Last year, between the two of us, we watched an average of 317 movies.
This year our goal is to top that by watching at least one a day.
And as an extra special torture, we've decided to write about all of them.

22 January 2008

Fido, dir. Andrew Currie (2006)

NIKKI says: I wasn't as excited about this one as everyone else. I thought the trailer made it look really cheap, and kinda lame. I thought the make-up was horrible, and the whole thing just looked ultra-cheesy and try-hard-y.

Thankfully, I was wrong. This was genuinely enjoyable. Well-written, funny, cute, it knew it's audience and it knew its setting. My thing about zombie movies is that there's just so damn many of them, and more coming all the time, that rarely are they original anymore. And I mean truly original. Dead and Deader might have had the zombie as the zombie-hunter, but it was still about zombie hunting. Who really cares anymore? Find 'em, shoot 'em in the head, move on. Same ol'! Shaun of the Dead had been the most original I've seen in ages, and that was really because the zombies weren't the focus. As we all know, in the old school zombie flicks, the zombies were a sociological metaphor, not a beast to be destroyed simply because of its very existence. So many recent zombie movie make killing the zombies what it's all about. Boring.

Fido went back to the Shaun thing. I felt the movie was about tolerance and acceptance of others, and was very much relevant to today's political circumstances. Even though the film was set in the 1950s, many of the themes were pertinent to today -- America living in fear, for example. The zombies just happened to be the thing that made everyone realise their mistakes.

The little kid was great -- he made the film more enjoyable just 'cause he was so darn good. I liked the added twist of having Billy Connolly as the main zombie yet never having him utter more than a grunt. I loved the relationship between Fido and the mum, even though I think her feeling for him came on kind of suddenly. Still, that's a tiny flaw. I enjoyed this immensely. Good black comedy, interesting social exploration.


3.5/5

STEVE says:
Modern Zombie movies tend to leave me a bit cold, usually lacking the kind of social commentary that George Romero instilled in them when he created (perhaps re-created) the genre in 1968, and horror comedies are so rarely done well, anyway, that my expectations for Fido were quite low. So it came as a surprise that I liked Fido as much as I did.

The movie is set in the 50s, 30 or so years after a viral outbreak left the world ravaged by Zombies. But no worries, it's all be cleaned up by Zombcorp, the Zombies banished to something like the Forbidden Zone, and America returned to it's apple-pie normalcy. Oh, except that now some Zombies are fitted with neck braces that inhibit their need to feed on human flesh and are used as domestic servants, as America just can't help but take advantage of the weak and underprivileged.

So, social commentary: tick. What about the comedy? I'll just say this - Billy Connolly has the lead, yet never utters a single word. I don't know if it's because you know it's Billy Connolly or what, but you could almost hear his accent in all the grunting and moaning. That's just hilarious to me.

3.5/5