When George Romero was originally asked about how he would follow up Day of the Dead, he always said he wanted to do a flick called Twilight of the Dead. Sticking with his whole "my movies aren't just about zombies, but about social commentary through zombies" philosophy, Georgie Boy said he wanted to treat the zombies in this fourth installment as the world treats homeless people, basically ignoring the ghouls and going about their normal lives... yeah, great idea, except hobos don't rip people in half and munch on their warm, sticky innards... unless they're CHUDs... Besides, that doesn't sound like it'd make for much of a movie. No wonder he changed course and went the Land of the Dead route instead. Anyway, one idea that was touched upon in Day of the Dead was the domestication of the living dead to make them productive members of society again, as done through the loveable and now legendary zombie Bub. To a lesser extent, Shaun of the Dead showed us the possibility of simply chaining up our formerly deceased friends and loved ones in a tool shed as pets. Can an entire movie be created around a single joke made in another flick, not unlike the way sweet sweet candy is built around a Tootsie Roll core to create the always tasty Tootsie Pop? That's what Fido is here to tell us.

In a world that's kinda like a smoosh of Night of the Living Dead and Pleasantville, the dead rise thanks to an unexplainable space radiation that's seeped into our atmosphere. Fortunately we don't need to blow their undead brains out anymore though, thanks to an obedience collar that suppresses the ghouls' flesh munchies. As is the tradition of our nation, this allows for the living to put the undead to use as free laborers, surrogate parents and, in some nauseating ways, bed buddies. 200 years ago these would be known as slaves, while today we call them "illegal immigrants". I was going to say we call them "Mexicans", but saying that all illegal immigrants are Mexican is just ignorant. Though I imagine it would be easier and more affordable to just put a bullet in every zombie that crosses your path, you just can't smother the American urge to own people, so pretty much every household gets their own undead butler/maid/nanny/pet, all thanks to the businessmen (remember, 1950s, so businesswomen are science fiction, like invaders from Mars and homosexuals) of ZomCon.

One passenger on this global express train of weirdness is Timmy, the always present "odd man out" in his little society who's the only person left that thinks there's something kinda wrong with this fucked up situation they're all living in. As with any story involving kids, Timmy gets bullied around by the ignorant future Republicans of the class, has the pre-pube chest tickles over his new pigtailed classmate and general crack shot rifle girl Cindy, and has a pet he loves more than anything else in the world: titular maggot buffet Fido (comedian Billy Connolly). Well, when you're the least popular kid in school and even your parents don't like you, you gotta find companionship somewhere, even if it's in hands of the living dead. There were a lot of reanimated corpses in my childhood... Isis always complained about how hard it was to get the smell out of the furniture...

Timmy's not the only one affected by Fido's presence in the household though. It seems that dad(Dylan Baker)'s got a bad case of zombiephobia, mom(Carrie-Anne Moss)'s sharing flirty glances with the family pet, and a minor collar malfunction on Fido leads to a local ghoul contamination and possible jail time for Timmy and the family... meaning they'll be exiled to "the Wild Zone" outside of their town, where killer zombies roam free. No need for expensive jails when all of your criminals can just as easily be devoured by the living dead. Don't worry, it all eventually wraps up with a happy ending, albeit a fittingly twisted happy ending, but a happy ending none-the-less.

Of course the funniest thing about this zombie world is that '50s mentality of "everything's peachy keen and nothing can't be solved without a smile and an apple pie!" is completely fucking wrong by modern standards. Flesh devouring monsters taking care of our children and handling our food? Nobody swears?! Mom more concerned with grass stains on your shirt than bullies shoving rifles into your face? Every man woman and child carrying a firearm? Treating our deceased friends and loved ones as slave labor with shock collars? Everybody does whatever the people in power tell them to, making them no different from their zombies? Moms and dads sleep in separate beds? Housewives in their best June Cleaver dresses greeting their husbands when they get home from work with a Martini in hand? Put everybody in cowboy hats and pick-up trucks and you'd think we'd fallen into George Bush's wettest wet dream... hence why it's so odd that it's all happening in one of my new favorite movies.

Gore whores and scare, uhm, hares (?!) beware, because this is obviously not the movie for you. As such, I don't want to get feedback from people bitching me out for giving this a "5" only to go out, rent it and start demanding that I give them $6 to make up for it. First of all, if you're still paying on a "per movie" basis for your rentals, you need to come into the 21st century with the rest of us and start renting your movies online. Don't have a debit or credit card because you're currently on the run from creditors? Do what I did and move in with someone whose credit isn't shit so you can use their account. Either way, I told you this is a cheerfully skewed happy little movie, so start trying to put Ouija whammies on me when you realize there's no gut munching or 20 foot blood geysers to look at. I love those as much as the next guy, but sometimes movies need something more than "non-elective extreme surgery" to be good... not always, but sometimes.

As a whole, Fido is one big Bizarro take on political satire dressed up in the classic Lassie formula, complete with the old "What's wrong boy, did Timmy fall down the well again?!" type scene. Then again, Lassie never hurled a fat kid or got hard over Timmy's mom, and Fido's not played by a woman pretending to be a man. The vibrant "old fashiony" color scheme for everything is fun for the eyes and adds to the "cute and happy but still kinda disturbing" nature of the movie. It's like the way Tim Burton used to make movies: well. Truth be told, I can't find anything wrong with this film! The budget is big enough that it looks perfectly professionally made but doesn't sell out its twisted values to appeal to a mass audience. I'd say that director Andrew Currie is the next Tim Burton, but whereas Burton always drapes his movies with emo friendly depress-o crap to appeal to the cutters and goth kids trolling Hot Topic like zombies in their own right, Currie's refusal to grow up and join the real world is of a more childlike innocence, making it a lot more... gimme a sec, I gotta check my thesaurus for something that matches "charming"� but sounds smarter... amiable? Yeah, that works.

I didn't even hate the fact that the protagonist was a kid, and that's always an astonishing thing to hear from the lips (or in this case the fingers) or a guy whose disdain for cutesy child heroes in movies is only equaled by John Wayne Gacey's twisted freaky clown love for them. The music and acting were all great! Carrie-Anne Moss's transformation from the bitchy mom who only cares about what the neighbors think of her, Henry Czerny as the overly conservative ZomCon spokesman neighbor and former military guy who would kill his own wife in a heartbeat if he had to, all the while grinning with his pipe clenched between his teeth, and Billy Connolly who makes Fido this funny and sympathetic ghoul without any actual lines beyond "Rrrrrr"�. Perfect. This movie's charming, it's lighthearted, it's fun, and it's twisted. Fido's like a George Romero rendition of a Norman Rockwell painting, only brimming with an endless stream of quotable lines for all you forum regulars out there constantly looking for the next great sig line. Here's a few to get you started: "Out there is chaos, in here is safety.", "Just because your father tried to eat you, does that mean we all have to be unhappy forever!?", "Not the teeth, Tammy. Good girl." and, of course, today's moral, as sung by a class of "so sweet they'll rot your teeth" fifth graders during daily firing range practice: