Director Deep Dive with Edgar Wright: Dead Right (1993)
Dead Right was 18-year old Wright’s first (kind of) full-length film, and was shot in his hometown of Wells, mostly when he was home on school breaks. I was pretty psyched that we were able to find it—YouTube has all forty minutes of it, so you can watch it too, right now!
Dead Right is a very silly Dirty Harry spoof. The basic plotline is an American cop and his partner trying to track down a serial cereal killer, and it’s jammed with the sorts of visuals and jokes an eighteen-year old guy and his buddies would find hilarious. It also features fake blood galore, numerous fourth-wall-breaking moments, and a very large cast of seventy. Wright has said in interviews that he figured the more people he put in the film, the more copies he might actually sell (he ultimately sold 200).
It is honestly not bad, considering the script was a first draft, and there are several laugh-out-loud moments which I won’t spoil. Wright has said part of what intrigued him as a student was how other directors edited their films, and created scene transitions. So I’m expecting to see some of these initial editing concepts evolve and mature as we go on. One thing I do very much appreciate is that Wright is obviously a film and TV fan. You can only spoof something if you know it very well, and really have an appreciation for it.
Recurring Wright themes-to-come? If I had to take a swing at how his films would evolve, I’d pick these:
Buddy plot
Genre spoof
Visual and dialogue jokes and puns
Splatter-gore
Mayhem in a small town
Actor watch: Wikipedia tells me at least one of these guys shows up again in Fistful of Fingers, and Wright himself makes a cameo, which he apparently also does in seven future endeavors.
Will you like this movie? If you are a fan of Monty Python and/or The Zucker Brothers (Airplane!), and can indulge a student endeavor, yes. If you’re a fan of Edgar Wright and haven’t seen this yet, you should definitely give this a watch—it will give you an appreciation for how he’s evolved. If you enjoy Dirty Harry and especially Dirty Harry spoofs, yes. If you think boys are stupid and/or you lack an appreciation for slapstick and crude humor, you will NOT like this at all and should steer clear.
At bat: Fistful of Fingers (1995)
On deck: Shaun of the Dead (2004)