Shaun of the Dead is the kind of low budget movie every genre filmmaker should aspire to make. One the one hand, it's a gore-drenched zombie movie that doesn't let us down in chills and bloodletting. Yet it's also a sharply-written comedy rooted in problems that your average person can easily relate to. While Shaun, as perfectly played by everyman Simon Pegg, struggles to overcome his own mediocrity in order to rise to the challenge of keeping his loved ones safe from the clutches of zombie hordes, he takes the time to argue with his best friend over issues that have plagued their relationship for years. Where George Romero used zombies and black humor to satirize social ills, director Edgar Wright uses the same set up to honestly explore the difficulties of everyday relationships, while also tossing in the overriding theme that people who fail to live life to the fullest are themselves living zombies. Even without searching into these depths, the film is wildly entertaining, genuinely frightening and extremely funny as a horror comedy on par with the likes of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series. For action, Shaun's skull-bashing dash through lumbering groups of zombies performed in long takes, his shuriken-like LP tossing, and a brief kung fu movie-inspired leg maneuver are icing on the cake.