Sean Pegg and Edgar Wright: Doing Great Things
When Shaun Of The Dead–penned by Edgar Wright, starring Sean Pegg and Nick Frost (Spaced)—rose from the grave it made the walking dead main-stream cool again; not that they weren’t cool before 2004, of course, just that after Sean sunk its teeth in, you didn’t have to be at all embarrassed when bringing up the subject of zombies and gore in your local. In fact, talking, singing, or acting like a zombie came to be in some places encouraged. They’d managed to do what George A. Romero did all over again, this time in a hilarious way which George himself even found appealing. (Both Edgar and Sean went on to cameo in a later George A. Romero zombie film.)
At the time people said that Shaun Of The Dead was almost too good to be true—almost a fluke of sorts. For several years the media—even critics who’d loved Shaun—admitted that they thought it unlikely that a similar buzz could happen again; then Hot Fuzz came along in 2007, proving that not only could the pair repeat their previous unlikely success at the same high level, they could, if they so wished, re-invent a genre that nobody wanted to touch with a very long barge pole: the small time British police drama; Hot Fuzz can be best described as a dastardly mix of Last Of The Summer Wine and The Thin Blue line–combined, obviously, with malevolent villagers all packing guns on a mission to keep outsiders out for good, whatever the cost may be., The Bill
Then there’s the acting: both Shaun and Hot Fuzz feature a broad selection of some of the finest British acting talent to ever live—including the legendary Timoth Dalton and film grand-daddy Jim Broadbent to name but two.
Now it remains to be seen what will come next; one things for sure (we hope!) it’ll have a cornetto theme and it’ll be hilarious.