CR: Fido

Hey everybody, this is Jameson. Over the next couple of days I will be wrapping up the last of my Sundace coverage. First up we have director Andrew Currie’s Fido, which screened at Sundance as part of the Park City at Midnight program. Fido is set in the idyllic suburban town of Willard, frozen in the style and sensibilities of 1950’s America, and overrun with zombies – but relax, the walking dead have been domesticated thanks to a nifty zombie-control collar manufactured by the good people at ZomCom!

The protagonist of the story is grade-schooler Timmy Robinson (K’Sun Ray), who’s having a rough go at it when the film opens. He’s the most unpopular kid on the block (not a single friend), his dad (Dylan Baker — The Matador) is suffering from some serious mental issues (residual post-traumatic shell-shock from the Zombie Wars), and he is bullied at school (a life-threatening issue at a grade-school where practice on a rifle range is part of the curriculum). He’s also the only kid in town whose family doesn’t own a zombie – that is until his mother (Carrie-Anne Moss — Memento — who looks absolutely stunning as a 50’s housewife) ignores the protests of his zombiphobic father and purchases one (to help out around the house and such). Reluctant at first, it’s not long before Timmy develops a friendship with the newest addition to the household, who he names Fido (Billy Connolly — Fuck).

Fido is a brilliant mix of tongue-in-cheek humor, black comedy, and splatter, and ranks as one of the most enjoyable and unique film’s I’ve seen in a long time. Much in the way Tim Burton mashed 1950’s Americana with imagery and ideas drawn from German Expressionist works like The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari and Frankenstein when he made Edward Scissorhands, Currie mashes his picture perfect town with mythos from the works of George A. Romero. He transports the (somewhat lame and very weak) ‘Space Particles!’ zombie-creation explanation from the original Night of the Living Dead into a cheeky black and white public service announcement, the entire town of Willard is surrounded by a barbed wire fence that keeps out the free-roaming zombies that occupy the ‘wild zone,’ and capitalizes on the opportunity for social-commentary presented by the subject matter – domesticated zombies are basically slaves to be bought and sold for menial labor (throughout the film we see zombie landscapers, milkmen, paperboys, factory workers, and performing a load of other tasks I won’t spoil for you). In a world where the dead can be used for cheap labor, Timmy’s funeral home-owner father finds himself in a world where he is needed less and less, a metaphor for a changing economy and industrial evolution. Zanier, funnier, and gorier than Shaun of the Dead, there has never been a zombie film like this before. One of the best films I saw at Sundance, and my choice the most enjoyable.