Hot Fuzz
April 20 2007: The Final Year of Cinema Week 16
A few years ago my bestie Jesse uploaded this video to the website formerly known as twitter dot com. It made me laugh harder than I’d laughed in months. You should watch it right now because it’s the linchpin of this entire essay. It is 30 seconds long. Turn the sound up.
Even if you don’t think it’s as funny as I did, you probably see why I laughed. It’s a dumb joke, but it’s a well structured joke, and crucially it’s a joke that cannot be described in writing. It’s a joke that juxtaposes sight and sound in motion to create its humor. It is a joke that only works in the medium of film. It is the kind of joke that precious few filmmakers excel at. One of the few filmmakers who does excel at it is Edgar Wright, and the best example of it is his film Hot Fuzz.
Hot Fuzz is the story of Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), an impossibly by-the-book sergeant in the London Metropolitan Police who is reassigned to the small village of Sandford. While the village initially seems sleepy and boring, Sergeant Angel finds himself investigating a series of grisly murders that the rest of the police dismiss as mere “accidents”. Eventually he uncovers a conspiracy led by the ominous greengrocer Simon Skinner (Timothy Dalton) that only he and his new BFF Officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) can overcome with a copious amount of firepower and attitude.
Hot Fuzz is definitely the funniest film of 2007 so far and I honestly doubt that another film will be able to take its place. What’s fascinating about Hot Fuzz’s is that its humor isn’t created by director Edgar Wright filming funny things, it’s created by using the language of cinema itself to tell jokes. While there are absolutely jokes in Hot Fuzz’s script, the vast majority of the laughs come from cuts, camera movements, framing gags, and juxtaposition of visuals and sound. Take the film’s opening: after an expository montage delivering all of PC Angel’s bonafides as an exceptional police officer, we cut to him sitting in a meeting with his supervisor where he’s informed simultaneously that he’s being promoted to Sergeant and that he’s being reassigned to a quiet village in the country. Nothing about the dialogue itself is terribly funny, but still the way a smiling Steve Coogan and gruff looking Bill Nighy appear out of nowhere is hilarious because of how they’re shot, framed, and cut.
The entire film is full of these gags. Minutes later there’s a sequence of Sgt Angel clearing the local pub out of underaged teen drinkers. The laughs in this scene don’t come from anything the characters say or any physical comedy they perform, it comes down to things like being blinded by the shine of one teen’s braces or the timing of the camera cutting back to Angel as he announces “OUT”. Minutes later we’re introduced to the film’s primary antagonist, Simon Skinner, while Sgt Angel is out for a jog. As he appears the film’s soundtrack shifts from The Kinks’ pleasantly jangly “Village Green Preservation Society” to an incredibly ominous bit of original film score. “Lock me up! I’m a slasher… of prices!” he informs Angel, in what could be an incredibly corny dad joke but for the fact that Edgar Wright films it like we’re being introduced to Hans Gruber as he enters Nakatomi Plaza. Minutes later the film’s first action set piece occurs as Angel and Danny chase a shoplifter through the village. Wright shoots it as a deadly serious chase sequence, complete with purposeful allusions to a similar foot chase in the greatest action film of all time: Point Break (1991). Of course the difference is that Johnny Utah chases Bodhi across Los Angeles because he’s trying to stop a dangerous armed bank robber who has stolen millions of dollars from banks across southern California, while Nicholas Angel is trying to stop an unarmed man in a tracksuit who has stolen roughly £5 of Custard Creams from the grocery store.
There are plenty of filmmakers who are known primarily for comedies. Frank Capra made a lot of comedies, Frank Oz made a lot of comedies. Paul Fieg made a lot of comedies. I love these comedies very much and regularly revisit them when I want a chuckle. What all of them do though is put something funny in front of the camera. None of them create humor with the camera. That skill is substantially rarer. When I sat down to think about who else does this, who else uses specifically the language of cinema to create laughs, one name came up, and with that name came a revelation. That name is Sam Raimi, and the film I was thinking of as an example is the funniest film he’s made: Evil Dead 2 (1987). This is the moment when I realized that horror filmmakers and comedic filmmakers have substantially similar jobs.
Edgar Wright clearly understands this. I know this not only because his prior film, Shaun of the Dead (2004) was a wildly funny movie about zombies, I also know it because the film that Wright is clearly referencing the most with Hot Fuzz isn’t Point Break or Bad Boys II (2003), it’s another British movie about a big city cop who comes to a small village and uncovers a murderous conspiracy among its residents: 1973’s folk-horror classic The Wicker Man.
