This menu has gotten me through a lot of rough nights. |
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[Note: Being November, I am busy tits deep in NaNoWriMo all month, so please accept this trifle of a column until I can return to my usual avoidance of rigorous research. Thank you.]
About four years ago, in 2003, I started hearing rumbling on the tracks about some British horror/comedy movie that was simply a must see. Now, as soon as something builds hype, even underground hipster hype, I lose interest in it. I guess I am just a snob. Then at the 2004 Horror Find convention in Maryland I spied a DVD copy of the film. I didn't bother to pick it up because it had only been released in the UK at that point, and I figured it either wouldn't play in my machine or would just suck. But now I had a face to go with the name, and was a little more intrigued. Luckily it was soon to get a limited American release.
That film, if you hadn't already guessed from the title of this article, is none other than SHAUN OF THE DEAD. I took a chance on it in the theater, and I am so glad I did. It became my favorite movie on that first viewing, even though I didn't know it right then. A few days later I dragged my brother out to see it: on the one hand, I needed him to see it, and on the other hand, I needed to see it again myself. The first time I was so awestruck that I couldn't really absorb all the little bits and bobs properly, of which there are many. Which is kind of my impetus for writing this column in the first place.
SHAUN OF THE DEAD is a much more complex movie than it appears to be to the untrained (meaning non-geek) eye. Most of the people seen during the opening credits appear again as zombies later on in the film, and a good deal of the events that occur during "Z-Day" are prefigured during the earlier, character portion of the piece. You could watch the film a half dozen times and still not get all the references and homages and callbacks (meaning jokes they set up in the beginning that get paid off later on). Luckily, the film is made by, for, and about geeks, so the special features are plentiful and splendiferous.
What? You don't watch special features? You think commentaries are boring?
*sigh*
That is just the kind of misconception I am trying to correct here.
First off, if you enjoy a film, the special features will enhance the value of both the dollars you spend on the disc and your enjoyment of the film. They can give you an insight into what the filmmakers and/or actors were thinking during the creation of the piece, and how they went about getting certain things to happen for your viewing pleasure: all the little ways that they trick you. Things like forced perspective, reverse motion, splicing two disparate locations together to make you think it is one continuous shot, or the sneaking in of a digital effect when you thought it was an in-camera effect. I posit that once you start getting keen on how a good team puts these devices together to convey to you an image that is almost wholly unreal, you will become as fascinated with the process as I am.
I guess at this point I should acknowledge any people unfortunate enough to have not seen the film, and describe it a bit. As one might guess, the film revolves around a guy called Shaun. He is a 40 hour a week wage slave, wedged firmly between college hijinks and adult responsibility: namely, your average slacker. He lives with his two flat mates, the yuppie Pete and the waster Ed. His exasperated girlfriend, Liz, dumps him for being unambitious and unreliable, his stepdad is breathing down his neck to pay more attention to his mum, and he gets zero respect from his much younger co-workers. Basically all things that the average Joe can relate to. It just so happens that Shaun's drunken epiphany to sort his life out coincides with a full scale invasion of the living dead.
The film is billed as a "RomZomCom", meaning a romantic comedy with zombies, and that is very accurate. It is not a horror comedy: it is either a comedy with horrific elements or a horror with comedic elements, depending on your point of view. But mark my words: the horror elements are clear and true. Unlike the recent FIDO, SHAUN OF THE DEAD reverently respects the zombie genre, and treats those subjects accordingly. When the flesh-eaters attack, it is never played as a joke. They think that Mary is funny at first, when she appears to be a drunk in their backyard, but when she proves to be a reanimated corpse, she inspires nothing but fear and dread.
Now on to the DVD.
After you suffer through the awful previews (or just skip right to the root menu), you are treated to an animated Simon Pegg as Shaun, twirling his cricket bat and knocking zombies over on his way into the Winchester, his and Ed's pub in the film, and the place they ultimately decide will be safest until the whole thing blows over. The first animated menu is at the bar, complete with bottles on the wall, a burning cigarette in an ashtray, and zombie shadows along the windows. From this point, you can choose to start the film (at which time a zombie pops up, and promptly gets its head blown off by a shotgun), go to the extras, or go to the options. For the moment, let us choose Options.
When you click Options, some zombie hands come up and grab away the SHAUN OF THE DEAD logo, and the camera swings around to the corner of the room, and settles in on the Ooh! Aah! Dracula! fruit machine, the dartboard, and the jukebox. The fruit machine is for scene selections, and has all the neat musical cues from the one in the movie, and the jukebox has the soundtrack selections and the commentaries. Since I know nothing about audio stuff, I'll just talk about the commentaries.
