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Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent. Comedy. Writers: Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright. Director: Edgar Wright.

FILM SYNOPSIS: The action-packed comedy comes from the makers of Shawn of the Dead. Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the finest cop London has to offer, with an arrest record 400% higher than any other officer on the force. He’s so good, he makes everyone else look bad. As a result, Angel’s superiors send him to a place where his talents won’t be quite so embarrassing – the sleepy and seemingly crime-free village of Sandford. However, as a series of grisly accidents rocks the village, Angel is convinced that Sandford is not what it seems.

PREVIEW REVIEW: At first I was reminded of the staid English comedies of the 1950s, those satirical films released by Ealing Studios, which usually starred Peter Sellers and/or Alec Guinness. Like those pictures, Hot Fuzz contains a premise ripe for understated, mocking humor, with just enough bawdiness to remind viewers this is for grownup people. Alas, it’s a different time and filmmakers and filmgoers seem more entertained the more a film becomes obsessed with crudeness. The humor in Hot Fuzz dwindles into lazy R-rated rudeness – you know, the kind that depends on viewing a drunk urinating in public. This happens not once, mind you, but at least twice. I don’t know, seeing a middle-aged man so drunk that he starts peeing inside a barroom always strikes me as sad, not funny. And rather than use language, the filmmakers pretty well abuse it in this film, the f- and s-words now acceptable speech in nearly film, by nearly every character/actor. Then there are the killings. In Kind Hearts and Coronets, a dark farce about a castoff relative doing in family members in order to inherit the family title, such demises were handled with dark but subtle humor. Here, the killings just shock and revolt (an adulterous couple are decapitated, a man’s head is splattered by a falling cement spike, another spike shoots up through a man’s jaw, a woman gets a pair of garden shears through the neck, the blood spewing). Oh, the deaths are played for laughs, but I still feel guilty laughing at the visual of a gruesome killing. Go figure.

Video Alternatives: Each of the following was made by Ealing Studios and contains irreverent but understated humor and reminds us that comedy need not come solely from anatomical and scatological graphicness. Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, and The Ladykillers (the 1955 version – not the Tom Hanks remake of a few years back).

Distributor: Rogue Pictures