Fido

So you've cast The Big Yin Billy Connolly in your film, a man renowned for his vocal abilities and broad Scottish accent, and you don't want him to utter a single line throughout the movie. Disastrous decision? Turns out no.

Fido's an interesting little movie. Like Shaun Of The Dead it's a zombie film that places it's action somewhere a bit different. In Fido's case the setting is an alternative 50's America where the war fought the decade before was in fact the events of Romero's Night of the Living Dead. As we come in the situation's similar to Land of the Dead in the sense that the human race are walled into various cities which are surrounded by wasteland filled with the walking dead. Whereas in Land the city was a corrupt vice filled shithole, the setting for Fido is the sort of old fashioned American suburb where everything appears to be perfect, but inevitably the surface ideal is deceiving. The major difference between Fido and, say, the middle time-line in The Hours (you know, the Julianne Moore one, or the one without homosexual guilt or fake noses) is that man has harnessed the wonderful power of zombie thanks to brain modifying technology and any unlucky enough to have been caught in the war are now the bottom feeders of society. No respectable household can be seen not to have at least one as a servant.

And that's where we meet the Robinsons. Mum Helen (Carrie Ann Moss) is the sort of stereotypical 50's movie housewife in that all she cares about are appearances. As such she acquires a solitary zombie servant (the Big Yin), all the family can afford. This causes anxiety in Father Bill (Dylan Baker) who hates zombies and who's only dream in life is to be able to afford funerals for the whole family in which their heads are buried in separate coffins to avoid coming back for seconds. Son Timmy is delighted as he has no friends. Thus starts a touching friendship, much like those found in Lassie films or any of those TV shows that feature an animal with a name that points out what type of animal it is (Skippy, Flipper, er, Woof!). The only thing that could go wrong is Fido (the best name for a zombie ever?) eating one of the neighbours...

Shamefully Fido's never quite as funny as the initial setup suggests it's going to be. It's actually quite gentle in tone. Most of the humour is quirky, observational stuff based on the genres being melded together. That doesn't stop it being a good little film, it just doesn't quite reach the heights you might expect it to. There is a lot to love, the little visual touches such as Death! magazine, and the performances from the leads are excellent. Carrie Ann Moss shows she can do domestic goddess and humourous while Dylan Baker, you'll know who he is when you see him, is wonderfully paranoid. But it's the Big Yin's film. He doesn't have a line yet he is hilarious throughout, showing those acting chops like he did in Mrs. Brown. This time he has to convey everything through facial expressions and grunts, so in some ways it's an even better performance than that one. Oh, and he's scary as hell when he goes bad.

The thing is most people it seems will not see Fido. At the point of writing no release date has been set in the UK. It's a shame because it deserves to be seen. It may not be an almighty shakeup of the zombie genre, or a laugh riot, but it is a genuinely interesting film that will definitely find a cult following. And it would be a great shame if the Big Yin's performance was missed.