Fido – The Heartwarming Story of a Boy and His Zombie

My wife knows that I like horror movies and she, for the most part, continues to tolerate me.  She won't watch them with me, but she allows that I watch them.  She rolls her eyes at me.  And I think she laments the fact that our children are developing a taste for the weird and strange and scary. 

Nevertheless, I convinced her to watch the movie Fido (2006) with me the other night. It’s a zombie movie but I was able to persuade her to watch it with me because it’s also a comedy. And, believe it or not (she denies it now…) but she laughed several times during the film.  I think she liked it more than she’s willing to admit.

Fido is set in an alternate 1950’s – after a radioactive "space dust" led the the reanimation of the dead and  the nearly catastrophic “zombie wars.”  Conditions in the town of Willard (a nod to George Romero's film) and across the country are relatively safe and, thanks to the Zomcon Corporation and the invention of zombie control collars. In fact, it is so safe inside Zomcon protected communities that many families keep collared zombies as house-servants and pets.

The movie is infused with brilliant, crisp colors and sharp patterns, providing a strange contrast to the rotting corpses that inhabit the town.  The dialogue is well written and filled with witty 1950's cliches turned upside down and inside out, and the actors all perform admirably.  It is, simply, a great zombie movie.

And it is, indeed, a zombie movie –  it does have the requisite gore and blood (it wouldn't be much of zombie movie without it…) but, like the best zombie movies, it is less about the staggering, reanimated corpses and more about the living.  Fido is social commentary and satire.  It is a dark, biting humor.  While it never sinks to the point of being mere diatribe, the movie explores American culture and values and laughs at them.  It laughs at American fears that lead to racism, totalitarianism, and consumerism.  It laughs at the fear of death behind what passes as religion.  At a funeral, the priest intones “From dust have you come and to dust shall you return, but from dust shall you not be resurrected.”

If we can't laugh at our fears, they're sure to consume us.

Powerpoint Slides for Everyone - Week 41

I've been out of town most of the week, and am only just now able to post this week's Powerpoint (or similar presentation program) background image.  You are free to download these images and to use them in your own personal, school, work, church, or business projects. Use them for anything you like.  I only ask that you share them freely and that you tell others that you found them here.

Fire in the Sky - Fear, Earthbound and Ordinary

As much as I'd like to believe in extraterrestrials and interstellar visitors from outer space – I don't.  I can't.  Not really.  The physics just don't work. And the idea that alien species would travel 53 thousand light years in order to abduct people and to perform kinky medical experiments strains credulity.  But that doesn't stop me from wanting to believe…

During the month of October I try to watch a horror movie every day and then to write a little bit about each of them.  But Fire in the Sky (1993) may not be a ‘horror’ movie - not exactly. 

Horror movies often incorporate the strange and otherworldly – monsters, ghosts, demons - or they dwell on the strange and twisted – the demented and depraved – serial killers and slashers.   But the terror of the first half of Fire in the Sky is purely earthbound and ordinary.  It is the fear resulting from a lack of trust. The fear and guilt that grows in men who've lost and failed a friend.  It's also the growing irrational fears of a community slowing turning against its own.

Fire in the Sky is based on the "true story" of Travis Walton, who - according to his book of the same title - was abducted by aliens in November of 1975.  At the time he had been working as a logger in Arizona.  His friends and coworkers, who also claimed to have seen the alien ship, fled when Travis was taken.  Their story was not believed by the town folk, or by members of law enforcement agencies.  Even though they answered every question they were asked and willingly submitted to a polygraph test.

They knew it was an outrageous story.  They could hardly believe it themselves. But what could they do? Fortunately for them Travis reappeared again after five days.  Any charges or allegations of murder were dropped and the community tried to get back to life as usual. 

Fear in the second half of the film turns to the strange and otherworldly as Travis remembers his experiences inside the alien ship – though the experience depicted in the movie departs dramatically from the experience Travis Walton described in his book.  The filmmakers took enormous liberties. The scenes aboard the alien craft are intense and disturbing.  And even though there isn't much in the way of 'blood and gore' these scenes will surely make the squeamish turn away. 

