Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Zombie movies have always been one of horror's most popular sub-genres. George Romero's zombie movies are classics, and in recent years, DVD releases of those movies have been widely successful. The films of legendary Italian directors Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento are regarded with great esteem among diehard genre fans, and zombies have seen success in video games, with Resident Evil, House of the Dead, and Timesplitters being popular game franchises. When Fox Searchlight brought the British pseudo-zombie movie 28 Days Later to America in 2003, it was greeted with wide critical acclaim. Universal Pictures imported another zombie movie from England a year later, only this one was a little more lighthearted than 28 Days Later. Made by cast and crew members of the popular British TV show Spaced, Shaun of the Dead is a comedic homage to the zombie movies that preceded it, greeted with high praise from reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Shaun (Simon Pegg) is a 29-year-old loser, living a rather mundane existence as an unmotivated electronics store clerk. He isn't helped any when his fed-up girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield), with a little nudging from her roommates Dianne (Lucy Davis) and David (Dylan Moran), dumps him for not changing his slacker ways. After a night of drowning his sorrows in Queen songs and several pints of alcohol with his slob of a best friend/roommate Ed (Nick Frost) at the Winchester, the local pub, Shaun wakes up the next morning and walks to a nearby convenience store, discovering that the normally busy streets outside his house are a wee less busy.

He returns home to find Ed staring out a window into the backyard. Ed informs Shaun of an apparently drunk woman standing in their garden, so they go outside to shoo her away. The woman tackles Shaun and tries to bite him, but when he pushes her off, she falls and gets spiked on a pole sticking up from the ground. That would usually hurt or even slightly annoy most normal people, but to the "drunk" lady, it's not a problem. She doesn't even notice. She just stands back up and starts shuffling in Shaun and Ed's direction.

They wisely retreat inside the house and try to call for help, but all of the phone lines are tied up. However, they soon discover the way to defend themselves when Ed kills a zombie that came in through the front door by bashing it in the head with an ashtray. Coupled with a news report moments later that says head wounds are the best way to dispose of the undead, our two zeros get a bright idea: Shaun and Ed grab their record collection and head outside, chucking records at the zombie lady and another one that's joined her in the backyard. Because when you think head wounds, you think vinyl records.

After some debate over which records should get broken and which ones shouldn't (do you throw the Purple Rain soundtrack or a Dire Straits album?), Shaun arms himself and Ed with a cricket bat and a shovel. Note to self: cricket bats are far more effective weapons than regular baseball bats. Shaun and Ed soon come up with a plan to get Liz and Shaun's mother (Penelope Wilton) away from the zombie horde. They put their plan into action, and with Shaun's mother, Liz, Dianne, and David in tow, they hole themselves up in the Winchester. Knowing that they can't survive in the Winchester forever, they soon try to find a way out without becoming food for the ever-growing number of undead or killing each other first.

You might be a little disappointed if you're expecting British horror along the lines of 28 Days Later or Dog Soldiers (an underrated British werewolf flick that was imported to American video store shelves and the Sci-Fi Channel in 2003). When a movie that comes right out and says it's a "Romantic Zombie Comedy," expecting anything else from it would be ill-advised. It's a romantic comedy in the midst of a zombie invasion, which is one of the most original cinematic concepts that I've heard in a while. The movie is both well-written and well-executed, and my only complaint is the humor. I didn't get some of the jokes in the movie, but most of the ones I didn't get were in-jokes for fans of Spaced to catch. Being an American that's never seen Spaced, I missed the humor behind those. But those were a minuscule part of the comedy, as all the jokes worked on some level.

That extremely minor complaint aside, the movie is great all the way through. I haven't seen a movie balance horror and comedy this well since the original Return of the Living Dead, and that's saying something. Return of the Living Dead is a really good movie, but Shaun of the Dead just may be better. The cast is enjoyable, with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost being the definite standouts. Helping the cast is a hilarious script (co-written by Pegg and Edgar Wright), and for the horror moments of this horror/comedy, the score composed by Daniel Munford and Pete Woodhead is very engaging. Throw in the stellar use of songs by Queen and The Smiths, along with various techno songs and music from the 1978 version of Dawn of the Dead, and the whole soundtrack is superb.

I'm just sad that Shaun of the Dead didn't get a wider theatrical release, because it could have gone from a surefire cult classic to a surefire blockbuster. It's a romantic comedy that horror fans can enjoy, and a horror movie fans of romantic comedies can enjoy, and that eclectic combination makes one of the most entertaining movies I've seen in a long time. For that, Shaun of the Dead gets four and a half stars.

