As anyone who’s had to listen to me talk about films for any extensive period knows, I love love love the Cornetto trilogy. (Or the Blood and Ice-Cream Trilogy, depending on who you ask.) I love it so much I still have to stop myself from buying the box set, even though I already own the films and could watch two of them on Netflix anyway, just because they look so nice in a proper little set with all the cover art and stuff. For my brother's birthday we once re-enacted a scene from
Hot Fuzz when we brought the cake in.
So because of this, I wanted to offer up a few assorted thoughts on the films, with mention of a couple of cultural influences and cinematography.
The three films have their well-known similarities in the form of little touches (the fence jump, identical twins, the music played on the pub arcade game, several cast members) and also have a few overarching themes in common. The thing that crops up repeatedly is a warning on the
dangers of conformity
...Which manifests itself in a variety of different ways. Naturally, the friendship between Simon Pegg’s and Nick Frost’s characters always takes centre stage, and all three films are known for their devices of heavy foreshadowing, along with using tightly-packed smash cuts and breakneck speed visuals to make even the most mundane of actions seem high-stakes and exciting.
I wanted this to be up on the 22nd of February, in reference, of course, to this little
exchange:
....But since it’s after midnight I’m not sure if my blog will register it as such. If it
does, kindly disregard this part, and of course I had it done on time.
...Anyway, let’s look at the films.
(Warning: spoilers.)
Shaun of the Dead
Kicking off the trilogy,
Shaun of the Dead follows a guy trying to get his life back on
track and rekindle his relationship with his girlfriend. This noble goal is derailed
somewhat by a classic zombie outbreak.
The film owes a lot to the movies of George Romero, the title parodying
Dawn of
the Dead in the most obvious example, and with other little references cropping up
throughout. (In fact, Romero was invited to a screening of the film, in which a
reference to Night of the Living Dead ('We're coming to get you, Barbara!') went
right over his head.
Shaun’s insistence on not referring to the living dead by ‘the Z word’
also references
the more traditional zombie (not-zombie?) flicks, since
Night of the Living Dead
never used the term and other films, such as
28 Days Later, were adamant about
not referring to their creatures as such.
I've talked a bit about the history of the zombie as pop culture monster and
Shaun's
place in comedy horror in previous posts, so perhaps there's not as much to say
about genre history here.
Shaun’s particular brand of zombies are the slow lurching
kind, who still retain small traces of their personalities even in their deceased
state (the kid still playing with his football, Phillip turning off the car radio, Pete
showing up at the pub to exact a bit of revenge on Ed…)
The film frequently uses
parallel scenes and, like in every film in the series, is heavy
on the foreshadowing. There's a certain undercurrent of social satire going on there
- the members of the public we see milling around, and Shaun himself in his first
appearance - already resemble the walking dead.
Plus, by the end, the fact that the zombies wind up integrating so well into society is probably a bit of a scathing indictment.
The use of parallel scenes highlight Shaun's complete inability to notice anything going on around him, not helped by his being hungover. As we see when he walks to the off-license and fails to notice, among other things, bloody handprints on the fridge, and casually slips on what we can assume to be a bloodstain on the floor. It’s also done to create a sense of pervasive unease, along with brief scenes from the build-up.
The mundanity of Shaun’s daily life is frequently contrasted with these increasingly unsettling goings-on. The idea of our mundane everyday lives gradually going ever- so-slightly
wrong is at work here (plus the idea that we might not even notice at first) before it all gets very evidently real.
Death by foreshadowing is abundant:
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I like to think this is what happens when you say Peter Serafinowicz's name three times
into a mirror |
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| ...I'm sure he's fine. |
Effectively, and as you might expect, any time ‘you’re/they’re dead’ is used as a threat against another character, that's the last time they'll be seen alive.
At the heart of it all, it’s a film about someone whose life isn’t going anywhere. That ties in pretty nicely with the zombies – Shaun’s life and his relationship have become metaphorically ‘dead’ in themselves. You can see this from the opening scene, which shows Shaun with a dazed expression
...as
Ghost Town by the specials plays in the background. The film opens with Shaun’s girlfriend Liz expressing her frustration about the aimlessness of their relationship, while their respective flatmates interject.
