Bloody good

I missed a Hot Fuzz screening last week thanks to taxes, but got another chance to see it in advance Thursday night.

Buddy cop comedies have become their own genre, so it's nice to see a new film that sends them up but also takes them to the next level -- like Ocean's Eleven did for heist movies, and Scream did for scary ones. The meta-reality (not Mehta reality, or my life) is on full display as the country constable (Nick Frost, left) asks the transplanted London sergeant (Simon Pegg, right) if he's ever experienced those great supercop moments you see in the movies.

He hasn't, but surely he will as the film progresses. Transferred to Sandford, a bucolic village in the English countryside, he learns that there's no crime but quite a few bloody accidents that claim the lives of some of the allegorically named townspeople. (The gore factor is low, but still bizarre.) Worse yet, for most of the movie he's unable to convince the rest of the police force -- er, service -- that murder most foul is afoot.

Like Fracture, which I reviewed earlier this week, there's a central mystery that the audience tries to solve. Unlike that movie, the eventual explanation is way better than anything I thought up. (Come to think of it, this film is like Scream for multiple reasons.)