Rhapsodies

So, after the first batch of this year’s Halloween marathon, I wanted to watch something with a bit more quality, and to really clear my palate with something funny. So this week I watched two zombie comedies that, coincidentally, were also two films on my “what do you mean you’ve never seen this?” list.

The first film, Andrew Currie’s Fido tells the story of a slightly different 1950s where a Zombie apocalypse had occurred. It had been safely contained and now humanity lives in very pleasant gated communities safe from all of the zombies that have not been enslaved for humanity’s use. 

One of these enslaved zombies (Billy Connolly) is bought by the family of a lonely boy named Timmy. Timmy immediately makes friends with the Zombie that he names Fido. Unfortunately, Fido’s restraining bolt breaks and he kills a few people. How will Timmy help his new best friend

This was a fun parody of the standard nineteen fifties boy and his dog formula. I mostly knew Connolly from his wonderfully manic standup comedy and seeing such a restrained (sorry!) performance was a pleasure to watch. 

After that, the best part of it was the darkly satirical and remarkably well thought out world that at first glance looks like a pastel Leave it To Beaver setting, until you look at it a little closer and see that just across the fence surrounding this wonderful town is a zombie-infested wilderness, and children practice firearm skills at school

The next film on the list Edgar Wright‘s Shaun of the Dead tells the story of Shaun (Simon Pegg a 29-year-old slacker who lives with his best friend Ed (Nick Frost) who is even more of a slacker than he is. Things are not going well for Sean. His job is terrible, his step-father (Bill Nighy) is getting on his case and his girlfriend just dumped him for being a slacker. Is it any wonder he completely missed the start of a zombie apocalypse until it was too late?

Shaun of the Dead was so much better than I expected. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was good, I just didn’t expect how good the cinematography and direction would be. The rise of zombies is wonderfully subtle gradually increasing over the first half-hour.

The only scene I didn’t care for was a rule of funny scene where Shaun and company do a terrible job fighting their zombified favorite bartender. I would have found it funny if I hadn’t watched Shaun master killing zombies for the last half hour.