Dead man mocking

>> Hit-and-miss zombie comedy
Fido offers black humour, social satire and gore

by Malcolm Fraser

Fans of Shaun of the Dead may remember a throwaway gag at the end, where the film’s marauding zombies have been controlled and are now used as servants to do menial tasks. The new comedy Fido is essentially a feature-length extension of this concept, a new contender in the burgeoning zombie-comedy subgenre.

The film takes place in an alternate-universe 1950s; Zomcom, a huge corporation, has pioneered technology to enslave zombies, and every respectable family owns at least one. Timmy (K’Sun Ray) is a young misfit with a dysfunctional family: his father (Dylan Baker) is cold and distant, and his mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) is obsessed with social status. She buys a zombie against her phobic husband’s wishes, since Zomcom head honcho Mr. Bottoms (Henry Czerny) has just moved into the neighbourhood and she wants to keep up appearances. Timmy soon befriends the zombie (Billy Connolly), whom he names Fido, and Fido protects him against school bullies and gives him the companionship his father withholds.

The tone set by director Andrew Currie is both broadly satirical and cheerfully perverse. There are obvious echoes of slavery, segregation and the war on terror in the characters’ treatment of the zombies, but Currie doesn’t flesh out these themes, and it has to be said that 1950s America is a pretty easy target for a critique of consumerism and conformity. On the other hand, the film doesn’t hold back on the black humour, with lots of outright gore as well as occasional implications of zombie-human love.

Currie is an alumnus of the Canadian Film Centre, and although Fido certainly can’t be called a generic Canadian film, ultimately it shares some of the inherent issues of our official national cinema: mainly, it seems torn between its genuine creative impulses and a desire to please by imitating Hollywood. (You can almost hear crusty CFC honcho Norman Jewison egging on Currie to throw in heartwarming scenes and generic plot twists that spoil the film’s subversive energy). And as with so many Canadian films, a critic is torn between encouraging the filmmaker and ordering him back to the drawing board. But all that aside, it’s well-crafted, entertaining and delivers the goods for the horror-comedy fan base.

Fido opens Friday, March 16

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