Canadian director Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo) has been insisting in interviews that his new film Pontypool is not really a zombie movie, and as someone who has burnt out on zombie movies of late, I have to agree with him. It's a difficult film to categorize at all - sort of like Orson Welles' War of the Worlds in reverse, or a George Romero adaptation of Talk Radio, although neither of those descriptions quite gets at how peculiar Pontypool really is.
Set almost entirely inside a radio station and unfolding in something close to real time, McDonald's film concerns the efforts of morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie, most recently the original Nite Owl in Watchmen) and his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) to understand and properly react to a mounting crisis in the small town of Pontypool, Ontario - a crisis that begins as a riot and escalates into an epidemic.
Isolated from the outside world, privy only to information from callers, a traffic reporter on the scene and a BBC newsman who has somehow gotten wind of the situation, Mazzy and Sydney attempt to piece together what exactly is happening. They figure out that the townspeople are indeed being transformed into..well, creatures that behave a lot like zombies. The means of the infection is one of the oddball, ingenious twists that shouldn't be revealed here, but suffice it to say that this is the only zombie movie I can think of that climaxes with a very important game of word association.
Adapted from the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess (who also wrote the screenplay), McDonald's film marries the claustrophobic tension of Night of the Living Dead with a more cerebral approach. Gore is used sparingly, albeit to startling effect, and the grand finale is more of a semiotics discussion than the sort of bloodbath that gorehounds might be hoping for. It's not simply an intellectual exercise, however, and McHattie in particular keeps the movie grounded with his lived-in, world-weary performance as the increasingly frazzled DJ Mazzy. Pontypool isn't for everyone, but it just might be the zombie movie for everyone who thinks they're sick of zombie movies.
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