haun of the Dead co-creators Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have reunited as writing partners to parody another film genre. They now set their sights on the police procedural with Hot Fuzz, a funny if overlong comedy that also manages to evoke memories of The Wicker Man, High Plains Drifter, The League of Gentlemen and other tales centering on eccentric villagers inhabiting a seemingly angelic township.

Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a workaholic city police whiz who's so perfect that he horribly embarrasses his mediocre colleagues; his arrest rate is 400 percent higher than that of any other police officer. So his three superiors (nice cameos by Martin Freeman and Bill Nighy) ship him off to the remote hamlet of Sandford so he won't keep embarrassing the rest of the London force.

Sergeant Angel and his Japanese peace lily travel to the "the safest village in the country," where the streets are cobblestoned and the residents peaceful. Upon arrival at the village, he finds that his co-workers are a group of complete idiots, led by an Inspector (Jim Broadbent) whose training consists of studying Hollywood action blockbusters. But things, of course, aren't what they seem in Sandford, and Angel discovers a series of outrageously gory murders, and vows to track down whoever’s responsible.

Hot Fuzz takes its cues from the high-octane action film genre, cluttered with MTV-esque montages, but with blood. The uproarious widescreen hemorrhaging is welcome, though, because Wright finds fresh ways to kill off his characters.

The film explodes in the final 30 minutes, playing with all the action craziness, but it slowly morphs into a buddy picture, in the vein of the loud, pulsating, all-action American cop buddy movie - from Beverly Hills Cop to Lethal Weapon - as Angel and his bumbling beer-swilling partner, Danny Butterman, (Nick Frost, also of Shaun of the Dead), feel the need, in true "Lethal Weapon" fashion, to employ some real police force.

A crop of veteran Brit actors play the village elders: Billie Whitelaw, Paul Freeman, Edward Woodward, Anne Reid, and most notably Jim Broadbent as the amiable Police Chief Frank Butterman and Timothy Dalton, splendid as the supermarket manager with a wicked smirk and untrustworthy moustache. Did you identify Cate Blanchett's voice as the woman who dumps Pegg? And did you recognize who that was masquerading as Santa Claus?

Hot Fuzz is better than Shaun Of The Dead, but the pumped-up project does suffer from its share of problems. It's 20 minutes too long for an adventure comedy, and finally falls apart as it struggles towards a number of combustible climaxes. Still, it’s an exuberant, ultraviolent and quintessentially English with the obligatory full-tilt bombastic car chases and shotgun-wielding grannies and disarmingly credible chase and shoot-out set-pieces. And, yeah, Shaun of the Dead was too long too.