Fido

It doesn't take long for the hilarity of Fido's central idea to kick in: the world is reeling from the Zombie War, and the undead are being contained in two different ways. Some of them are roaming loose in fenced-off wilderness zones. The rest are, thanks to the good people at the ZomCom corporation, docile and domesticated–indeed, available as house servants for the upwardly-mobile. Such is the case with the Robinson family, a suburban clan who seem to have stepped straight out of an old episode of Lassie. Little Timmy is happy about the new manservant, whom he promptly dubs "Fido," and Fido himself is fine as long as the mechanical collar around his neck doesn't malfunction (in which case he will revert to being a cannibalistic brain-eating zombie). Fido is played, in a stroke of inspiration, by the Scots comedian Billy Connolly, although you wouldn't be able to recognize him without already knowing he's in the movie. Dylan Baker and especially Carrie-Anne Moss are just right as Timmy's parents, who have accidentally wandered out of a John Cheever novel and into a George Romero world. Director Andrew Currie skillfully gets the 1950s satire and the zombie action right, although there's no way to disguise that this premise is too thin to spread out over feature length. For a while, though, Fido hits a stride–a staggering, vacant-eyed stride. –Robert Horton