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'Shaun' a killer good time

A romantic comedy. With zombies.

That tagline, by far the best I've seen attached to any film this year, pretty well sums up the entire package that is "Shaun of the Dead." Shaun, a poor English schmuck looking down the barrel of his 30th birthday, is stuck in a rut with a loser job and a couple of bachelor roommates. He has a cute girlfriend, but he keeps screwing that up, too. All in all, his life just plain sucks.

Then, as if things weren't already bad enough, zombies attack. It's a premise that makes for a goofy flick and a crazy bit of genre twisting, and for the most part, "Shaun of the Dead" pulls it off with immense charm. Of course, this ends up working against it a little as well.

As entertaining as it is, "Shaun of the Dead," in the end, has a bit of an identity crisis.

Beginning as a sort of homage to "Office Space," "Shaun of the Dead" walks the line between cynical office talk to romantic tragedy to droll English comedy to, finally, straight-up zombie flick. The film is entertaining through and through, but it takes itself a little too seriously in the final reel, and it makes you wish it kept the same irreverence it sported with such success at the beginning.

But those are small cookies. What really matters is that "Shaun of the Dead" is a great time at the movies and a well-done zombie flick by any modern standards. Shaun, whose daily life consists of boring work and drinking pints with his girlfriend at a local pub, is definitely bored with his life. Apparently, his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield) is, too. Tired of his hum-drum, go-nowhere way of doing things, she ditches him, leaving him with his roommates, the slothful Ed (Nick Frost) and unfriendly Pete (Peter Serafinowicz).

Then, without any real explanation, zombies attack. It's a simple problem at first, with Ed and Shaun able to fight them off with old records, but the problem soon reaches epidemic proportions, and Shaun and Ed take off to save Liz and Shaun's mother and stepfather. They take refuge in the pub as the zombie army slowly encircles them.

It's all-around fun stuff, and it may be one of the better horror movie spoofs ever made. The actors are all superb in playing die-hard caricatures from a handful of different film genres, and director Edgar Wright does a respectable job of pulling everything together into what is undeniably a quirky film. Perhaps most interesting is the zombies themselves, who throw off the quick, jerky movements that have defined them in recent films such as "28 Days Later" and "Dawn of the Dead" and instead revert back to the lumbering motion of George Romero's early zombie flicks.

For fun at the movies, "Shaun of the Dead" can't be beat. It's funny, charming and even a little scary at times, and it's obvious that the filmmakers are aiming to please. Although it sometimes lumbers around like the very zombies it is about, it's not a point to dwell on.

Having fun is the thing to really keep in mind here. And the heads, of course. Always shoot them in the heads.

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