More than a parody; this is a homage that really works

Rating: 7/10 (21 May 2008)

If "Shaun of the Dead" looks like an extended episode of, or a pilot for, a British TV series then that is no bad thing since those involved have mainly cut their teeth on television and this is the kind of thing that television does so well. ('Alternative' comedy on British television has always been so much better than anything the Big Screen has given us in recent times). It is, of course, a homage to and a pastiche of Romero's Zombie movies as well as being formatted in such a way as to pay tribute to the best of the Comic Strip creations.
It's genuinely funny but it works because it also takes itself seriously; in this respect, it is vastly superior to Danny Boyle's misguided zombie movie "28 Days Later". Of course, you need to be very clever indeed to pull off a lampoon of a genre that has become somewhat self-consciously a lampoon in itself. There is only so much you can do with putrid, decomposing corpses that won't lie down no matter what, ('Go for the brain', is the advice given here), and with each succeeding movie the fright factor diminishes, so if 'Shaun' never hits a perfect ten on the terror scales it comes reasonably close where pity is concerned. The skill of the film-makers is in creating characters we believe in and whose fate we care about, no mean feat in what is essentially a gross-out comedy. But then the British have always been good at this sort of thing, applying an intelligence to the proceedings that American can only dream about.