What the hell ... here's a review I wrote for consideration by the newly refurbished Amazing Stories magazine. Turns out they don't need it, so I guess it goes here.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD

Monty Python may have made the first attempts, but TV comedies of recent years like Kids in the Hall and Mr. Show have proven that graphic violence gets laughs. The modern world has become so desensitized to severed limbs and spurting blood that gore can serve as a punchline, either for crass shock value or as a winking reference to slasher film conventions or some other meta-motive. The societal impact of this phenomenon is best left to philosophers and politicians, but the fact of the matter is that this kind of extreme slapstick is now de-rigueur, and the British import Shaun of the Dead is the latest to mine mayhem for mirth.

It's decidedly rare for a feature-length horror/comedy to succeed on either front; witness the Scary Movie franchise or any number of Troma hack jobs as examples of bad taste replacing humor and suspense dispensed with altogether. Against the odds, Shaun of the Dead emerges as a film that could lose the gags or the gore and still stand up, a film with energy, wit and of all things, subtlety. British telly watchers will be familiar with stars Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson from the BBC-TV series Spaced, which was helmed by Shaun director Edgar Wright. The characters are essentially the same, a slacking twenty-nine year old and his long-suffering girlfriend. Along for the ride are a boorish best friend, a pair of pretentious flatmates and the title character's mum, all of whom suddenly find the irritating minutiae of their lives swept away forever when a cannibal zombie apocalypse forces them to barricade themselves in the local pub.

While we've all heard that story before, co-writers Wright and Pegg build slowly to the action, allowing their characters both exaggerated tics and humanizing details. The early scenes of Shaun capture the ennui of post-collegiate life perfectly, with friendships strained by responsibility and a sense of betrayed potential shared by all. The approach of the zombie attack is obvious to the audience from the start, but for our heroes the drama drops out of nowhere (pretty realistic, that) and once the carnage begins it's a non-stop gut-muncher full of the exploding heads and ruptured organs so beloved by gorehounds. There's tension too, thanks to some Night of the Living Dead-style claustrophobia. Already a hit in its Merrie Olde homeland, Shaun of the Dead arrives Stateside to further jumble our genres and expectations. - Fred Beldin