On February 14, a British comedy caper from the makers of Shaun of the Dead opens nationwide. Potential Romeos, take heed: the opening date for Hot Fuzz has been cheekily chosen. Despite its picturesque West Country setting, this is not a typical Valentine’s date movie. Instead of any obvious love interest, it gives you gun-toting grannies getting horribly trolleyed in supermarket shoot-’em-ups and “more Semtex, vicar?” moments. Your date’s less likely to grab your hand than have her own clasped over her mouth in gleeful shock at the grisly audacity of its vision.

The low-budget cult hit Shaun of the Dead scored laughs by removing the zombie genre from its traditional American slacker setting and relocating it to north London. With Hot Fuzz, the same team have taken the over-the-top, Lethal Weapon-style police action movie — all physics-defying car chases and a superpowered array of heavy weaponry — and set it among a West Country constabulary. The result is rich in moments of yelp-out-loud humour. Once again, making mischievous fun from playing an American genre in an incongruous British setting should deliver at the box office. Shaun of the Dead, produced on a shoestring budget of less than $10m, made a profit in the cinema and topped the DVD chart.

Hot Fuzz, with a budget of $16m, which is peanuts for an action film, was again written by the director Edgar Wright and its star Simon Pegg. He plays Nicholas Angel, a Metropolitan police officer whose arrest record is so impeccable, he’s become an embarrassment to his peers. He is rusticated to the sleepy model village of Sandford. Soon, however, he becomes troubled as to why the incidence of gruesome fatal accidents is so bafflingly high in the almost crime-free town. To just what lengths are the town’s fathers prepared to go to maintain Sandford’s spotless reputation, under the guise of their sinister, super-vigilant Neighbourhood Watch scheme? What questions was the local reporter asking when his life’s story was so gruesomely spiked? Where have all the hippie travellers, buskers and hoodies disappeared to? Playing the town’s senior citizenry is an A list of older British actors, including Jim Broadbent, as the head of the local constabulary, Billie Whitelaw, Edward Woodward, Paul Freeman and a marvellously evil Timothy Dalton.

“It’s like a particularly fun Saga holiday,” Kenneth Cranham twinkled, while resting on the shady sidelines of the set during a blisteringly hot day’s filming of a fête scene last summer.

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• Hot Fuzz - Sunday Times review

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Meet the flying squad

Kevin Maher takes a spin with the stars of police comedy Hot Fuzz

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Playing Pegg’s police partner is his real-life best friend and former flatmate, Nick Frost, who co-starred in Shaun of the Dead and Spaced, Pegg’s television stoner sitcom. In Hot Fuzz, the 35-year-old Frost plays Danny Butterman, Sergeant Angel’s dozy country-boy partner, who teaches the ambitious city-boy copper some valuable life lessons. “If anyone’s the love interest, it’s Danny,” Pegg told me during a break from filming. “We felt that at the heart of these buddy movies is male bonding. Male heterosexual friendship that is loving is quite a complex and unexplored area in film. Women are shown hugging without that being seen as threatening to their identities. And, well, I think it’s nice when guys do that too.”

Hot Fuzz is a buddy movie both in front of and behind the camera. Beyond the screen is the heartening story of how a group of friends became big names in the British movie industry, and even Hollywood players, by promoting one another’s projects and working together amicably. “It’s like a Human League song,” Frost joked last month about his relationship with Pegg. When the two met, Frost was indeed working as a waiter, though not in a cocktail bar but in a Mexican chain restaurant, Chiquito. Pegg’s girlfriend at the time worked there too. “Then she and he split up, and we got each other.” Frost, an Essex boy, had been working at Chiquito for 6 years when Pegg picked him up, turned him around and turned him into something new by writing a part for him in Spaced.

The two men are touchingly fond of each other. When asked if his chunkier chum followed his punishing training regime for Hot Fuzz, Pegg becomes defensive. “Nick’s got a rugby-player’s build,” he insists. “He’s big, but he’s nimble. If you do get the chance to see him with his shirt off, he’s actually pretty bull-like. I always compare him to Oliver Hardy, which he hates. But, you know, he has that lightness of touch. Despite being a heavy guy, he’s got that agility. But he should stop smoking. Please put that in.”

If Pegg and Frost are like the group’s old married couple, then Hot Fuzz’s director, Wright, and producer, Nira Park, are their best man and chief bridesmaid. Channel 4 matchmade this creative force for Spaced. They all made their proper film debut with Shaun of the Dead, under the aegis of Working Title, now an offshoot of Universal.

“She’s a miracle,” Pegg says of Park, who, despite being heavily pregnant with her first child during Hot Fuzz’s 11-week shoot in London and Wells, was on set every day. “When she disappeared for six weeks to have Jake, we were all running around like chickens without heads. But now she’s back running a family and a production company.”

From now until mid-April, Pegg, Frost and Wright will be seeing one another daily, as they plug Hot Fuzz from Australia to Scandinavia. Universal has put its publicity muscle behind the film, but it remains a risk: will cinemagoers in California and Kyoto get the joke of shoot-’em-ups in a rural Somerfield, or a Women’s Institute type transmogrifying into the sort of knife-wielding harpy that wouldn’t be out of place in a Korean slasher movie? At least Pegg et al seem to have a home crowd rooting for them: the room of journalists I saw Hot Fuzz with rocked with laughter.

Most actors moan about doing publicity, but this unjaded bunch are enthusiastic about showing off their past two years’ work. “ As my girlfriend reminds me if I complain of being tired: ‘It’s hardly like working in a strontium mine in Kazakhstan.’ How lucky am I to be making good films with my mates?” Frost says.

For Wright, Hot Fuzz represents another kind of homecoming, which will be recognised on February 15 when the film has its regional premiere in Wells’s small cinema. “Edgar’s a local lad,” a Wells taxi-driver burbled at me last summer. “He made his first film here as a boy.”

It was Wright’s student film, the Sergio Leone-inspired A Fistful of Fingers, filmed in Wells during a summer holiday and starring schoolfriends, that got him spotted. “But what got me started was winning a video camera in a BBC Going Live competition as a kid,” he recalls. “From the outset, I never tried to make films that were particularly sensitive to my Wells environment. It was the same as it is now: I wanted to make a Dirty Harry-inspired thriller, only set in an English cathedral town instead of San Francisco Bay.”

Today, Frost, Park, Pegg — who’s just finished David Schwimmer’s first film — and Wright all have separate projects on the go. However, once their vision of what Pegg describes hopefully as “how Martin Scorsese might have directed a Miss Marple film in the 1970s” has been promoted, he and Wright will start writing a third film. “We’d like to make a trilogy of British comedy-action films,” says Wright.

They are as yet unsure which genre will be given an incongruous British accent. Frost doesn’t seem to care, as long as there’s a part for him. “That means I’ve got at least one more film before I get found out,” he says, grinning.

Hot Fuzz is released nationwide on February 14

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