Hot Fuzz

I’ve had a weakness for parodies since I was about eleven years old and the English teacher asked us to write a couple in successive weeks – one a sci-fi parody, one a parody of a detective story. My effort at the former made it into the school magazine – my first ever publication – but the latter has plenty of nostalgic appeal for me, as it was a Sherlockian pastiche, ‘The Orange and Purple Worms’.

I’ve managed to avoid most of the action movies mercilessly parodied in Simon Pegg’s comedy Hot Fuzz, but I enjoyed the film a lot all the same. Pegg plays a Scotland Yard cop who is too smart for his own good and finds himself exiled to a pretty town in the west country, where crime is minimal and the police have no interest in detection. Needless to say, mayhem ensues, with a series of violent and wittily executed murders taking place. However, there is remarkably little effort on the part of the local constabulary to solve them. What is going on?

Hot Fuzz is from the same people who made Shaun of the Dead an entertaining spoof of zombie films. The cast is brilliant, including the likes of Timothy Dalton as a rascally supermarket manager and Edward Woodward taking charge of the Neighbourhood Watch. Maybe the action goes on a few minutes too long – comic crime is notoriously difficult to do perfectly, whether on the page or on the screen – but even so, this is well worth watching, with plenty of genuinely funny moments.

P.S. This is my 100th blog post. I think of the blog essentially as a conversation between people whose interests have much in common with mine and I've really appreciated all the comments and feedback. Thanks.