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FIDO
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Thanks to the Geiger Collar, we have won the Zombie Wars and made 1955 America safe for democracy – at least the parts of it inside the fence. Though the undead are a constant menace – anyone who dies immediately becomes undead, even your wife ("I wouldn't hesitate to shoot Dee Dee in the head"), and they can be killed only through decapitation and separate head burial – we've found a use for them! Clumsy and slow-witted though they be, when dressed in gray coveralls that match their pewter faces and hands, they make wonderful gardeners, assembly-line workers, crossing guards, and all those menial shuffle-about jobs that a post-apocalyptic recovering America needs if it is to restore our freedom-loving values in a troubled world.
Zombies are status symbols – why, the new executives from Zomcon who moved into the Johnsons' place across the street have six! – so sensually neurotic Helen Robinson (Carrie-Anne Moss, Memento, think Julianne Moore in The Hours) brings home a manservant, whom perky son Timmy (think Billy Mumy in Lost in Space) dubs Fido, much to the consternation of withdrawn shallow dad Bill (Dylan Baker, Happiness, whose career consists mainly of playing creepy fathers).
Not everyone is so remote from zombies; why, Mr. Theopoulos (Tim Blake Nelson, O Brother), with his cigarette holder and silver silk bathrobe decorated with red dragons, is positively enraptured by his curving and barely-gray housekeeper Tammy: "dropped dead of a brain aneurysm in the supermarket, got a collar on her practically before she hit the ground. Stop with the teeth, Tammy."
"Are zombies dead or alive?" Timmy asks Mr. Bottoms of Zomcon, to which there is no good answer, and it is the film's small wisdom that we never know. When collared, Fido (Billy Connolly, Mrs. Brown) is mute, docile, obedient, and as facially expressive as a basset hound. When the collar fritzes, he lurches off to devour whoever is closest to hand.
Rated R (for zombie-related violence, says the MPAA), Fido stays entirely true to its imagined world, never delving into heavy meaning or contemporary relevance – thank goodness – yet it finds time to tweak the lexicon of family-therapy:
I'd say I'm a pretty darn good father. My father tried to eat me, I don't remember trying to eat Timmy.
Bill, just because your father tried to eat you, does that mean we all have to be unhappy – forever?
And of our gerontophobia:
Well, she is over sixty-five, Helen, and old people can't be trusted. [To Mr. Bottoms] Ain't that right?
Yeah, we've had a lot of trouble with old people.
Nothing more substantial than Young Frankenstein in Pleasantville, Fido is carried by three scintillating performances: Connolly's mime humanity, Nelson's lecherous sybarism, and particularly Moss's hesitant, girdled yearning. "I wish I would have known you before – before you died," she says, and so do we.