Shaun of the Dead

[DB7]

Back from the dead
Can a zombie comedy by the creator of the sitcom Spaced reanimate the British film industry? Stephen Armstrong thinks it just might.

There is a certain awkwardness about the launches of British films these days. Everyone, media included, really wants them to work. Arts pages devote acres of space, reviewers issue glowing praise, and the sides of buses are plastered with their posters. Then the day of release arrives, and nothing. Nobody bothers to turn up and see the thing.
The British film industry had just four titles in the top 100 films in British cinemas last year, according to figures from the Film Distributors’ Association. Although we are the third-biggest market, behind the United States and Japan, we overwhelmingly prefer Hollywood movies. Love Actually, Calendar Girls and Johnny English showed up in the top 10, but the fourth — S Club: Seeing Double — charted at 71. Blackball and Stephen Fry’ s Bright Young Things flopped completely, and Shane Richie’s Shoreditch was seen by a total of 300 people. It would have been cheaper if Shane had gone round to their houses with the video.



This grim ocean of mediocrity has led countless scribes to write off the entire industry as dead.

Fortunately for all concerned, the latest Britcom film to emerge from our studios is a zombie flick, and thus entirely qualified to reanimate rotting corpses. Its other important qualification is that it’s actually good.

From the pen of Simon Pegg, the comedian and star of the 1990s sitcom Spaced, and his directing cohort, Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead is an affectionate but so far unprecedented blend of light-hearted romantic comedy and George A Romero’s undead slasher classic Dawn of the Dead. The gags are sophisticated and naturalistic, playing on the fact that people’s personalities will continue to aggravate and annoy each other even when faced with a stupendously horrific adversary. That is, unless the gags involve the undead, when they become blood-soaked and messy.

The eponymous Shaun (Pegg) is a late-twenties blue-collar slacker, working in a hi-fi shop, living with one upwardly mobile and one downwardly mobile flatmate, and trying to hold together his relationship with his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield). He spends all his time in the same pub — the Winchester Arms — and his attempt to celebrate his anniversary there earns an unceremonious dumping from Liz. At which point, hordes of zombies attack. Shaun is galvanised by the grunting beasts, rescues Liz, her flatmate and her flatmate’s boyfriend, his mum and his school-friend Ed, and takes shelter in, well, the Winchester Arms.

When the zombies attack, Shaun basically does exactly what he was going to do that weekend anyway,” Pegg explains when we meet in the well-upholstered basement of a central London hotel. “The central joke is that apocalypse fantasy where you’re the last person on earth and you could go anywhere, do anything. Shaun goes to see his mum, visits his girlfriend and goes down the pub. The fact that there’s the zombie apocalypse doesn’t change the fact of one guy trying to get through the weekend.”



The writing is recognisable to anyone who saw Pegg’s Spaced. The Channel 4 sitcom was set in a north London house where Pegg and Jessica Stevenson pretended to be a couple to secure a room. Its theme, confused twentysomethings trying to make their way through life, attracted a devoted following who still meet in chat rooms, and who made up 60% of the zombie extras in this film. Stevenson has a cameo role in Shaun, alongside Matt Lucas, Rob Brydon, Martin Freeman, Julia Davis and Joe Cornish. With Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran and Bill Nighy all in supporting roles, the film feels, at times, like a comedy version of that 1960s moment when the Stones turned up to appear on All You Need Is Love, and the pop stars of the era went drinking in the Bag O’ Nails.

It’s a coming-together that Pegg appreciates. “There’s a lot of people working towards the same goal,” he says, sipping a Beck’s because he has that taste for a breakfast beer. “We’re all trying to make good alternative comedy, or, at least, less broad comedy. We all want to speak to people on a very personal level. Not to try to appeal to everybody, but to try to appeal specifically to certain people. I think people react so much more passionately if they feel they’re being spoken to directly.”

Pegg has always enjoyed this “gang of mates” approach. Inspiration for the Winchester Arms came from a pub called the Shepherd’s Arms in Highgate, where he and his Spaced/Shaun co-star Nick Frost basically spent every night for three years.

Gradually, all their showbiz pals ended up drinking there, alongside Highgate geezers and old boys puffing on roll-ups. Chris Martin is a mate, so Coldplay once performed a charity gig in the corner of the public bar for the nearby Whittington Hospital’s baby unit.

But will this coming together be enough to attract the jaded British cinemagoer? Pegg admits it’s going to be tough. “We have a love-hate relationship with our own films,” he nods. “Because our culture is so Americanised, there’s a certain state of watching in this country where films about something taking place in your own country seem domestic and strange. It’s less exciting to see Piccadilly Circus on screen than Times Square. You have to do something special so that they don’t go, ‘Oh, it’s just England.’”

He is cheered by the recent spate of zombie flicks — 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. There is also a residual interest in the slow-moving brain-munchers. Inserting the word zombie into Google brings up more than 2m web pages. That’s 2m fewer than Britney Spears, but 1m more than Justin Timberlake. (The pages include one for a warning system called the Zombie Alert, by Onko. This carries a guaranteed $1m payout should the device fail to operate during a documented zombie attack.) As Pegg argues, much of the joy of zombie films comes from that idea of being alone in a world that people have fled. Zombies are rarely evil, and usually portrayed as shambling, stupid and hungry. Dawn of the Dead itself has people hiding out in a vast shopping mall and enjoying the freedom to romp through the suburban fortress at will. But it’s quite a male fantasy.

Pegg used to play zombie attack as a game with Frost — “What would we do if the zombies came? Go over the roof, along Archway Road until we got to the sporting goods shop, get some guns, hijack a car, go to the Shepherd’s, lock the door and drink all the booze. It made my girlfriend despair.”

Does that mean Shaun of the Dead is sort of autobiographical? “In a way, I saw the film as a 90-minute apology for being a lousy boyfriend,” he grins. “Some of the things Liz says are amalgams of accusations and sentences that have been levelled at me and Edgar by our respective girlfriends.

“Nowadays, I’m engaged, I’ve got my own place, I do DIY. Not that I ever was Shaun. But I still have nightmares about zombies.”

[Steve Crook]

Bill Nighy managed to get a plug for it in today's interview with him on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4.

Steve

[DB7]

Bill Nighy only appears for about 5 minutes as the wife of Penelope Wilton. Wilton is a sight to behold as the zombie mother of suburbia eek!

It's an hilarious film with a surprisingly effective plot that plays it fairly straignt rather than going too far down the spoof route.

There's no hidden arsenal of Uzi's and rocket-launchers with which to defend yourself, Shaun and his mate are armed with only a garden shovel, a cricket bat and record collection (Dire Straits the weapon of choice).