Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on June 14, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
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Fido (Billy Connolly) is not your typical member of the cinematic zombie pantheon. Rather than stalking through a rural countryside or deserted city seeking human flesh or brains, he wears a collar around his neck that suppresses those natural hungers and makes him a docile servant of the suburban Robinson family. He’s such a “nice” ghoul that the Robinsons’ young son Timmy (K’Sun Ray) has adopted him as kind of a pet and given him that appropriate moniker. For this is an alternate-reality Earth where the walking dead, following their resurrection by space radiation and the subsequent “Zombie Wars,” are either restricted from invading civilized areas by high metal fences or given those collars by the Zomcon company, which has turned the creatures into menial labor.
Every so often, though, Fido’s collar goes on the fritz and he turns back into a moaning, bloodthirsty fiend anxious to put the bite on a tasty human—which he occasionally does before Timmy, anxious to retain his new friend, gets him back under control. And Fido the movie, as it turns out, is a lot like Fido the zombie: The potential is there for it to cut loose, but it has been tamed and domesticated, with the collar only slipping every once in a while to allow it to get outrageous.
To be sure, that’s part of the movie’s approach—to play everything in the style of a vintage sitcom with the visual sheen of an old Technicolor melodrama, combined to elicit a 1950s veneer. (No prizes for guessing that the movie opens with a classroom instructional film extolling Zomcon’s virtues.) Yet the thematic concerns are very much of the moment, dealing with issues of safety from an outside threat, how far people will go to insure it and how far a corporation like Zomcon will go to exploit that desire. It’s a heady mix of metaphors that Andrew Currie, who directed from a script he wrote with Robert Chomiak and Dennis Heaton, has tackled here, and while Fido offers more food for thought than your typical horror film (even in the often allegorical zombie subgenre), it feels like he’s bitten off more than he can chew when it comes to addressing those concerns while also keeping the audience engaged.
To use one more ghoul-appropriate turn of phrase, the parts of Fido are greater than the whole. The performances are all on the right deadpan wavelength, led by Dylan Baker and Carrie-Anne Moss as Timmy’s parents and highlighted by Connolly’s turn in the title role. Suppressing his usual outsized persona behind modestly effective walking-deceased makeup (supervised by Todd Masters), the actor/comedian brings the role to “life” with amusing physical tics and the suggestion of a spark of humanity behind that dead flesh. He shares good boy-and-his-dog chemistry with young newcomer Ray, making the central relationship upon which the whole story hangs work in the movie’s bizarre context.
Yet having teased out all kinds of socially satirical/subversive wrinkles on the idea of zombies existing amongst us, and ideas about how different types of people would relate to them, Currie and co. seem strangely tentative about exploiting them to their full potential. It’s as if they feel like shooting for big laughs or going to other extremes would somehow cheapen the material, and while Currie’s visuals are eye-catching (with fine cinematography by Fright Night’s Jan Kiesser), his direction is otherwise stead and unemphatic. As a result, the movie meanders along, eliciting chuckles here and there without building to either dramatic peaks or gut-busting laughs. Strange as it may seem to say, perhaps we’ve seen so many zombie films by now that simply making allegorical use of the ghouls isn’t enough in and of itself. The bar has been set high by everything from George A. Romero’s films to Shaun of the Dead, and Fido lacks the energy to reach it.