We see Shaun gradually mature over the course of the film. It helps that he’s thrown into a position where the responsibility of decision-making in dire straits is thrust onto his shoulders, and at first he reacts in about the way you’d expect a stereotypically-British comedy hero to react.
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| Actually, that first plan might have worked. |
There’s something weirdly realistic, if comedic, about the characters’ initial almost casual approach to what’s happening around them. Going through things on autopilot, and having weird priorities (such as which records to sacrifice in an attempt to fend off the zombies) seem like almost reasonable reactions when you consider that shock is a powerful drug; and it’s natural to fall back on familiar comforts in times of fear. Of course, while it’s mostly played for laughs at first, shit gets very real over the course of the film, as we see Shaun making peace with his stepdad before the latter dies, Shaun being forced to shoot his infected mother and the bleak scene before the military arrives to save the day - all of which are treated with appropriate gravity.
And then there’s Ed. I don’t have a great deal to say about Ed (other than the fact that I always saw him as the guy in everyone’s Job Interview Skills workshop who’s constantly interrupting and mouthing off to the instructor and asking if he can just go outside for a smoke and not come back. That being said, he does get some redemption in the end.)
And there's the bit where the group beat up the zombie barman in time to a Queen song. This is the best scene in the film.
Hot Fuzz
'Sleepy.' That's become a word with weirdly sinister connotations when being used to describe a fictional small town or location, hasn’t it? Nothing good ever, ever happens in a 'sleepy little town.' If the residents aren't being murdered left and right, they're probably the ones doing the killing. Or there's some sort of monster living underground there. Or a horrible secret conspiracy. Or something else that's equally unpleasant. The point is, if you are a fictional character and you were thinking of moving to a Sleepy Little Town, there's a fairly decent possibility that you're going to die within the week, and they really ought to mention that in the brochures. It's just polite.
Anyway,
Hot Fuzz sees the no-nonsense London cop Nicholas Angel being reassigned to our film's own Sleepy Little Town: Sandford, Gloucestershire. A seemingly picture-perfect countryside village in which the crime rate is very low, but the rate of grisly fatal
accidents seems... curiously high.
Besides the obvious centre-stage homages to the buddy cop action flick and slasher movie,
Hot Fuzz takes some inspiration from Robin Hardy's 1972 cult classic
The Wicker Man. (The original, not the Nicholas Cage remake, which was... a thing that happened.) Both feature an uptight, by-the-book cop, a fish out of water in a small town harbouring a dark secret. Edward Woodward, the star of
The Wicker Man, appears here as one of the town's residents.
The use of contrast in both films was interesting to me. In
The Wicker Man we've got the chilling dissonance of the murderous Summerisle residents singing a cheerful folk song about the changing of the seasons as they burn a man alive; in
Hot Fuzz, we have the quaint, oh-so-adorably-rustic rural setting and comedic tone as a backdrop for a series of grisly 'accidents' and action cinema antics.
This both pays loving homage to and sends up the action/buddy cop genres, with a few nods to Western cinema thrown in as well. Danny's love of films like
Point Break and
Bad Boys II cause him to be disillusioned by the real-life mundanities of actual police work (not to mention as Nicholas points out, the paperwork.) And Angel points out the inherent flaws at work in the films and his partner’s mentality, and shoots down Danny's idealism, but ultimately ends up taking inspiration from them when he rides back into town for the showdown.
There are also
nods to The Omen, with the casting of Billie Whitelaw and Tim Messenger's death scene and Skinner's impalement scene being much gorier versions of Father Brennan's death-by-impalement.
The opening shot shows Angel approaching the camera, bathed in light, in a way vaguely reminiscent of a Western hero walking into the sunset (as
this piece describes,) and which immediately contrasts with the comically serious expression as he faces the camera. He's a serious character in a comical world. Incidentally, frequent future points in the film show Angel illuminated:
With a bit of possible… well, angelic imagery thrown in.
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| The Number of God, according to some |
...So that's quite a nice touch.
Following the opening scene we're immediately thrown into Nicholas’s career history in a montage full of the trilogy's much-loved tightly packed smash cuts, set aptly to Adam Ant's
Goody Two-Shoes, before cutting to Angel's meeting with the Met sergeant.
