Shaun of the the Dead is hard to qualify. First of all, go see it.
Now into what I’m sure will become an extremely dense review. The movie was good. No one has ever seen a Rom Zom Com (Romantic Zombie Comedy) before, much less made a RomZomCom before, so there is nothing to compare this movie against.
As a RomCom, the movie is great. There’s rom, there’s com, and as an added bonus, you’ve got a little zom. As a ZomCom, the movie is great. There always had been something a little absurd to me about zombie movies, and Return of the Living Dead never did it for me. They took the jokes too far, and it was just goofy. Shaun takes a different route as far as the comedy goes, and I think it works well. It’s usually more subtle, though sometimes deliberate, but definitely less tongue in cheek.
What didn’t work was the RomZom parts of the movie. Now, there was only a few times when the movie made the jump from Rom to Zom or Zom to Rom, so the impact wasn’t so harsh as to spoil the movie, but whenever the gears switched from Rom to Zom or Zom to Rom, they did so haltingly, but not so haltingly as to throw the movie off course. The other transitions (Rom to Com, Com to Rom, Com to Zom, Zom to Com) were executed masterfully, and frequently bounced back and forth so that you didn’t know whether you were supposed to continue laughing, or be frightened, or be sad
I hesitate to give this movie a x of y stars rating, because it wouldn’t really mean anything. What I think means the most is this: Kmart and I were laughing the whole time, but the rest of the theater didn’t seem to get the jokes until about the third act. Also, I had zombie nightmares last night, which is definitely an honor. Shaun falls among the ranks of 28 Days Later; Night, Dawn, and Day; and Zombie Holocaust.
