Shaun of the dead

When I first saw this movie I just didn't get it. I was made to believe it was a satire or a parody on the zombie genre, but it wasn't funny enough to be a parody by any stretch of the imagination so I wrote if off very quickly. However, do to the persistent love the people around em have for it, I decided to give it a second chance and about 10 minutes into the second viewing I understood what was going on. They weren't trying to parody the genre they wanted to slyly change the genre so they made a very good zombie movie that happened to be funny, or at least that is how I took it.


Shaun is having a very bad week- his g/f is going to dump him, everyone hates his best friend, his job is miserable and all of a sudden Zombies are everywhere. At first, Shaun is oblivious to his surroundings which comes off very funny as he leaves his house, goes to the store, buys a soda and goes back home all while there are zombies on the screen behind him. It isn't truly laugh out loud humor but it a nice subtle humor. It something zombie movie fans can really enjoy. When they realize they are surrounded by Zombies, Shaun and his slacker, fart heavy best friend, Ed, take matters into their own hands by trying to kill the zombies. The news tells them to aim for the heads, so they start throwing all this random stuff at the heads, but the brilliant moment comes when they start throwing records at the Zombies and they have to go through the record collection deciding what is ok to break. really classic stuff.


If you know Zombie movies, you know what it going to happen, but some of the little things set this apart, like a dart going into Shaun's head. It is hard to convey the humor in words here, but just know that there are funny moments wrapped up inside a good movie. Watching those still living pretend to be zombies to fool the actual zombies is very clever and makes you wonder why people didn't try that in other movies of this ilk. The acting is not incredible and the forced emotional scenes really do not work for me, but it is part of the charm of a zombie movie, I believe.