Shaun Of The Dead review

Move over Richard Curtis, British comedy has a new king. Well, Clown Prince at least. After making his name as a stand-up comedian and co-creating the hugely innovative and successful television comedy Spaced, Simon Pegg now makes the leap to the big screen and the results are a joy. The funniest British film of the year may already have arrived.

One of the reasons Spaced worked so well was because Pegg created real characters in real situations and along with director Edgar Wright put a unique comedic and visual spin on them. Given the larger scope and budget of a feature film they prove that they were no collective one-trick pony.

Pegg stars as the eponymous Shaun, who is suffering from the advanced stages of Sad Bloke Syndrome. At 29 he is assistant manager in an electrical store and lives with two college mates: Ed (Nick Frost), a perpetual stoner who is only interested in playing Resident Evil on the PlayStation, and Pete (Peter Serafinowicz), who is desperate to escape the student lifestyle they still have. Shaun has a girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) who is frustrated by his lack of desire to commit and the fact that every night they spend together is in their local pub.

One fateful Saturday, Liz dumps Shaun and his world starts to cave in. Taken down the pub by Ed, both of them singularly fail to recognise the strange events happening around them, and that London has in fact been taken over by zombies. It's only the following morning, suffering the world's worst hangovers that they notice a strange shifty girl in their garden, who they mistake for a drunk until she impales herself and rises again intent on getting her teeth into them.

Shaun and Ed devise a plan to go and rescue Liz and her flatmates (the ditzy Lucy Davis and her ultra-serious boyfriend Dylan Moran), as well as his Mum (Penelope Wilton) and evil stepdad (Bill Nighy). The plan consists of driving them all to the pub where they reckon they can hole up until the trouble has passed. A series of side-splitting scenes ensue: using their 80s twelve inches to decapitate the zombies, performing an accapella version of White Lines with one of the undead, pretending to outfox the zombies by perfecting their own zombie walk, and coming across a remarkably similar group (led by Jessica Stevenson) intent on doing exactly the same thing.

The first hour of the film is so funny that you have to force yourself to stop laughing in order to catch the next gag. Once the gang hole up in the pub, things take a more sinister turn, and the superb zombie special effects give the film an authentic and hugely gory feel. Part-homage to the Romero classic, but defiantly British in tone, this could be the beginning of a long and landmark cinematic career.