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| With bonus baby Martin Freeman |
The first impressions we get of Sandford are dark. It's raining heavily. Thunder crashes overhead, and we get an ominous shot of a few hooded figures huddling together.
The hotel Angel enters is dimly-lit and creepy, throwing in a nod to
The Shining.
So, bit of foreboding established there already. After Angel goes for an explore and rounds up some underage pub-dwellers and an attempted drink-driver, we eventually segue into a more peaceful, rustic daytime scene with the camera panning over the fields to the comforting strains of
The Village Green Preservation Society.
See, nothing's wrong here! Nothing sinister going on!! It's lovely here! Soon afterwards, Angel is confronted with our blatantly obvious villain archetype.
Thus follows Angel’s period of adjustment. He quickly establishes a reputation as a humourless spoilsport who is, as far as everyone else is concerned, much too determined to see foul play everywhere, and is in turn disappointed that his colleagues seem to be...well…
Of course, it's a given that the seemingly idyllic 'village of the year' isn't all that it seems, and our expectations as to what’s being set up are ultimately subverted. The revelation of what's really going on ties in beautifully with the themes that we see established earlier in the movie - the determination to keep up the image of a perfect village, references to 'the greater good', and the residents' boneheaded refusal to view the gory incidents as anything other than accidents. It's dark,
chilling and utterly, delightfully ridiculous.
As much as Angel gets his own character development in the form of his learning to loosen up, it’s perhaps Danny who has the more emotionally significant arc. Over the course of the film he’s forced to come to terms with the fact that his dad has become a murderous despot, and what Frank’s ‘special club’ is really all about. And whilst the despair nearly overcomes him at first, he ultimately manages to pull through and stand up to Frank and the NWA, with some assistance from Nicholas
invoking his beloved movies.
This might be the film that's heaviest on the foreshadowing (although someone will probably prove me wrong on that - I’m sure one of our lovely internet denizens has calculated the amount of instances in every individual film.) Nearly
every single line ends up coming back with some double meaning at some point later.
Foreshadowing lines pop up at least as early as this scene:
I swear more of them crop with every rewatch. It took me at least ten viewings to spot this, for example:
And then we have lines like this:
Because apparently not content with simply foreshadowing its own events,
Hot Fuzz decided it wanted to foreshadow real life, too.
*Shudders.*
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I don't have anything specific to say about this; I just happened to get a good screenshot.
Still a nice visual gag, though. |
The World's End
So we come to the end. The world’s end, in fact (y’see? Because it’s the name of the film!) The movie with the highest budget ($20 million, as opposed to
Shaun’s $6.1 million and
Hot Fuzz’s $12 million) and lowest body count. (Technically.)
Gary King, a hammy, childish, outrageous loser somewhere in his late thirties/early forties, manages to talk his old high school friends into re-attempting a pub crawl that they failed to complete as teenagers. After Gary hauls his mates around the first few pubs, it becomes apparent that something is off about their childhood village of Newton Haven (another ‘sleepy little town’,) as a public toilet
confrontation reveals that local residents are being replaced with humanoid blue-blooded robots. Or, as the film calls them, ‘Blanks,’ avoiding the term 'robot' because:
Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
noted that unlike its predecessors, The World’s End didn’t really have any explicit nods to other films, but there’s a general feel that evokes the body-snatchers genre of sci-fi/horror, in which notable films include things like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers and
The Stepford Wives, among others.
They Live might also get a look-in as inspiration, what with the whole ‘alien
conspiracy’ angle.
In these kinds of films, there’s the insidious fear that sinister forces could be at work behind the facade of our daily lives. Often there’s some kind of pervasive social fear acting as subtext (communism in
Body Snatchers, for example.) The idea that the enemy could be hiding in plain sight, maybe in the form of our loved ones; people we thought we knew, and thought we could trust. And that any one of us could be next in line to get replaced, and/or simply done away with…
There's a fascist dictatorial element at work there too (‘comply, or that's the end of
you; it's all for the greater good,’) in a similar vein to
Hot Fuzz, but on a global scale.
Whilst the aliens’ motivations might be arguably good, the price of putting their plan into action - taking away human agency and essentially killing anyone who expresses dissent - is just too high. Besides which, with the amount of resistance the Network ends up facing, their initial plan of only replacing a few key people quickly goes down the pan.
