Finally got around to seeing Shaun of the Dead, and well worth a visit to the cinema it is. Essentially this is zombie spin-off from Spaced, but that’d do it a disservice.
I was a big fan of Spaced… OK, I became a big fan of Spaced. You see, I entirely missed out on the first series, and only caught some of second after my brother expressed surprise that I wasn’t watching it since it’d be so much up my street. So I turned to DVD, where a series like this absolutely belongs.
Whether there’ll ever be any more Spaced seems doubtful, although we can but hope for the odd one-off. But in the meantime, Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright have handed us the first decent British comedy film since, well, I don’t know really.
The setting’s not quite the same, although Pegg still seems to be living with Nick Frost in a flat, although this time without a landlady. But we all move on. Pegg has a girlfriend played by Kate Ashfield, the only face that’s not completely familiar in the whole production. Lucy Davis from The Office, and Black Books’ Dylan Moran provide other characters along with Bill Nighy and a cast of lots of other familiar faces.
Funny and scary at times, this is a great zombie movie, even if it seems wrong that the whole thing’s set in North London. Worth catching at the cinema, and I feel the DVD will be a compulsory purchase.
As a side note, I watched Resident Evil on video this morning, and the poorness of that zombie film was amplified by my having seen Shaun the day before.