Zombie Movie Review: Fido

My cinematographic zombie culture is still very limited. Beyond the big classics I have not seen that many zombies movies, and that’s really cool because whenever I want to watch one I feel like a kid on a Christmas morning not knowing which present to open!

I had never heard of Fido until I stumbled upon its movie poster by accident; I found this image so ridiculously absurd that I immediately wanted to know more about it. Lucky me, I bought the DVD for 1 euro at a garage sale, and let’s just say it was a euro well spent.

The story takes place in the 50’s in a small American town. Houses are nicely aligned, gardens well attended, women have neat and crazy haircuts, men are utterly macho and drive gorgeous cars. Overall, the idyllic postcard image of the post second world war era in the good ol’ America. Except for one thing, zombies are everywhere. So yeah, in Fido the zombie apocalypse happened, but thankfully some clever scientists have found a way to control the undead thanks to an electronic collar that voids their natural tendency to feed on humans and turns them into a docile workforce. That’s right, Zombies have become slave workers for the humans and are being sold by the company who owns the zombie control technology “Zom Con”. In this crazy society, owning one or several zombies is a mark of wealth and good taste.

In Fido, a young boy is against all odds going to become friend with “his” zombie. This element reminded me in some aspects of Dr Logan attempting to tame Bub the zombie in Day of the Dead. The comparison however stops there as unlike Day of the Dead, Fido falls into the zombie comedy category. Also, while Logan’s research were meant to allow the coexistence of human and zombies, Fido’s pitch is very different as it describes the exploitation of one “race” by another – human nature at its finest.

The movie features some good zombie effects in addition to a good but predictable plot. What I really liked about this story is the original angle, certainly not the typical zombie survival flick. That being said, the scenario still respects the basic zombie codes and when these magical collars stop working (and of course they do breakdown) the zeds get back to being bity.

To some extent  I think this story can also be seen as a parable of the class conflicts in a modern society. I might be pushing this too far but the zombies could be seen as an image of the labor class working for the rich; a situation that inevitably leads to discrimination and eventually the uprising of the oppressed.

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