A tribute to the zombie-genre

Rating: 7/10 (5 March 2006)

I first encountered Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright when a friend of mine introduced me to the English cult-series; "Spaced". It's clear that these crazy fellows make movies, just because they love it. It's the kind of ultra-referential meta-manic intertextual stuff that any moviefanatic loves. Almost every scene is a reference to another movie, and the real sport is guessing what movie it comes from.
"Shaun of the Dead" follows the same tradition, but with Romero's "Dawn of the Dead" as their main-inspiration. Anyone who tried to analyze Romero's work should know that it's not just about people coming back from the dead to eat the brains of the living. It's a critical comment to the modern zombie-culture one sees when entering a shopping mall. The zombies are consumers, and the are us.
Pegg and Wright has certainly not abandoned this idea, however the zombies are not just mallrats. The zombies are lazy, unemployed, couch-sitting playstation-junkies. The zombies are our TV-culture. Keeping the idealistic ideology, add humour and a passion for movies. - There you have; Shaun of the Dead is funny, original, interesting and quite gory. It's the best tribute to the Zombie-genre I've ever seen.