Reviewed by Craig McPherson
Stars Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Hrant Alianak, Rick Roberts,
Boyd Banks, Laura Nordin, Daniel Park, Boyd Banks, Tony Burgess, Rachel Burns | Written by Tony Burgess
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £19.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 96 minutes | Directed by Bruce McDonald
As far as directors go, it’s hard to pin Bruce McDonald down. The Canadian has helmed everything from episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation, to Queer as Folk and the sci-fi series Lexx. Given that a dude’s gotta pay the rent, these are clearly not where his true ambition rests. Cue Bruce McDonald 2, the fellow who delivered Hard Core Logo, arguably the greatest mockumentary of the Punk era, and 2007’s The Tracey Fragments, which starred fellow Canadian up and comer Ellen Page (Juno) in a non-linear story that had the art house crowd drooling.
Unknown to most, however, is that way back in McDonald’s nascent days prior to becoming a film student at Ontario’s Ryerson University, he lensed a Super-8 zombie flick titled Our Glorious Dead with a budget of $100. So it was with Pontypool that I expected McDonald to return to a seminal love. After all, you can count the number of Canuck zombie movies on one, well-chewed finger. Starring Nova Scotia native Stephen McHattie (Watchmen, 300, A History of Violence) as Grant Mazzy, a newly-hired morning radio jock nearing the end of a long career plagued by an over-inflated ego and a love of the bottle, the movie unfolds largely as a three person stage play in the church basement studio of a small AM radio station in the tiny Ontario town of Pontypool. Early reports indicate that an outbreak of sorts has taken hold in the town, with people transforming into cannibalistic maniacs.
As the radio team tries to make sense of the sound bytes, along with listeners at the BBC, the movie deftly draws the viewer into a web of imagined horror, as the audio of the carnage is played out in one’s mind. Unfortunately, however, McDonald drags this out far too long for the story’s good. While small is good when dealing with the outbreak of zombie Armageddon (see the Spanish masterpiece [REC], or its American remake Quarantine, as stellar examples), McDonald goes to great lengths to keep everything confined to a couple of sets and a handful of actors, the end result of which is a movie that tries too hard to confine a grandiose tale to a small scope.
On a more local, Canadian note, however, McDonald does strike an amusing chord. An integral plot reveal brings into play Canada’s English/French linguistic duality, and implies that languages other than English will dominate the world, leaving Canada, among nations, as a French-only country ... and it all started in Pontypool.
EXTRAS *** An audio commentary from director McDonald; Pontypool Original Radio Play – the one-hour radio drama on which the film is based; two short films, Eve and Dada Dum, which are silent black-and-white shorts by different directors; a stills gallery; a couple of trailers.