The first one is by co-writer and director Edgar Wright and 
A slice of fried gold awaits the intrepid special features viewer. |
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co-writer and star Simon Pegg, and is both incredibly informative and utterly hilarious. What it never is is boring. You get the true sense of what movie lovers they are, and what a labor of love SHAUN was for them. This was no Hollywood gig to pay the bills for these two. In between good-natured sniping at each other, you will learn interesting tidbits about stuff that got cut out of the original script, stuff they had to pare down in order to "crack on a bit", and they point out stuff in the background that is almost impossible to notice. Like the little black baby with a sombrero on its back on the coffee table in Shaun's flat, the fact that the pizza place next to the shop is called Bub's Pizza (a reference to the best zombie of all time, in DAY OF THE DEAD), and the fact that the line "she's so drunk!" is the only one that had to change for American audiences (if they had said Mary's was "pissed", we would have thought they meant she was angry). Pegg also has a lot of fun when Wright mentions the Isle of Man. "You love men? You just said it!"
The other commentary is the cast commentary, featuring Pegg, again, along with Nick Frost (Ed), Kate Ashfield (Liz), Lucy Davis (Liz's bohemian flat mate Diane) and Dylan Moran (Liz's other flat mate and Diane's boyfriend, the insufferable prick that is David). This commentary is less informative than the other, but makes up for that in entertainment value. You see, Pegg and Frost used to do stand-up, and Moran still does. They are all very quick on their feet and good at improv, and of course always feel the need to one-up each other (like when Moran suggest that all London suburbs sound like minor bowl diseases, such as where the film takes place in Crouch End...at which point in becomes a contest to see who can be the grossest – Frost wins, hands down, with Distended Bumpton). Lucy Davis is also surprisingly clever and entertaining. Ashfield, unfortunately, doesn't add all that much to the proceedings. Which is perfectly fine, though, because the others more than make for her.
Now, one might think that a trip over to the subtitles dartboard would be unnecessary. I'm assuming that you speak English. As a test, what did I just write? Okay, good. You speak English. And if you're not deaf, you don't need the dartboard, right?
Wrong!
You see, along with the subtitles, it also has the Zomb-O-Meter, which is a Pop-Up Video style device that shows trivia tidbits throughout the film. Some are kind of stupid, like trying to equate the names of the characters with their fates (all of them are a stretch), but it also has nice little gems. Stuff like how the voice of the video game Ed is playing (Timesplitter 2, FYI) was done by Peter Serafinowicz (Pete) and the voice when Shaun calls Fulci's to book a table (a reference to Lucio Fulci, director of ZOMBIE amongst others) was done by Edgar Wright himself. It also made me very happy by pointing out the names and artists of the songs during the movie, as well as calling out the names of the musical cues and bits of scoring.
There is also a storyboard comparison feature, but I can't make it work with my remote. Which is okay because, oddly enough, storyboards don't interest me much.
Moving right along to the Extras menu, we swing around to the other side of the bar. Up on the wall to the left we have Raw Meat. In this section, we have:
1.Simon Pegg's video diary: This one has some nice candid footage of the crew, both in pre-production and during production. It spends a good deal of time lingering on Nick Frost getting a pain-killing jab in his ass, after Pegg accidentally punched him too hard in the shoulder during a tense scene filmed in the Jaguar. When Pegg explains what's going on to Nicola Cunningham (Mary), Frost leans into the camera and sings, "It's like a little prick." Good to know they had such fun on the set.
2.Casting tapes: there's really not all that much on view here. You see the various actors (aside from Pegg and Frost, of course) doing some readings for their characters. The best part about this segment, though, is watching Pegg and Frost and Wright filming themselves in front of a TV, so you get that TV within a TV within a TV, forever and ever effect. They stick various fruits in their noses and mouths. Truly childlike behavior. I love it.
3.Simon and Edgar's flipchart: this bit was actually filmed in 2001, before the movie was even shot. It is exactly what it sounds like, about 13 minutes of Edgar and Simon standing in front of a flipchart of what they think the movie will end up looking like. It's a great way to see how initial ideas make their way through (or not, as the case may be) to the final product.
4.SFX Comparison: this is kind of an anemic segment, focusing on two effects: Pete getting his brains blown out and Mary being impaled (and subsequently rising from) a pole in Shaun's backyard. It's pretty interesting, if too short.
5.Makeup Test: This one is cool. Zombies don't just happen in movies: you better be pretty goddamn sure ahead of time that they aren't going to look stupid on camera. So some time was spent making up zombies and filming them. You can see that one such test was used in the final film, during the Zombies From Hell television segment seen at the end of the film. The pratfall zombie way in the back is Edgar Wright's cameo.
6.Lastly, we have the EPK featurette (Electronic Press Kit). Basically it is the kind of short piece detailing the film, and giving some behind the scenes jazz, that you might see between movies on HBO. It's thin as Copperfieldian gruel, but does have a few cute mini-interviews. Such as Nick Frost going into 50,000 ZOMBIES mode, talking about getting killing 
The HD-DVD menu doesn't look nearly as cool. Sorry, high-techers: you suck. |
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distance.
