Shawn of a decent script

Rating: Null/10 (13 April 2004)

As with nearly all British movies this effort falls well short of Hollywood standards. A first-time script shows itself up to being rather an amatuerish attempt. Brit movies are mostly created by people who have come fresh from TV without bothering to understand the medium. Lame, quirky sit-com style dialogue dominates the first act. There's a confusion as to what the writers are trying to achieve with some vague notions about character set-up and development.
However, I was prepared to forgive the weak opening, after the 2nd act started well with two very funny moments. Everything seemed to be coming right and I was sitting back ready for a good hour's laughter. Unfortunately, me and the rest of the audience were to be dissapointed. The comedy dried up pretty soon, with us realising we were at a one-gag event where the writers had no idea where to go with this story.
The script fell into a muddle - is this sitcom? Farce? Romantic comedy? Horror? Drama?
Barely a snigger was to be had from the entire second half of the movie.
At one point, our heros are beating a zombie to 'death' in time to a Queen track being played on the duke box. Maybe this got huge laughs in other showings, but in my theatre there was a deathly silence as this scene went on and on... and on.
A moment later I noticed people leaving.
The end is pretty bad. The writers just seem to have forgotten this is meant to be a comedy. Perhaps Simon Pegg decided to write himself some emotional scenes to look good on his showreel. Waste of time - he really ain't that good an actor.
All in all, this movie was a failure. The fact it was located in Crouch End (where I grew up but is now inhabited by the media 'elite') didn't endear it to me either. They tried to make out Crouch End is full of 'normal' people (the place is full of people who think they're great movie makers but are really just average TV makers). Now, if those Crouch End zombies had been the BBC/Channel 4 TV producers, media lawyers, wanna be script writers, graphic designers, pseudo-intellectuals... now there's a zombie flick I wanna see.