Fido – Review
Fido is a comedy zombie movie starring Billy Connolly and Carrie-Anne Moss that many people missed when it first came out in 2006 – 2008 (wherever you’re based). After a recent spending spree on the Amazon Marketplace, in between reading emails and games of online bingo (What? It’s fun!), Fido was the first DVD to turn up and, after some hearty recommendations on Twitter, I put this rental only copy (marketplace ftw!) on to watch.
The film is set in the ‘only on TV perfect’ 1950′s where the dead have started coming back to life thanks to radioactive space dust; as hinted at in the original Night of the Living Dead, complete with a great black in white intro and homage to the 1968 classic. Scientists at ZomCom have since managed to invent a collar that controls the zombies’ cannibalistic urges and now people have zombie servants ready to do their every bidding.
The story follows little Timmy Robinson (K’Sun Ray), a socially awkward kid who is picked on by his peers and ignored by his father, and ‘Fido’, his 6ft tall zombie best friend (Billy Connolly). It’s not long before a collar malfunction means Fido gets loose but it turns out that zombies still have some of their humanity; Fido actually protects Timmy and acts a surrogate father to him. Once ZomCom find out that FIdo got loose though it’s up to Timmy and his mum Helen (Carrie-Anne Moss) to defeat the evil head of ZomCom.
The story itself isn’t particularly strong, though more than functionally serves to carry the characters through their development. The whole film echoes the issues of the 1950′s, with zombies taking the place of black Americans at the dawn of black civil rights. It also reflects the rise of consumerism (some other families have 6 zombies!)and is set perfectly in the time where the world conducted the first organ transplant and the space race started with the launch of Sputnik 1 and Explorer 1.
The zombies in Fido are the traditional Romero zombies; slow, with a modicum of intelligence and will chew on you if given half a chance. These zombies however seem to retain some of their feelings being able to be upset and show love and loyalty to their human ‘masters’. That said don’t expect to be seeing a lot of blood and guts, the zombies (Connolly in particular) are merely painted grey rather than decomposing and other fresher zombies simply have a couple of veins drawn on and some nasty false teeth.
Fido is a hard film to sum up. There’s a lack of belly laughs though more than enough humour to crack a smile, making it hard to recommend as a pure comedy. There’s no gore, guts or menacing bad guy to sell it to horror oriented fans and there’s no survivalist element to recommend it to those that like their post-apocalyptic movies.
That said it is an entertaining film, one that just happens to have zombies. Decent performances from all of the cast, a functional story and likeable characters (even the zombies) makes this a refreshingly different film to have in your collection and one that almost all the family can watch, though the ratings vary wildly from a French U – suitable for all – to a US R – restricted!
If you liked Shaun of the Dead and aren’t looking for shocks, screams or explicit violence then this is a pretty good was to get your daily zombie intake.
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I find it interesting that you gleaned a civil rights message out of this movie. Having seen it a couple times now (and having been one of the FEW Americans that saw it in theaters LOL), I found it to be a really capable satire of cold-war paranoia set against the backdrop of the blissfully naive media of the 1950′s.
I think a lot of our nostalgia for those “simpler times” comes from those early days of family friendly television, but actually studying up on the times, the world lived in fear of nuclear annihilation. We were taught to spy on our neighbors, and to report those who might be “Red Sympathizers”.
I think Fido does a remarkable job of of using the undead as a metaphor for the “corrupting influences of Communism”, and our heroic figures (like the brilliant Czerny) are jingoistic extremes of Americana. I guess all the more interesting that such a skillful lampooning of American history came out of Canada (maybe another reason it wasn’t so well received here in the states with a completely unwarranted R rating).
Belly laughs may be fewer than Shaun of the Dead, but for those of us in the Nick at Nite generation, there’s a lot to like here.
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