Review of Fido

I suppose "Fido" is seemingly set in the 1950s to make fun of the era's reputed conformity, which, indeed, is from which many of the jokes here arise, but nothing is really done to equate that unquestioned normality to the zombie slaves that the citizens of the corporate town own--parading them around on leashes through the neighborhood when not employing them as dubiously-cost-efficient laborers--what with them accidently destroying property left and right, let alone the threat that their mechanical necklaces will malfunction and, thus, release the zombies from the constraint on their drive to eat human flesh. Of course, one sees where the movie is going. As "Fido" challenges, in its comedic fashion, the conception of zombies as mindless cannibals, it oddly doesn't do the same for the 1950s conformity. Putting Carrie-Anne Moss in a stereotypical housewife dress and the otherwise single male neighbor making a sex slave out of his zombie surely doesn't do anything to shake the white suburban, "Leave It to Beaver" nostalgia. Although, admittedly, giving the main zombie a dog's name and treating him as such, pays off humorously when Fido directs the mother played by Moss to follow him to where the boy is trapped--and get this, the boy's name is Timmy! That's right out of another 1950s TV show (although it began in literature and was revived in some 1940s films), "Lassie."

"Fido" also does a poor job at reviving any of the Cold War, nuclear or Space Age fears that underlined the movies it's supposedly parodying, beginning with its film-within-the-film regarding the radiation and zombie apocalypse. The result is that "Fido" looks as though it were thrown into the past merely to give it a twist to what is otherwise a rip-off of other zombie spoofs such as "Shaun of the Dead" (2004). Ironically, it's a comedy that works best if one, in zombified fashion, turns off their brain.