Starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, and Dylan Baker. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, March 16, at the Paramount Vancouver

Imagine a society in which people hide in well-patrolled, leafy enclaves, secretly envious and mistrustful of their neighbours and acting out of the fear fed to them daily by a consortium of government, corporate, and military interests.

Sure, it's hard to conceive of such an awful place, but Vancouver director Andrew Currie cleverly paints a picture of an Eisenhower-era suburbia with a crucial difference. Instead of the Second World War as the touchstone of the Smiths and Joneses in their ranch-style houses, it's the effects of the Zombie Wars.

Fortunately, as we learn in a grade-school educational film worthy of The Simpsons, the good folks at ZomCom rushed in to save humankind after lethal atomic space rays brought the dead back to life to feast on the flesh of the living. Thanks to a handy collar the company came up with, the surviving zombies are as docile as, well, dumb household servants—as long as the yoke's on them.

When we meet crisp housewife Helen Robinson (a dryly funny Carrie-Anne Moss), she's just brought one of them home, despite the misgivings of her milquetoast husband (Dylan Baker, channelling Don Knotts), who has zombie issues—something about having to shoot his dad when he got up after a heart attack. The trauma has left him extremely distant from son Timmy (doe-eyed K'Sun Ray), even by '50s standards.

The dad deficit is one reason Helen buys the hulker Timmy calls Fido. (He's played by Scottish comic Billy Connolly, unrecognizable with short hair and minus the Scottish brogue—or speech of any but the most grunting kind.) Another is that the new family next door is led by “war hero” Jonathan Bottoms (Henry Czerny), ZomCom's security chief, who boasts six of the grey-skinned servants, as well as a military shrine centred on a giant portrait of General Frank Savage, from the '60s TV series Twelve O'Clock High.

That's one of many witty throwaways in a movie that plays like a Douglas Sirk melodrama on steroids. With those billowing summer dresses and unspoken family tensions, it shares some of the campy-anthropology tone of Far From Heaven, albeit with oozing viscera and ironic pop songs by Kay Starr and other period divas. Currie, who also went this route in the stylish short “Night of the Living”, has affection for all of the characters, dead and alive. And the script—which he wrote with Robert Chomiak, from a story by Dennis Heaton—doesn't overplay its metaphorical hand.

In fact, the last act feels a bit undernourished. After Helen un–Stepfords her life and Fido bonds with mother and son, the movie—shot in the Kelowna area in relentlessly cheerful sunlight—goes off in another direction that doesn't quite deliver on its early promise.

Still, Fido offers a steady flow of small pleasures, some of which are provided by Tim Blake Nelson as a neighbour with a zombie sex slave played by Vancouverite Sonja Bennett. Key line: “Not the teeth, Tammy. Not the teeth.”