But, for me, it is the earthbound and ordinary fear of the film's first half that is far more terrifying.  It is more terrifying because it is entirely believable   The fear that results from seeing friends and family and a once trusted community slowly turning against you.  Watching as friends and neighbors turn their backs.  If we can't trust each other (even with outrageous stories) the world will be a terrifying place - even without alien abductions and anal probes.

YellowBrickRoad - The Road to Madness and Inexplicable Mysteries

One morning in 1940, the entire population of Friar, NH, walked north up an unmarked trail into the wilderness.

Some were later found frozen to death.  Others were mysteriously slaughtered.  Most, however, were never found.

YellowBrickRoad (2010) begins with 70 year old mystery - where did the inhabitants of Friar, New Hampshire go? Why did they leave their homes, their clothes, even their pets tied up and slowing starving to death?  What happened to them?  Like the still unsolved mystery of the Roanoke Colony, whose inhabitants disappeared leaving only one clue behind - the word "Croatoan" carved into a tree - the mystery persists.

The film follows a group of scholars who set out to follow the path taken by the missing community in order to discover what happened to them, to turn the legend into "recorded history."


It isn't long into the expedition before the team's GPS device fails them.  It variously locates them in Guam, 40 miles NW of Florence, Italy and "just outside  Melbourne."  They begin to hear strange sounds and music from the 1940's in the wind.  The team posits several possible explanations for these strange occurrences:


1 - Scientific explanations such as solar flares or magnetic resonance or, or, or...
2 - Human pranksters playing  a joke on the team
3-  A shared psychosis spread between the members of the team
4 - An act of God.

"What if the people of Friar believed this was the road to God or the Wizard or whatever?"


But the path they follow, this "yellow brick road," as the tag line of the movie says, does not lead to "a fairy tale ending." It leads into madness and horror and despair.With elements of the Roanoke Colony mystery, the Bermuda Triangle, and even Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - the movie leads the viewer deeper and deeper into madness and inexplicable mysteries.

When the team realizes that they can't rely on their electronic GPS device, they turn back to the surveying equipment of their cartographic experts and their compasses.  They make detailed notes about their heading and the distances they've travelled, but the numbers don't add up. They're lost.  And they can't follow their calculations back the way they came because the "numbers only make sense going forward."

The ending of YellowBrickRoad has left some reviewers unsatisfied.  Little is explained.  The mystery is not solved.   But this is a movie about being lost and being lost in madness.  The numbers only make sense going forward.  If you try to look back from where you came, it won't make any sense.

If I were going mad, how could I tell?

Exit Humanity - Devouring Ourselves

It's October - time for monster movies.  Of course, I watch horror movies all year, but especially so in October.  And now that I'm blogging, I try to write a few things about the monster movies that I watch in October.

Tonight I watched the movie Exit Humanity (2011) directed by John Geddes - a zombie movie set six years after the end of the American Civil War.  Part Western, part Horror, this genre mashing film explores the horror of war and probes the self-inflicted wounds of mankind's cruelty.  But it's more than just a horror movie; the characters look for ways to live with and to live beyond  the horrors they've experienced and the horrors that they've committed.

The movie was filmed north of Toronto - imbuing the scenes with a stark, almost colorless - lifeless - pallor.  The story is structured around the chapters of the hero's illustrated journal. (And this is my only complaint about the movie.  The gritty historical realism achieved in the costumes and scenery is broken by a few animated sequences-used mostly to cover flashback material -that look too much like modern comics and graphic novels to fit within the rest of the film.) There are long scenes without any dialogue - carried very well by the actor's strength. (But there are also a number of scenes that rely too much on a voice-over narrator. Oh well...) The costumes look (mostly) authentic, and the gore and monster effects are convincing - something remarkable considering the movie's relatively low budget.

The American Civil War is often described as a war that pitted brother against brother.  Exit Humanity pushes the consequences of that war between brothers beyond the war's end in 1865. When hatred, and murder, and revenge are allowed to pour out, unchecked-like an infection- across the land, families are torn apart (quite literally).  And, as is always true in war, the innocent suffer.  Children die.  When we lose whatever is good in our humanity we become like the shambling horrors of this film, devouring and consuming each other.