cult film freak: EDGAR WRIGHT & SIMON PEGG'S BUDDY COP HOMAGE 'HOT FUZZ'

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in Edgar Wright's HOT FUZZ Year: 2007 Rating: *****

After British director Edgar Wright and his leading man and writing partner Simon Pegg scored with the zombie comedy SHAUN OF THE DEAD, it was time for straight-out action that, while also loaded with hijinks, takes the cop genre more seriously, especially Pegg's against-type performance as a tough guy instead of the usual shrugging slacker from DEAD and before that he and Wright's pop-culture-referencing sit-com, SPACED...

And there are even more nostalgic homages here as HOT FUZZ is a mega-satire on mainstream American buddy-cop flicks ranging from LETHAL WEAPON to POINT BREAK... and for the British it's loaded with iconic cult actors of that country's more cerebral crime genre past...

Stuart Wilson in HOT FUZZ

These include Billie Whitelaw from kitchen-sink noirs HELL IS A CITY and PAYROLL to English/American cinema crossovers Timothy "Fourth James Bond" Dalton; THE EQUALIZER star (along with CALLAN and the very influential WICKER MAN) Edward Woodward, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK sophisticated villain Paul Freeman...

And an actual LETHAL heavy Stuart Wilson: all of whom play residents in a rural English village that Pegg's supercop Nick Angel is sent from London for making his fellow officers seem comparably unfit and under-par...

Simon Pegg and Peter Jackson in HOT FUZZ

Yet he's not soon humbled in that squeaky-clean/creepy-neat village, trying to clean up their own loose laws while reluctantly paired with his usual SPACED/SHAUN sidekick Nick Frost as Andy, the inept, movie-collector son of Jim Broadbent's jovial police chief, in what begins as the usual 'two contrary cops warming up until they trust each other' before becoming a full-blown horror flick concerning a cloaked serial killer, wielding violence under Wright's signature fast-paced/snap-cut style, livelier and deadlier than ever...

Forcing his characters to keep up with the film itself that, despite running about fifteen-minutes too long, gets better/clearer with each viewing as both the main character and audience remain deliberately lost in the ever-changing plot, and, despite paying hyperactive tribute to those mainstream American flicks, HOT FUZZ becomes its very own British cop classic in the process.