Q: Lets put it this way. I actually get this movie. I get what the writer/directer was trying to do. I understand that the dialog was meant to be dry and emotionless. I understand that the plot was supposed to be non-climactic and stale. That was what the writer/director was going for. A very very very dry humor/comedy. With all that understanding, I still think the movie sucked. It seemed like the writer/director was trying to recreate Napolean Dynamite with this movie. It had all of the same features. Even the main character behaved similar to Napolean. But Napolean Dynamite was actually funny. Its script worked. This movie is not. It has no purpose. Well, let me rephrase that. Its only purpose is to rip off Napolean Dynamite and try to capture that look and feel. Too bad it didn't work. OPTIONS:
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A: negative
Q: There's been a vogue for the past few years for often-as-not ironic zombie-related films, as well as other media incarnations of the flesh- eating resurrected dead. "Fido" is a film that's either an attempt to cash in on that, simply a manifestation of it, or both -- and it falls squarely into the category of ironic zombies. The joke here is that we get to see the walking dead in the contrasting context of a broadly stereotyped, squeaky-clean, alternate-history (we are in the wake of a great Zombie War, and the creatures are now being domesticated as slaves) version of a 1950s suburb.

It's a moderately funny concept on its own, and enough perhaps for a five-minute comedy sketch, but it can't hold up a feature-film on its own. The joke that rotting corpses for servants are incongruous with this idealized version of a small town is repeated over and over again, and loses all effectiveness. The soundtrack relentlessly plays sunny tunes while zombies cannibalize bystanders. The word "zombie" is constantly inserted into an otherwise familiarly homey line for a cheap attempt at a laugh.

The very broadness and artificiality of the representation of "the nineteen fifties" here can't help but irritate me. It is so stylized, in it evidently "Pleasantville-"inspired way, that it is more apparent in waving markers of its 1950s-ness around than actually bearing any resemblance to anything that might have happened between 1950 and 1959. There is something obnoxiously sneering about it, as if the film is bragging emptily and thoughtlessly about how more open, down-to-Earth, and superior the 2000s are.

Because the characters are such broad representations of pop-culture 1950s "types," it's difficult to develop much emotional investment in them. Each has a few character traits thrown at him or her -- Helen is obsessed with appearances, and Bill loves golf and his haunted by having had to kill his father -- but they remain quite two-dimensional. Performances within the constraints of this bad writing are fine. The best is Billy Connolly as Fido the zombie, who in the tradition of Boris Karloff in "Frankenstein" actually imparts character and sympathy to a lumbering green monster who cannot speak.

There are little bits of unsubtle allegory thrown around -- to commodity fetishism, racism, classism, war paranoia, et cetera, but none of it really works on a comprehensive level, and the filmmakers don;t really stick with anything.

Unfortunately, this film doesn't really get past sticking with the flimsy joke of "Look! Zombies in 'Leave it to Beaver!'" for a good hour- and-a-half. OPTIONS:
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A: negative
Q: This movie is pretty awful but I have some interesting information about it:

It was filmed in 1976 at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, as well as at Oak Creek Canyon near Sedona, AZ. A good bulk of the extras in the film are then-drama students from NAU. I was a freshman there that year, minoring in theatre, but for some reason I didn't get involved with the production. I did however know several people who did and can supply this rather odd fact:

There is a scene in this movie where two of the principals, as part of their hazing ritual, have to run naked into the woods. They are seen from behind in the movie, doing just that. The thing is, those aren't the actors at all but two guys I knew from the theatre department. The identity of these "stunt posteriors" will remain anonymous, at least to this website, unless they decide to, um, "reveal" themselves! OPTIONS:
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A: negative