I WAS dying to see Shaun of the Dead, having chortled massively at its wonderfully deadpan trailer, which seemed to have its comic sensibilities firmly in the right place.

But, disappointingly, it turned out to be just slightly less in need of a soul than the creatures which populate it.

A product of the men from Spaced - director Edgar Wright and his co-writer and star Simon Pegg - it must have seemed like a good idea at the time, an ironic zombie movie, with horror and loads of laughs to boot.

And the cast they assembled couldn't really have been better, what with Dylan Moran, The Office's Lucy Davis and Bill Nighy in a smaller role.

Pegg takes the anti-hero role of Shaun, who's in trouble with his girlfriend Liz because he can't seem to escape the clutches of either his local pub The Winchester, or his best mate Ed (Nick Frost), there to pass wind and play PlayStation in the manner of Johnny Vegas.

Stuck in a dead-end job selling appliances, he's passing through life in a state of inertia, which explains why it takes him so long to realise that a plague has overrun London and zombies now inh-abit the suburbs right outside his door.

And the film works well, with its very British depictions of suburbia.

Only in England could people get strangled with draught excluders, and there's also a mobile disco involved.

One great duplicated tracking shot runs with Shaun as he leaves home to visit the local corner shop and, once again, when he makes the same trip later in the film, he is oblivious to the ruin and wreckage around him.

But, sadly, selected set pieces are not enough to raise the proceedings above mediocre.

Shaun of the Dead is neither scary nor funny enough, and its skewing off into mass carnage at the end to round up the plot means you can't help but think it would have been a heck of a lot sharper as a half-hour episode of Spaced.