This doctor started a corporation called Zom-Con, which controls the supply and maintenance of all the zombies in America. Zom-Con built huge retaining walls around every town, to keep the “wild zombies” outside, in the “wild zone.” Meanwhile, they sell tame zombies to people basically as slaves. The richer you are, the more zombies you own, and your neighbors are jealous of you.

After the Zom-Con representative (the film’s future villain) shows this film strip a fifth grade class, he asks, “okay. Who here has killed a zombie?” (four kids raise their hands) “So, not too many. And I plan to KEEP it that way.” Our hero is introduced here, a little boy who is disturbed by zombies. He asks weird questions like “are zombies alive or dead?” and “are zombies people anymore?” and “are all the people who were buried before the space dust still in their coffins in the graveyard trying to get out?” The representative says a bunch of garbled stuff about being productive members of society, then says, “isn’t that right?” and the little boy says, “I guess,” and the guy goes, “We don’t guess, we either KNOW or we DON’T know.” Ha ha ha!

Anyway, everyone taunts Timmy and two school bullies who I forget what organization they belong to but they’re clearly intended to be a sort of Young Republican/Hitler Youth kind of vibe, in training for future careers at the hegemonic Zom-Con, anyway, they keep trying to shoot him in the face with rifles (all schoolchildren, instead of recess, have target practice, while they sing a helpful song about how you have to shoot a zombie in the head).

Timmy’s home life is a caricature of 1950′s stereotypes. His mother greets him at the door, horrified that his shirt is dirty. He tells her bullies pushed him down and held a gun in his face, and she says, “What? Did anyone SEE this happen?” She also at one point tells him not to play outside alone because it makes him look lonely. The mom is played by Trinity from the Matrix, and she is awesome.

Then the dad (the pedophile dad from Happiness) gets home. He’s a caricature of that 1950′s Distant Father Figure. Timmy’s like “Hi dad!” And the dad sort of waves awkwardly in his direction and goes “Hiya!…..Tim!” like he forgot his name. There’s also a part where they come in from some barbecue and the dad just kind of waves his arms ineffectually for a minute, and then just sort of SHOVES Timmy out of frame and says “…gotobed!”
Anyway, it turns into this really complicated web of social commentary. Everyone is obsessed with not turning into a zombie when they die, but you have to pay exorbitant “funeral insurance” (i.e. health insurance) to Zom-Con while you’re alive, or else they will stick a collar on you when you die and sell you into zombie slavery. Timmy’s dad, who was traumatized by having to kill his own father in the Zombie Wars, is obsessed with this, constantly making his wife swear she will cut his head off when he dies. On Sundays he insists on driving around to all the funerals going on–real funerals, where the people have paid funeral insurance and thus earned the right to have their head buried separately from their bodies. “To dust you have gone; and from dust you shall NOT be resurrected.” And then everyone claps.

The entire goal of life is thus to die, to truly die. The father reads “Death” magazine instead of Life. And when the mother says, “Darling, I’m pregnant,” he touches her belly and says, “…I just don’t think I can afford another funeral on my salary.”

So then the emotional crux of the film is that this family finally makes enough money to buy a zombie of their own. Timmy takes a shine to the zombie, and names him “Fido.” They play catch together until Fido accidentally eats a mean old woman, forcing Timmy to cut off her head and bury her to cover up their tracks. But the Zom-Con representative who just moved in next door, he’s onto them.
“That zombie’s got blood on his face.”
“Uh..it was a nosebleed.”
“That’s not a fresh zombie, son. Only fresh zombies bleed.”
“I know. It was my nosebleed.”
“Well how did YOUR blood get on HIS face?”
“…I wiped it there.”

Fido basically reveals himself, and by extension all zombies, to have an essential humanity that the living humans are overlooking. The mom becomes a sympathetic character via these weird tender moments she shares with the zombie, where she’s combing his hair and letting him have a soda, and he’s sort of giving her the eye, and she’s blushing. Her growing love of Fido helps her become more human herself, and she develops an actual relationship with her son in the process. And of course there is a Lassie joke (which if you knew the boy’s name was Timmy, you definitely saw coming). “Go for help, boy!” etc. “Fido? Where’s Timmy? Is Timmy in trouble?” This weird scene where Fido is trying to direct the mom where to drive the car to save Timmy from the bullies, who Fido killed and who are thus now turning into zombies, so they have to get to Timmy before they rise up as zombies (Timmy was tied to a tree by the bullies before Fido showed up and rescued him by killing them; then Fido was too much a shambling dead corpse to have the motor control necessary to untie Timmy, so he went for help instead). The mom is like “Where is it, Fido? Do I turn here?” and Fido’s sort of groaning and gesturing. Then at one point the mom realizes his collar isn’t on, and she goes “Why aren’t you eating me?” And he gives her this really tender but super sexy look, and she goes, “FIDO! My GOODNESS!”

This movie! What a weird movie. Illegal immigration, the patriot act, the corporatocracy, class issues…all of these are sort of raised and mocked in such a satisfying way. “Bill, just because your father tried to eat you, does that mean we all have to be unhappy, forever?”

I laughed so hard. In the movie, crazy zombie attacks are totally scary, yet they are JUST NORMAL ENOUGH that people sort of maintain their composure in the face of them. In the climactic scene, a total zombie apocalypse is going on, but the humans are still walking sort of calmly, like holding onto their hats as they walk briskly away from zombies and soldiers run past them firing rifles. There’s a moment where a man is pulling a woman away from a zombie but she breaks free and runs back to grab her purse that’s on the ground. Just a fact of life!
Also by implication you realize that this new society has been indoctrinated to “never trust an old person.” Because an old person can die at any moment and then you’ll have a zombie on your hands. There’s a commercial for a product that’s a heart monitor that will immediately alert Zom-Con if your heart stops beating. “Grandpa’s fallen and he’s getting up!” HA HA HA! Good one! Characters talk about how they don’t have prisons anymore because they had to turn the prisons into nursing homes. So now instead of putting people in jail they just throw them to the wild zombies.

There’s also a character who has a creepy sex zombie named Tammy who he dresses in a miniskirt and tube top. He explains at one point that he was lucky to get such a fresh one–Tammy had been in the store with her mom and then had a massive brain embolism, “but they slapped that collar on her before she hit the ground! Almost no decomposition!” Which sort of implies that everyone is actually STOKED for people to die, so they can turn them into slaves–and also especially that people are sort of keeping an eye on hot young women, like sort of hoping they will drop dead right in front of you.

It was a really weird movie. I urge you all to rent it.

Then I went to Daybreakers, which was another meta-monster movie, this time re: vampires. In Daybreakers, the vampires have zombies! It’s like there are humans, then humans turn into vampires because of a virus, then zombies that vampires turn into if they don’t drink enough human blood! So many weird anxieties going on! The vampires have to deal with the fact that the zombies ARE US. But they also have to deal with the fact that WE ARE HUMANS. But we also need to eat humans to live! And the humans have to deal with the fact that both the vampires and the zombies ARE US TOO. There’s a weird scene where the vampire army is ethnic cleansing the vampire zombies by dragging them out into the sunlight.
Willem DeFoe was really phoning his performance in on this one, though, I have to say.
Daybreakers! It was totally good.

I feel pretty zombied-out.

I think we can all agree that our monster movies are getting really complex. I wonder what Freud would say? (“Help! Help! I’m trapped in a box!” —LOL)