![[DVD] Pontypool (2009)](http://www.popbunker.net/wp-content/themes/arras-theme/library/timthumb.php?src=http://www.popbunker.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Pontypool_banner_3001-752276.jpg&w=630&h=250&zc=1 "[DVD] Pontypool (2009)")
Ponty Up Films/IFC
Directed By Bruce McDonald
Starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle
DVD October 13 2009
PONTYPOOL is full of cleverness and fun. First of all, since Romero’s original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, zombies movies have almost always contained an element of breaking news that can be followed throughout the film usually in the background. This running commentary is often used to set-up the tension of the situation as well as the impending hopelessness. Many movie makers have since combined that Welles WAR OF THE WORLDS-like element into the genre.
PONTYPOOL takes that element and makes it the apex of the plot – and the device works in a genius manner. Stephen McHattie plays down-on-his-luck big city shock jock Grant Mazzy. Mazzy is paying penance for his tell-it-like-it-is style (which got him fired from his previous job) in the small town of 
Pontypool in Canada. He works the early morning drive and the movie set up hilariously as the obviously still new on the job Mazzy tries to inject big city hot buttons into the vein of rural ice fishing town Pontypool. His producer and boss Sydney (Lisa Houle) wants nothing of brewing controversy while his engineer Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) defends Mazzy out of apparent admiration.
The tensions surrounding the zombie-like outbreak come in in snippets and between regular features and interviews. I previously worked in radio and I have to say that the radio scenes are handled with 
a good degree of accuracy – including many in-jokes (is that traffic chopper really a chopper?) and real life technical problems. This is where we see what we usually would hear in a Romero-like zombie movie – the workings of the panic stricken news casts, live reports, eye witness interview, and conjecture in real-time as events unfold. The effect is tingling as, with mostly the use of voice acting from live reports, the tension builds without ever seeing a zombie-fied actor.
About two thirds of the way through the movie the action moves out of the studio and turns a bit into a typical barricade against the onslaught type of zombie film. However, there is a crazy nearly unexplainable twist to these zombies that has to do with the French-Canadian Separatist movements, terms of endearment, and the life saving skill of being bilingual. It’s unexplainable, but fits in cleverly well with a slightly existential view of communication which is a theme to the movie.
Much of the film’s fun has to do with the bizarre nature of the zombies, so I will not try to explain it with any more accuracy. PONTYPOOL is a well acted, competently directed, skillfully shot, and wonderfully conceptualized horror movie. Check it out when you get the chance.
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Interesting premise, nice coverart, and being named after a town that I both know where it is, and was in the old area that I hailed from is a nice threesome of awesome to start out with, at least for this poster.
However, there is a crazy nearly unexplainable twist to these zombies that has to do with the French-Canadian Separatist movements, terms of endearment, and the life saving skill of being bilingual.
It just wouldn’t be Canadian if we didn’t have that. :p At least there’s another example of how useful being bi-lingual can be outside getting a cushy government job.