I feel like the subtextual themes are twofold here. We've got Gary's destructive nostalgia; seeing him desperately cling to the rose-tinted memory of his school days instead of moving on with his life, and his conviction that finally completing the crawl will fix everything. He still acts like a teenager (at least, when he's not channeling a small child,) dresses exactly like his younger self, uses outdated slang and is still throwing around in-jokes from several decades ago, much to the confusion of his companions.
He even drives the same bashed-up old car he did as a teenager. In him we see the dangers of idealising and holding onto the past too much, to the point where it interferes with the ability to move on. As far as Gary's concerned, that pub crawl was the pinnacle; it never got any better since then.
This is in contrast to his friends, who have all moved on with their lives and tolerate him more out of pity than anything else.
And then we have the other underlying theme: technology.
The androids attacking the protagonists are the product of The Network, which is ultimately responsible for all of humanity’s technological development. When Gary and his friends refuse their offer, they retaliate by destroying all the world’s technology, plunging us into a post-apocalyptic wasteland and leaving humanity to pick up the pieces the best it can. (It's subtle, but early on in the film when the characters try to use their phones, it's Bill Nighy's voice telling them there's no connection.)
If there's a small criticism to be levelled at The World's End, it's that the themes presented don't necessarily tie together that well. On the one hand we've got the aforementioned Gary's determination to recreate his youth, and then... there's a bunch of robots. And don't get me wrong, I like the sci-fi element, because I'm a sucker for an action-heavy monster-of-the-week number. But honestly, the plot about a group of friends trying to recreate the pub crawl of their teenage years could have stood up pretty decently as a film in its own right. To be fair, though, I wasn't really heading into the cinema for a poignant character study about a guy who couldn't leave his youth behind; I wanted to see an apocalyptic flick where a bunch of middle-aged drunk guys beat up robots, with the other stuff existing in addition to that. So I feel like I can't make too many digs.
On the other hand, it could be said there’s a point where the themes tie together rather nicely when Gary ultimately refuses the Network's offer: he could be his young self again, no longer plagued by bad memories of adulthood.
...And he turns it down, signalling that he’s undergone some serious character growth.
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| The look on the robot's face might be the best part of this. |
(Of course, he contradicts that line a few minutes later. They are pissed, after all.) This could, perhaps, also be seen as a continuation of Gary's stubbornness which ultimately wins the day.
By the end, from what we see, Gary even seems happier and more suited in the post-apocalyptic world, possible in the more traditional dusty-cowboy-action-hero vein. In an odd way, he's simultaneously managed to move on and live out his fantasies; swashbuckling his way around the pubs with the younger versions of his friends and picking a fight with anyone who threatens them.
Having let go of the desire to be young again and for his life to be the way it was, he seems to have actually found something worthwhile to keep going for.
Some assorted thoughts on cinematography: early on in the film, the scene of the group wandering around Newton Haven before the crawl starts is a fairly telling example of how this all looks in Gary's eyes; it's a triumphant, power-walking montage. In reality, of course, all we're really seeing is Gary dicking around ringing people's doorbells and running away. You can sense the nostalgia there, the sense of being young again.
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| A wild Serafinowicz appears |
All three films get pretty dark in parts, but
The World's End really doesn't shy away from loaded topics. There's the (really quite devastating) revelation of Gary's self-harm, and Andy's sense of betrayal after Gary abandoned him that night. Plus, their friend Peter is still so traumatised from the memory of his school bully that he risks getting captured just for the opportunity to beat the guy up.
As with the other two films, the
early scenes foreshadow and run neatly parallel to later ones, as the montage of the first attempted pub crawl gives us some hints as to the film’s events.
The names of the pubs also clue us into the film’s events, and there’s a decent bit of foreshadowing with the deliberate homogeneity of the first two.
One of the interesting visual details is the shot of the five friends walking together, as it appears at least three times throughout the film:
The first image evokes Gary’s rose-tinted nostalgia for that night. The second sets up a decent contrast between Gary and his friends, as we see they’ve settled into adulthood, whilst Gary’s still trying to look like his old self. Finally the third shot indicates his new role in the post-apocalyptic world: he’s presumably managed to let go of the past and become this wasteland action here, but in some ways he’s still the same person he always was.
