Fido

There's a group blog that I read that's not a movie blog, just a group of people with a roughly similar philosophical mindset posting articles on things they find interesting. There is one guy interested in cult movies, with an emphasis on the bad stuff from the 80s and beyond, who posts an article a week about some interestingly bad movie he's found on one or another of the free streaming services. A few weeks back he posted about Fido. The poster he embedded in the article looked familiar, and I realized I had this one on the Lions Gate horror (well, it really should be comic horror) box set I picked up mostly for Earth Girls are Easy. But seeing this guy mention Fido gave me the impetus to drag out that box set again and watch it.

The movie is set in what looks like a simulacrum of 1950s suburbia, but with a difference. Opening the movie is one of those black-and-white educational films that were still getting shown in schools when I was in elementary school circa 1980. Apparently there was a low-level nuclear war, and the radiation turned the recently deceased into zombies -- indeed, there's enough radiation left over that to this day if you don't behead a dead person, they'll turn into a zombie. Thankfully, however, the benevolent ZomCom company was able to get the zombie problem under control.

Not only that, but after putting up a protective fence around each little town to keep the zombies in the woods out, ZomCom set about figuring a way to keep zombies docile so that they could be used much the way middle-class families had maids back in the day. The more zombies you can afford to buy, the higher your social status apparently is. The Robinson family, however, doesn't have a zombie servant, mostly because Dad (Dylan Baker) has a fear of zombies. Mom (Carrie-Ann Moss), however, buys one, and their son Timmy (K'Sun Ray) dubs the zombie Fido (Billy Connolly).

One day, Timmy takes Fido for a walk in the park, hoping to teach Fido to throw a baseball back and forth. They accidentally knock over an old lady over and kill her; predictably she turns into a zombie. Meanwhile, a couple of Timmy's classmates who are in the equivalent of the Cub Scouts, bully poor Timmy and shoot off their BB guns. The bullies get accused of killing the old lady, and they vow revenge.

One thing leads to another, and the two young bullies hold Timmy hostage in a mountain cabin, while the police eventually discover that it was really Fido who killed the old lady, sending him back to the ZomCom facility. Timmy's attempt to free him leads to a much bigger zombie invasion.

A lot of filmmakers have tried to put their own spin on the zombie genre, with comedy having been done any number of times. A zombie movie based about stylized Boomer nostalgia, however? I don't think that's been done. I have to admit that I'm not a particular fan of the modern-day look at Boomer nostalgia, because it always seems to sterilized and predictable (eg. the message of the stifling nature of suburbia has to be put in to the movie). As such, it sometimes seems like there's more attention paid to getting the parodic parts right than to getting the plot to work. Physically, Fido looks nice if you like that sort of representation of the 1950s. And people who like zombie films more than I do will probably like this one more than I did.

Fido is another of those movies that I'm glad it was on a box set, but not the sort of thing I'm looking to watch a bunch of times or that I'd pay standalone DVD prices for.