Shaun of the Dead triumphs by putting together a selection of actors from some of the better British sitcoms and allowing everyone to be as intelligent and as silly as they would be on a half-hour on Channel 4 or BBC2. This seems a blindingly obvious idea but if you've sat through a few dim, sitcom-derived comedy films of the last few years, you'll know just how rare it is.

There's no failure of nerve here as the Spaced team (co-writers Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright; co-stars Pegg and Nick Frost) assemble Dylan Moran (Black Books), Lucy Davis (The Office) and Peter Serafinowicz (World of Pub). Add Bill Nighy because you do if he's available, and make a zombie film with a rather superior bit of a rom-com in it. It's ragged round the edges but often hilarious and very English indeed. These are characters whose reaction to a crisis is to have another pint or another cup of tea, not make a fuss and wait for it all to blow over, and whose weapon for combating zombies is a cricket bat.

This is nothing like a Monty Python movie but it has learned two lessons from the maestros: a) something is much funnier if it's played out on banal English streets and b) violence in comedy should be very violent indeed - here it rivals the Black Knight sketch for gore quotient. There are other skills on display here, with running verbal and visual gags that hang it together and a few visual flourishes pulled off with aplomb.

To say a lot more might risk spoiling the surprises, but it's a winning blend of the mundane and the ludicrous.