary, and above all it's really not entertaining or amusing. It's depressing and sad, and the film's end leaves one with a sense of futility and pointlessness, a sense of having wasted the entire running time on a completely and utterly meaningless thing.
The whole film is spent with unsympathetic and unlikable clods who manage somehow to survive as long as they do through sheer luck and no real ability or even desire to persevere. The humour is hardly passable, even by today's standards; it's often either crass and unfunny or simply unsubtle and unfunny.
The script is as pedestrian as possible, with attempts at tugging the heartstrings merely coming off as manipulative and illogical, especially given the subsequent 'resolution' the film gets. If the viewer is not furious, then he clearly wasn't paying attention. And the scriptwriters certainly weren't paying attention, as the script's coherency is laughable. Even for a comedy, it ought to be much tighter than this happens to be.
After people raving about Shaun of the Dead, it's easy to go in either extreme direction. People jump on the bandwagon easily, especially when friends recommend something, and eventually it reaches a point where people who haven't even seen the film are recommending it to others. The overblown nature of the film, however, makes judgement of it much harsher. If it had been simply the small-time film that it probably was intended to be, it might be easier to forgive. However, as an overrated 'cult classic', it is not worth the praise heaped upon it for being something it is not: namely enjoyable.