Recommended: Fido
Once a month, some friends and I get together for what we call Beer and B-movie Night, where the beer is good and the movies are usually bad. Last night, we did a thing where we picked out movies at random, and somehow ended up with three that went from very bad to very good. The first was the infamous Manos: the Hands of Fate, which was much worse than I'd imagined--it made Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Blade Runner. The second was Flash Gordon, which I'd never seen all of, and which I enjoyed quite a lot, despite being compared to Ming the Merciless throughout. (Of course, how could anyone not like a film that showed so much of BRIAN BLESSED?!?) And then... and then there was Fido.
I'd long since grown weary of the zombie subgenre, and when I saw the cover I at first thought that we were watching it because it had Bruce Campbell in it. (The title character is actually played by Billy Connolly, but in the zombie makeup and without his trademark beard and long hair, he looks quite a lot like Campbell.) The movie had me within about three minutes. The best way of describing it is that it's like a cross between the end of Shaun of the Dead and Pleasantville--in fact, there are quite a few tropes from the latter movie in this one, including a love triangle that includes the mom and dad, and a creepily-smooth authority figure similar to that played in Pleasantville by the late J.T. Walsh--but that only begins to describe this movie's eerie charm. For one thing, instead of being in black and white with growing flashes of color, this was apparently shot in black and white and then colorized, giving it that weird aspect of a tinted postcard (the movie is set sometime in the late 40s or 50s). There's also the fact that zombies are used as slaves, controlled by some sort of electronic collar, and the ethics of that doesn't go unremarked upon in the movie. In fact, the movie has a lot of fun really exploring the more gruesome and disturbing implications of the post-Zombie War world, while at the same time sticking to the overall trope of an old Wonderful World of Disney TV movie, albeit one in which necrophilia is heavily implied.
It's just great. I'm thinking of getting my own copy. Here's the trailer:
I'd long since grown weary of the zombie subgenre, and when I saw the cover I at first thought that we were watching it because it had Bruce Campbell in it. (The title character is actually played by Billy Connolly, but in the zombie makeup and without his trademark beard and long hair, he looks quite a lot like Campbell.) The movie had me within about three minutes. The best way of describing it is that it's like a cross between the end of Shaun of the Dead and Pleasantville--in fact, there are quite a few tropes from the latter movie in this one, including a love triangle that includes the mom and dad, and a creepily-smooth authority figure similar to that played in Pleasantville by the late J.T. Walsh--but that only begins to describe this movie's eerie charm. For one thing, instead of being in black and white with growing flashes of color, this was apparently shot in black and white and then colorized, giving it that weird aspect of a tinted postcard (the movie is set sometime in the late 40s or 50s). There's also the fact that zombies are used as slaves, controlled by some sort of electronic collar, and the ethics of that doesn't go unremarked upon in the movie. In fact, the movie has a lot of fun really exploring the more gruesome and disturbing implications of the post-Zombie War world, while at the same time sticking to the overall trope of an old Wonderful World of Disney TV movie, albeit one in which necrophilia is heavily implied.
It's just great. I'm thinking of getting my own copy. Here's the trailer:
Click to view