The Wicker Man is an incredibly unique horror film. It has a body count of one through its entire runtime, preferring to build a creeping sense of dread via its atmosphere rather than through increasingly violent acts. The film doesn’t have a single jump scare, but it has plenty of moments of characters acting ominous and weird, creating unease in the viewer. It is also weirdly funny. The entire opening scene of Sgt Howie (played by Edward Woodward, who later played Neighborhood Watch Association head Tom Weaver in Hot Fuzz) attempting to get the villagers to send a dinghy over to him in his seaplane reads like a vaudeville sketch. Through the entire film Howie is flummoxed by his interactions with the villagers in a way that rhymes with Basil Fawlty becoming increasingly irate at his guests in an episode of Fawlty Towers. I cackle at the film’s final scene everytime I watch it — not because I find human sacrifice funny — but because of how disjointed that reality is against the backdrop of its chorus of smiling and singing villagers. Hot Fuzz feels very much like an attempt to create a version of The Wicker Man that also has laughs and horror, but puts the laughter as the focal point rather than in the background.
Hot Fuzz, however, does not take its humor from Wicker Man’s creeping dread and ominous dialogue. It takes its humor from the same visual language that horror and thriller films use to get jumps, but Wright uses it to get laughs, and the more I think about it the more it becomes apparent that they’re the same visual language. Think about the way that the shower scene from Psycho (1960) is terrifying. The moment the scene moves from dread to horror is the moment that an unexpected thing enters the frame, in this instance the shadowy figure of the killer through the translucent shower screen. It’s the exact same visual trick used to get a laugh by having an unexpected piece of cake enter the frame from stage right as Sgt Angel is trying to deliver a stern monologue to Chief Inspector Butterman. Or think about the defibrillation scene from The Thing (1982). The visual misdirect of having us expect that the doctors hands will land on a man’s chest that instead turns into a gaping monstrous maw is the same kind of visual misdirect as when Sgt Angel thinks he has Skinner dead to rights in the murder of Leslie Tiller and “proves” it by tugging up his pant leg to expose a sock garter rather than an incriminating leg wound.
This, of course, is in addition to Wright’s considerable skills at delivering thrills that are simply thrills. The deaths of Leslie Tiller, Tim Messenger, and of course the climactic incapacitation of Simon Skinner are all genuine jump scares that happen to occur in a comedy. Wright’s other films in his “Cornetto Trilogy” of Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End (2013) deliver plenty of genuine scares and thrills, and his latest film One Night In Soho (2021) is just a straight ahead supernatural thriller. The exact same set of skills are used to craft jokes with a camera as are used to craft scares.
This is also borne out in that one of the most well known horror directors working today has bonafides in both the horror and comedy world: Jordan Peele. Get Out (2017), Us (2019) and Nope (2022) are so successful in the world of horror that it’s easy to forget that Peele started his career as part of a sketch comedy duo, but just have a glance at, say, his sketch NSFW Computer History, and you can see how the laughs work in literally the exact same way that he builds suspense. It’s the same language.
So let us turn our attention back to that first video my buddy Jesse posted. Anyone familiar with The Dark Knight (2008) knows exactly what’s coming as soon as Heath Ledger’s Joker enters that room and asks if anyone wants to see a magic trick. In the context of the film it’s horrifying, and serves to cannily demonstrate how much of a psychopath Joker is. But when you tweak that context just a little bit, and you telegraph that moment of horror with a big corny horn sting like that at the beginning of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and it becomes hilarious. Since Jesse posted that video I’ve tweaked his formula to see if it works in other thrilling film moments, and it absolutely does. It works with the work of Joel & Ethan Coen, it works with the work of Francis Ford Coppola, and yes, it works with the work of Edgar Wright.
Sometimes something is just so horrifying you just gotta laugh.
Rating: ★★★★★ A stone cold classic. I didn’t even get to talk about the way Angel & Butterman’s friendship is romantically coded but doesn’t fall into any no homo bullshit. Very much worth it if you’re into funny things and/or action movies.
Economics: Hot Fuzz opened in America on 4/20/2007 to number 6 at the box office, behind the Disney sci-fi cartoon Meet The Robinsons in its 4th week of release and ahead of the Ice Cube family comedy Are We Done Yet in its 3rd week of release. It would go on to make $23 million at the US Box office plus $57 million internationally, plus $37 million in home video sales against its £8 million budget (about $12 million at the exchange rate in 2007). Its success cemented Edgar Wright as a filmmaker, demonstrating to the world that Shaun of the Dead wasn’t a fluke. His latest film, a new adaptation of Stephen King’s The Running Man is due to be released this november.
Other 2007 Films visited this week:
Fracture: A courtroom thriller starring Ryan Gosling as a hot shot prosecutor and Anthony Hopkins as a brilliant engineer who kills his wife in a jealous rage, confesses to the crime, and then proceeds to use his genius brain to walk away from trial as a free man. Gosling does some rather questionable Okie accent work and there’s a weird subplot where his boss (Rosamund Pike) sleeps with him and, just, everyone is okay with it? Also toss this one on the pile of courtroom dramas that don’t understand what Double Jeopardy means. Still, there are thrills and twists where there need to be, and Hopkins never sounds more Welsh than when he calls Gosling “Willie” ★★★☆☆
Next week: Next
Great article, great movie. I love that there was originally a straightforward love interest in the script but then they just got rid of that character and gave the lines to Nick Frost. Works perfectly.