Fido (2006)

directed by Andrew Currie
Canada
93 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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I love when an aberration in the zombie subgenre like Fido comes along, something that goes in a completely different direction than the standard formula most movies use. The classics are classic for a reason, but a lot of them also came out 45+ years ago, so when a director decides to go with a new direction and makes something that contains few references to the pantheon of zombie films even the least horror-oriented cinemaphile can name, I get kind of excited.

Fido starts off with a short advert about how the zombie outbreak and subsequent zombie war got started in the universe of this film. It's set around the 1950s and it echoes the fascination with outer space and the terror of the Cold War that hallmarked that era, using "space dust" and then "radiation" to explain why the dead just don't stay dead anymore. We get an informative glimpse into the measures taken against people coming back to life, things like separate head coffins and funerals that have become so expensive people save up for them like college. There are subtle digs at capitalism, too; hints at a conglomerate that monopolizes the market and convinces citizens that they depend on them for their very survival.

One of its few downsides is that it can feel like an unrealistically small environment- the fully fleshed-out backstory of the zombie war seems to only have an effect on the one neighborhood that the film takes place in. We don't get to see anything too far from suburbia, although to be fair, that could have been intentional, there's always the possibility that this is the last colony of survivors on Earth, desperately clinging to 50s sunshine and normalcy, while the corporation that dominates them continues to cling to the ugly final scraps of capitalism.

There's also a psychological aspect to this that I rarely see zombie movies do, or if they do, they do it heavy-handedly. The mental state of the populace has clearly changed greatly since the "space dust" came; children are largely desensitized to death and the passing of an elderly loved one is no longer tragic but another thing to be monetized. When somebody's zombie gets free and kills people, well, it's a rare thing, but it happens- and strangely, the deaths themselves are not treated with much feeling, but the punishment for owning a rogue zombie seems to be getting shipped off to the "wild zone", AKA the boundaries beyond which ZomCon's all-seeing empire does not bother to clean up.

The question of what sort of mental capacity a zombie retains is hinted at almost constantly, but never addressed outright. There's mentions of older zombies being trapped underground for the rest of time unless their family can cough up the funds for a head coffin and a proper funeral. On the surface, in dialogue, this movie touches few of the messier aspects of its premise, but believe me, they're there. It hides behind sardonic Lassie references and a genuinely cute story about a boy and his zombie, but if it were to shed its shiny-plastic and colorful-chiffon exterior, it would be one of the deeper and more interesting explorations into the mechanics of a zombie apocalypse.