By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Georgina Reilly | Hrant Alianak | Lisa Houle | Rick Roberts | Stephen McHattie
Country: canada
Year: 2009
Running time: 95
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226681/
Jason says: “PONTYPOOL is adapted from a small part of the novel Pontypool Changes Everything – according to the producers taking part in the Q&A, a tiny part. Paragraphs, supposedly. That’s actually a really nifty idea – zoom in a large-scale story to find one that is just as big to the people caught up in it.
“This is the story from the perspective of Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a radio announcer who has the morning shift on a low-power station operating out of the basement of a church in Pontypool, Ontario. It’s a stripped-down operation, with just producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and technician Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) in the studio with him, and Ken Loney (Rick Roberts) calling in with traffic updates. Mazzy’s a pro but it’s boring most of the time, so he jumps at the opportunity to talk about something more exciting when reports start trickling in at a riot in and around a local doctor’s office – a riot that turns out to be something out of a George Romero movie.
“PONTYPOOL has two somewhat unique features, one executed very well and one more of a mixed bag. The excellent one is the way that, once Mazzy arrives at the station, the camera never looks outside. Everything we know about the situation out there comes from callers and news reports, and even those are often filtered in that they’re Laurel Ann reading from the wire rather than first-hand. This gives writer Tony Burgess and director Bruce McDonald time to let us get to make the first half of the movie about Mazzy and his ego without the audience feeling either like we’re waiting for something to happen or that he’s a one-dimensional jerk for thinking of his career despite immediate danger. What’s going on is real and scary but not yet immediately so, so we can wait a while for this to turn into a siege movie. The filmmakers do a fantastic job of giving us a personal stake in what’s going on with Ken Loney, even though he never actually appears on screen.
“Some what iffier is the means by which things go to hell (skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know things revealed roughly halfway through the movie, late enough to potentially be considered spoilers): The premise that the English language acts as the vector for infection is potentially a deliciously clever one; it sets things up that anything Mazzy and company do to try and help risks making things much, much worse. Watching a person lose their mind in the space of a couple minutes, especially as they try and fight the onrushing aphasia that is the first symptom, can be much more chilling than any physical transformation. The film doesn’t really do much to explain how ‘the English language is infected’ works – it’s not like THE SIGNAL where there’s some technological mechanism – and ‘it’s scary because it’s incomprehensible’ only goes so far. It also seems like they miss out on a lot of rich thematic material, like an obvious potential parallel for hate speech and only hinting at how this could turn a multilingual country like Canada upside down.
“According to the producers, there are plans to expand this movie into a trilogy, so maybe those ideas can wait for movies which are set outside this building’s walls. As mentioned before, McDonald and Burgess (who also wrote the original novel) do a fine job of keeping things contained to a handful of rooms while still creating a sense of something larger – that sort of overcoming sensory constraint is, fittingly, like radio at its best. MacDonald finds good ways of presenting something akin to zombie attacks without as much in the way of blood and guts, and the somewhat understated approach makes it a bit more frightening. There’s also a nice bit of misdirection in the script, setting up a direction that the movie swerves away from.
“The cast is good, too. Stephen McHattie has an actor’s dream of a role in Grant Mazzy, and does all he can with the character: McHattie fills the screen with Mazzy, making him somewhat theatrical both in his charm and his faults, playing the man as someone who can present himself as larger than life but is, often enough, not up to that standard. I kind of love the look on his face and the petty tone in his voice when he delivers a certain line over the air, as if he’s the one blowing the BBC off. Lisa Houle is a great foil for him as the slightly younger but more adult producer who is exasperated by Mazzy even while recognizing his value, and Georgina Reilly is very nice as well. The weakest link is Hrant Alianak as a scientist who shows up later on with explanations and a little too much forced quirkiness.
“PONTYPOOL is being categorized as an unusual variant on the zombie movie in many places, which isn’t really fair to it. It resembles Romero’s THE CRAZIES as much his DEAD films, and though you can see the same basic idea at play, Bugess and McDonald have ventured far enough afield that it certainly feels like something else. It’s not quite the audience-bowling-over brilliance that we’d generally like these sorts of variations on a theme to be, but it is, at its best, an exciting enough thriller to be a welcome break from the ordinary.
4 cats
“Seen 24 April 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival of Boston After Dark)”
Michael says: “PONTYPOOL is my kind of horror film: creepy, startling, chilling, and with just enough visual horror to startle without traumatizing. (What can I say, I’m a wimp!) It’s also whole lot of fun, with some laugh out loud moments, which the best horror movies should be. Of course, there are some who might not call PONTYPOOL a horror movie at all, but those are all just labels. Bruce McDonald (THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS; ‘Twitch City,’ HARD CORE LOGO) has created a highly entertaining and clever film that’s sure to appeal to many.
“Early one morning, driving to work through a blizzard in the small Canadian town of Pontypool, Grant Mazzy stops at a traffic light when a young woman appears suddenly at his passenger window, shouting something incoherently. Mazzy recovers from his shock and rolls down the window to ask if she needs help but she is gone, swallowed by the whipping snow and pre-morning darkness. The moment haunts him as he arrives at his job as a talk radio DJ. Mazzy is new on the job; hired for his name and reputation, but cautioned about slipping into this trademark political rants on the air. With him in the station is his producer Sydney, and an intern, Laurel Ann. Along with Dr. Mendez, who appears in the latter half of the film, these are the only people we will see for the duration of the film. After successfully establishing the situation and relationship dynamic between the three radio station employees, McDonald kicks things off when Pontypool’s ‘eye in the sky’ helicopter traffic reporter Ken Loney calls in for the morning’s traffic report. His voice becomes agitated and his story becomes confused as he talks about a mob of people surrounding a house in some sort of riotous attempt to push their way in. As Sydney and Laurel Ann try to get some information off the wire, Mazzy fumbles on, trying to report something relevant while having no information. Subsequent reports from Ken grow more chilling and revealing until the impending horror of the situation Pontypool finds itself in emerges.
“While some call PONTYPOOL a zombie film, and it certainly does have elements of that celebrated genre, there is more to McDonald’s film that mindless, flesh-eating monsters roaming the countryside. The story, based on a few paragraphs out of a larger novel, is more science fiction, than horror, more medical thriller than the walking dead. There’s also an old-fashioned end-of-the-world feel to PONTYPOOL, with its occasional, over-the-top drama and garbled, nonsensical scientific explanations. (At times I thought of LAST NIGHT, written a directed by a friend and frequent collaborator of McDonald’s: Don McKellar). For a time, our characters remain safe, if frustrated, quarantined in the radio station while the world around them seems to go to hell; but when the horror makes its way into the close confines of their space, the feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness increase exponentially until the surprisingly lovely, yet sobering finale.
“Canadian character actor Stephen McHattie (SECRETARY; THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE; tons of television) is terrific as Mazzy. His expressive face is at times as terrifying as the circumstances surrounding his characters. He finds a strong foil in Lisa Houle’s Sydney, the two of actors responsible for conveying much of the tension and growing horror of the film through their expressions and dialogue. McDonald makes incredibly effective use of sound as well since the visuals are kept to a minimum. Yet when the visuals do arrive, they are incredibly effective. An incredibly effective scene is one of the three characters quietly succumbs to the horror invading Pontypool, not with sinister music, or flailing terror, but unnoticed in the background until it’s too late. 4 1/2 cats”