Moving on, and slightly to the right, we have the door to the back, the fusebox, and I'm pretty sure the loo (aka: the Zombie Gallery). Here you can find:
1.The photo gallery. I like this one. It has pictures taken mainly by Peter and Simon, and again shows the level of fun and mischief that went on behind the set. My particular favorite is of Ed, bare-chested, with someone grabbing his moobs from behind, ala Janet Jackson from the cover of whatever magazine that was.
2.The 2000 AD SHAUN OF THE DEAD comic. I don't read comics, but I guess 2000 AD is some famous British stuff. Dunno. The SHAUN comic deals with how Mary was bitten by Horton Jupiter, the mendicant zombie from the opening of the film, and went on to sire the "Hulk" zombie, as he is known behind the scenes. I didn't bother trying to read it, because the resolution on my TV is kind of crappy. If you have a good tube, and a predisposition to comics, bon apetit!
3.Finally, there is a collection of posters designs. Both stuff that was and wasn't eventually used, as well as some of the foreign posters. Not earth-shattering stuff, but there aren't many, and they're interesting to look at.
On the scoreboard for the pool table you can find a spot labeled "trailer", which unfortunately just has one US theatrical trailer. I was sort of hoping for a few different ones, and maybe some TV spots as well. Now, looking up from the scoreboard you will see a TV, oddly enough labeled TV Bits. Now, these aren't the TV spots I just mentioned, but instead are the full versions of what were shot for the characters to see on television during the film. There is the T4 segment, hosted by Vernon Kay, where he interviews Coldplay about their involvement with the charity Zombaid. The bit is funny, and especially worth a watch for when they announce their two new band members (as the old bassist and drummer were zombified and then destroyed by the government). Another other two bits are both from the fictitous episode of the real daytime talk show Trisha, centering around a young woman who chooses to stand by her zombified man. The last TV bit is called Fun Dead, a Double Dare type program featuring zombies competing in ridiculous challenges. The music during this segment is a remix of the jingle heard in the Monroeville Mall in the original DAWN OF THE DEAD, and two of the zombies are played by HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY director Garth Jennings (also seen as a crackhead with a Kalishnikov in HOT FUZZ) and producer Nick Goldsmith.
And finally we come to the final special feature, the Missing Bits. There is some real fried gold here:
1.Funky Pete: this is the segment where Pete freaks out and goes on a cursing rampage against Shaun and Head. But the boys were contractually obligated to deliver an airline version, so this scene was overdubbed to remove the offending words. F*ck becomes funk, and prick becomes prink, which is quite funny to see.
2.The Man Who Would Be Shaun finds Simon and Nick doing a scene from the film as Michael Cain and Sean Connery from THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. It is really funny, until Simon starts laughing. And then it's hilarious.
3.The Plot Holes segment is one of my favorites. It contains three animated sequences (like most of the other animations, it was done by Edgar's brother, Oscar Wright) dealing with some things that apparently bothered some viewers. Stuff like what happened to Diane after she left the Winchester, how Ed got from the basement of the Winchester to Shaun's garage, and how Shaun escaped the zombie horde out behind the Winchester (I like it when he says he decided to "fox those dead pricks and jump in a skiff and hide for a bit".)
4.Now we have the extended scenes. These are basically the deleted scenes, except each exists in the film in some fashion. One of the things I admire about the boys is that the only stuff they needed to take out they took out for pace reasons, not because they weren't good scenes. All jokes and sequences that didn't work were recognized and eliminated before they were filmed. These guys did not make this movie on the fly. Like all good geeks, they knew their material and knew exactly what they wanted to achieve (which isn't to say that some of the stuff they wanted to do didn't get trashed: ultimately, it was a low-budget film, and some stuff was just not feasible economically or time-wise).
5.And finally, finally, finally, we come to the outtakes. This is the gag reel, and it is hysterical. Like when Shaun reappears at the Winchester and his mom is supposed to greet him with "Pickle!", but flubs the line and ends up blurting out, "Pig...puff...pickle!" Or when Shaun was attempting to get the zombie horde's attention, to divert them from the rest of the gang, except the encroaching mass of reanimated flesh honestly scared him. You can see it on his face as he yells at them to "F*ck off! Just f*ck off!" I'm smiling just thinking about it.
By this point I am sure I have talked you out of even watching the movie ever again, never mind the special features. But I can't help it: this is my favorite movie, and I've watched it at least two dozen times, not counting viewings with the commentaries running. I've also pored over all the special features many times. The geeks who brought me my favorite movie were kind enough to also recognize my deep need to see how it was all done, because they feel that need, too. Do you?
PS: This "trifle" of a column is actually longer than anything else I've ever written for this site.
PPS: The stuff about the "drunk" line in the Mary scene is actually talked about in the cast commentary. Whoops.
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| Agent Provocateur |
Every other Sunday
Eating the flesh of lesser film geeks since '72.
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| Zombie Boy |
Zombie Boy is not a Hollywood insider, just a movie
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