Final Rating: ****

Walking Tall (2004)

Back in the mid-1960s, one of the most crime-ridden places in the United States was McNairy County, Tennessee. It was overrun with corrupt police, violence, drugs, and organized crime rings. A former professional wrestler and football player named Buford Pusser was elected sheriff of McNairy County in 1964, and began to enforce and uphold the law. He took Theodore Roosevelt's quote "walk tall and carry a big stick" to heart, and with a large oak club as his weapon of choice, he cleaned up the county for six years before ending his term as sheriff in 1970.

Sheriff Pusser faced numerous death threats and assassination attempts, one of which led to the murder of his wife, before he died in a car accident in 1974. While it was ruled that Pusser simply veered off the road and crashed, it's believed by many that his accident was intentional, that he was ran off the road on purpose by someone holding a grudge against him. Regardless of the circumstances of his death, Pusser's story became so well-known that it inspired Joe Don Baker's 1973 film Walking Tall, a movie that itself inspired an extremely shortlived television show and two sequels starring Bo Svenson. The story of Buford Pusser has become a modern tall tale, and twenty-one years after the original film's release, the story was retold starring another former football player and professional wrestler.

Chris Vaughn (The Rock) is a retired Army Special Forces member returning home to rural Kitsap County, Washington. However, he soon discovers that the town is not as he left it. The local lumber mill has been shut down and replaced with a casino, Chris's little brother Pete (Khleo Thomas) has started doing drugs, his high school sweetheart Deni (Ashley Scott) is a stripper, and the crooked police are controlled by the casino's owner and one-time friend of Chris's, Jay Hamilton (Neal McDonough). Chris reunites with some old friends to celebrate his homecoming at the casino, but after raising a stink when he discovers the craps table is using loaded dice, he ends up catching a beatdown from some of Hamilton's goons. Instead of the regular beatdown where a guy gets roughed up and thrown into the street, the goons zap him with a stun gun and carve up his chest with a box cutter before dumping him in the middle of nowhere and leaving him for dead.

Chris eventually recovers, but gets some bad news when he learns Pete has been hospitalized, thanks to a near-overdose on crystal meth. Chris finds out Pete bought the meth at the casino, and he turns from mild-mannered Bill Bixby to giant green guy Lou Ferrigno. Okay, so he didn't turn into the Incredible Hulk, but he does gets mad as hell and he isn't gonna take it anymore. Armed with a cedar two-by-four, Chris clears out the casino and lays waste to the gang that attacked him. He gets arrested for and acquitted of assault charges, and promises to clean up the city. He successfully runs for sheriff, and fires the entire police squad before hiring his longtime friend, convicted felon Ray Templeton (Johnny Knoxville), as the one-and-only deputy. Because when you think of hard-working law enforcement, you think of the Jackass ringleader. Keeping the cedar two-by-four on his truck's gun rack as an "equalizer," Chris essentially becomes a vigilante with a badge as he and Ray begin to bring down Hamilton's drug/crime ring, no matter how unorthodox the means.

Walking Tall is an all-out action movie, and it carries that label as a badge of honor. It really serves no other purpose than as a way to spend 85 minutes watching The Rock crack some skulls with a big tree branch while Johnny Knoxville serves as comic relief. The film is anemic on plot and heavy on action. I haven't seen Joe Don Baker's Walking Tall movies, so I can't compare them to Rock's Walking Tall, but the remake is essentially "Rock no like, Rock smash!" The Chris Vaughn character is already a man's man the second the movie starts. He obviously doesn't take any crap from anybody, instead of being a regular guy like the real Buford Pusser. The movie basically shows us that The Rock can easily transition from the choreographed fighting of professional wrestling to the choreographed fighting of Hollywood action movies. While Walking Tall hits all of the necessary plot points, the characters have no real backgrounds or development. The movie should have been at least 30 minutes longer to fill out those necessary plot points. At a very short 85 minutes (or just about 75 minutes if you don't count the end credits), the movie feels like it had to be cut and squeezed into its PG-13 rating, and that didn't help it at all.

With the exception of The Rock and Johnny Knoxville, the bulk of movie's cast is very forgettable. The producers could have cast any random person that walked into an audition, and it wouldn't have mattered. None of the characters are very interesting. I didn't care about any of them or really feel anything for them. I'm quicker to lay blame on the lacking script than the acting, since most of the cast tried hard but couldn't really do anything here. I must say, though, that The Rock and Knoxville are both good here. With this being his third major film role, Rock's acting skills have drastically improved, and Knoxville proved to me that there's more to him than Jackass. The fight scenes here are more realistic than other action movies, which is a definite plus, and I applaud the film's stunt crew.

But other than The Rock, Knoxville, and the stunts, there's really nothing I can say about Walking Tall other than despite bring another brainless action movie, it's still fun and engaging. I don't know how proud Buford Pusser would be of the new Walking Tall, but if he liked movies with non-stop action and not much else, he'd approve. Myself, I give it two and a half stars. That sounds about right to me.

Final Rating: **½