Shaun is a 29 year old man, living in North London and deeply unhappy with his life. He shares a house with Pete, who is ‘something in the City’, and who is deeply fed up with Ed, Shaun’s slobbish, bone-idle friend who has also moved in and does little apart from play video games and drink. Shaun’s girlfriend Liz also shares a flat, with aspiring actress Diane and the superior David, whom Shaun cannot stand. He has a job working in an electrical store and is being nagged by Liz to do something other than spend their evenings in the local pub, The Winchester, and he is also being pressured by his stepfather, Phillip, to be more of a good son to Barbara, Shaun’s mother. After a mix-up with answering machine messages results in Shaun and Liz’s planned night out in a restaurant turning into yet another night in the pub, Liz tells him she’s leaving him. Shaun is terribly depressed, and spends the next day in a depression, so much so that he fails to notice that the local streets and corner shop are now filled with flesh-eating zombies, and surfing through the channels he fails to piece together what is happening from the news bulletins on every channel. Pete staggers home having been bitten by a zombie and Shaun and Ed see a woman in the garden, tottering from side to side. Thinking she’s drunk they try to help her, but after she falls and impales herself on a garden umbrella stand, getting up with a large hole in her abdomen, the pair suddenly realise what is happening. Another ghoul joins her, and the pair only get out of the house by using an old box of LPs as ammunition. Grabbing a cricket bat they race round to Liz’s flat to try to rescue her, seeing the streets filled with the undead, but unfortunately have to take Diane and David as well, the latter being highly critical of Shaun’s rescue techniques. Going to Barbara’s they find that Phillip has already been bitten by a ghoul when fending them off, but they take both of them anyway, having to abandon Phillip when the zombie infection takes hold, leaving him in his car and unable to operate the child-proof locks. Shaun reckons that the safest place is The Winchester, and they make their way there through a series of back gardens, avoiding the flesh-eaters along the way, Shaun managing to quell David’s gripes about his leadership qualities. The zombies batter at the doors and windows but Ed reminds Shaun that the pub is called The Winchester because there is a Winchester rifle over the bar, which their friend Al reckons is loaded. Shaun reminds Ed that this is the same Al who claims that dogs can’t look up. The rifle proves to be loaded but Shaun is such a bad shot that none of the zombies are killed, and he has to shoot his mother when she proves to have been bitten and turns into one of the undead. Diane and David try to escape but are torn apart by the ghouls, and Ed is badly bitten when Pete, returning as a zombie, bites him as Ed tries to reinforce the barricades, Shaun using one of the last bullets on his former housemate. Getting to the basement with Liz and the injured Ed, Shaun realises that there are only two bullets left as the zombies pound on the trapdoor, and thinks what sort of day it’s been when he has to shoot his housemate, his mum and his girlfriend.... A quite glorious comedy obviously inspired by the George Romero Dead cycle rather than the Italian zombie genre, Shaun Of The Dead is packed with references to related genres, everything from Resident Evil video games to reality TV, and has clever touches such as part of the Dawn Of The Dead soundtrack by Goblin being played over a repeated montage scene and even, as the end credits roll, the Romero shopping mall jaunty musak, but Edgar Wright’s movie is much more than a self-reflexive wallow amid genre indicators. Having co-created the TV series Spaced with Simon Pegg, Wright uses his lead actor as a depressed Everyman, trudging through a routine life revolving between work, pub and bed, and even when zombies roam the streets he doesn’t notice, in a terrifically shot and played sequence, where even visiting the local shop he doesn’t see huge bloody handprints on the drinks cabinet and even apologises to the now-zombified Big Issue seller for not having any change. Aside from Pegg the cast includes some of the top names in British TV comedy, including Lucy Davis (The Office), Nick Frost as Ed, whose opening line is joltingly obscene, and hilarious, Peter Serafinowicz (TV’s Hardware) and most surprisingly Dylan Moran (the crazed Bernard Butler of Black Books), giving a brilliant performance as the opinionated, obnoxious David. And when one terrifically judged throwaway scene includes Martin Freeman (Love Actually), Tamsin Greig (Black Books), Reese Shearsmith (The League Of Gentlemen) and Matt Lucas (Little Britain) in cameos one can see that the project has strength in depth. Wright knows how to make the movie unpredictable, and the special effects are played for impact rather than laughs, with one character getting the same graphic end as an Army officer in Day Of The Dead, and the zombies are always a real threat, only becoming the butt of the jokes in the coda. Wright also manages to skewer the pretentious 28 Days Later with a very neat and pointed line in the script. Extremely funny and with excellent performances, Pegg himself being a particularly appealing hero, Shaun Of The Dead is that rarest of all hybrids - a truly funny horror / comedy.