Exterminator? I’ve got zombies! Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are vaguely troubled by the undead in their backyard in ’Shaun of the Dead.’

Shaun of the Dead Starring Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, and Nick Frost. Directed by Edgar Wright. Written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. Rated R.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, comes one of the oddest and most enjoyable movies I’ve ever had the chance to review. Shaun of the Dead is destined to be an instant cult classic, though I’m really hoping for a Bend It Like Beckham-style hit, which is what it deserves. This British import put together by tv sitcom veterans is a remarkable achievement, because it simultaneously manages to be a romantic comedy about neurotic single people dealing with commitment issues and a horror movie about those people’s attempts to escape a mob of flesh-eating zombies. There’s no way in hell this should work. The American troupe Broken Lizard tried to pull a similar trick earlier this year with Club Dread and failed miserably. Yet, against massive odds, this movie succeeds gloriously.

Simon Pegg, who doubles as co-writer on this film, plays Shaun, a boring 29-year-old electronics store salesman whose girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) has just left him because he has no direction in life and spends most of his time hanging out at the pub or playing video games with his couch-potato best friend and flatmate Ed (Nick Frost). Shaun’s so wrapped up in his relationship’s demise that he pays no attention to the urgent news bulletins on tv or the increasing presence of gun-toting soldiers on the streets. Eventually, though, so much of London’s population becomes zombified that he finally takes notice and tries to lead to safety a group that consists of Liz, Ed, Shaun’s mum (Penelope Wilton), and Liz’ friends (Dylan Moran and Lucy Davis, the latter well-known to fans of The Office).

The movie fits into a well-established tradition of English comedy in which people continue to observe social niceties even as civilization crumbles around them. A nifty recurring gag has Shaun repeatedly running into his ex-girlfriend (Jessica Stevenson) and swapping ex-like pleasantries regardless of the nightmarish circumstances. The script is savvy and highly self-aware and includes a satirical postlude full of cameos by British tv personalities that shows the mass media dealing with the zombie phenomenon — listen to the voiceover, and you can hear a satisfying dig at the plot of 28 Days Later. There’s also a truly priceless bit that happens when Shaun and Ed try to decapitate two zombies outside their flat by flinging vinyl LP’s at them. While the monsters slowly advance on them, Shaun and Ed meticulously thumb through their record collection and argue over which albums to sacrifice. (“Ah, Sade!” “That’s Liz’!” “Yeah, well, she dumped you, didn’t she?”)

As funny as this movie is, it’s not a spoof, and it treats the zombies in a surprisingly straightforward manner. Not all of the characters live; one of them even has his internal organs torn out and eaten before our eyes. This actually gets a laugh because of the movie’s comedic context — you don’t expect the computer-generated special effects to render this so realistically. Nevertheless, the movie takes its characters’ deaths with the right amount of gravity. Shaun’s frosty stepdad (Bill Nighy) even has a touching farewell scene, apologizing to his stepson for not being a better father figure. The leisurely rhythms of the movie’s first half give way to a more urgent pacing when the zombies start to take over.

Co-writer and first-time film director Edgar Wright does the equivalent of walking on eggshells while juggling chainsaws here. This material presents extraordinary difficulties when it comes to finding the right tone; there are a thousand points in this movie where it all could have become too light and jokey or too heavy and grim. Somehow, Wright doesn’t misstep even once. The cast, a well-oiled ensemble with an assured and enviably sharp sense of timing, is a crucial part of this. These actors are mostly professional comedians, but they play every facet of this script with total seriousness. The entire film would collapse if any of them let on for a second that they’re in on the joke. Ponder that while you’re watching them wield toasters, cricket bats, and severed human limbs as weapons against the zombies.

Shaun of the Dead plays like what would happen if the cast of a British sitcom wandered into a George Romero film. As a comedy, it ranks with this year’s funniest. As a zombie flick, it’s vastly superior to the wretched Resident Evil films and the routine Dawn of the Dead remake from earlier this year. It even outclasses the Evil Dead movies. (Yes, you read that right.) If a movie that packs all that doesn’t fit your standard of entertainment, well, what can I say? Have fun watching Lars von Trier’s collected works. The rest of us will be grinning as we contemplate how appropriate Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” is as a soundtrack accompaniment for fighting off the undead and how that juxtaposition contributes to one of the unlikeliest cinematic triumphs in recent years.

When Will I Be Loved Starring Neve Campbell, Fred Weller, and Dominic Chianese. Written and directed by James Toback. Rated R.

The best part of When Will I Be Loved is right at the beginning, when we see Neve Campbell naked in the shower. Wait, it gets better — she masturbates. Well, why not, since the filmmaker’s pretty much doing the same thing for the entire movie?

That would be James Toback, and this movie is typical of his crap. If you’ve seen Two Girls and a Guy or Black and White or any other of his self-indulgent exercises, you know how he puts films together. A bunch of half-assed ideas about sex, money, power, and race relations; fashionable New York types portrayed by actors in heavily improvised scenes; stunt casting of rappers, pro athletes, and supermodels; classical music on the soundtrack for intellectual cred; hip-hop music on the soundtrack for street cred; and sex scenes involving beautiful naked women, often more than one. They’re all thrown together with little regard for continuity or dramatic effect. They’re all served up with the condescending, anti-establishment tone of an aging beatnik shouting “This is art, man!” Presented this way, even the beautiful naked women are annoying.

Campbell plays Vera, a child of wealth who lives in a gorgeous SoHo loft with her boyfriend Ford (Fred Weller), a lowlife hustler and compulsive liar who’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks and who’s desperate to move up the food chain in the entertainment business. She has no trouble manipulating him, particularly when she agrees to let him pimp her out to Count Lupo (Dominic Chianese), a super-rich Italian media baron who will pay her six and possibly seven figures for one sexual encounter.
This storyline doesn’t kick in until the movie’s half gone, however. The scenes before that are basically filler: Vera has a chance meeting with actress Lori Singer and sex with a female acquaintance (Joelle Carter), and Ford has a run-in with an ex-girlfriend he owes money to (Ashley Shelton). These exchanges aren’t entertaining in themselves, and they don’t tie into the main story or shed much light on the characters. Why are they here? Too often it feels like the actors run out of ideas midway through their scenes, though they do better when the plot starts up — Weller delivers a nice long sotto voce monologue when his character tries to talk Vera into the indecent proposal, and Campbell and Chianese neatly underplay an even longer conversation in which Vera and the count circle each other like two high-powered executives, trying to negotiate the terms of their arrangement.

These mildly interesting scenes, though, aren’t nearly enough to salvage this junk heap. Toback wants badly to be hip and provocative, and his aimless, meandering movies fall so short that they’d be pitiable if they weren’t infected by the same insufferable pretentiousness. His unsavory characters are drawn without sympathy or insight, and the filmmaker claims to see through them while being blinded to his own poses. (This, despite the fact that he gives himself a funny cameo as a dashiki-wearing African-studies professor on the make.) When Will I Be Loved is obsessed with looks and attitude but doesn’t offer up an original thought, which makes it exactly like the characters that it scorns.