(“Chew on This” is Bill Coffin’s column on horror cinema, analyzing the some of best movies the genre has to offer, new and old.)
Here’s the thing: I love zombie movies. I always have. I always will. As far as horror movies go, this genre is my favorite because it mines a theme that I find deeply disturbing: that one day, without any warning, everybody you know might suddenly want to kill you. I guess I read enough news to know that this isn’t entirely without precedent. Sometimes, humans just go apeshit and turn on each other with the kind of savagery we would like to pretend we are no longer capable of. But we are, and we do, and that scares the hell out of me.
Zombie movies touch on this effectively, and always in a way I find equally creepy and intriguing, which is why the last few years have been so much fun for me, ever since Zack Snyder’s surprisingly good remake of Dawn of the Dead followed up the simply terrific 28 Days Later. What followed was an intense blitz of every iteration of zombie cinema one might imagine, of which Pontypool, a neat little film from Canada, is a recent entrant.
Of course, whenever Hollywood detects a workable genre of film, it exploits the living shit out of it until everything you ever liked about it has been obliviated in some dickheaded crusade to avoid doing anything remotely original with one’s development budget. And boy, did this ever happen with zombie films. It has gotten to the point where Roger Ebert (who would be the world’s least dangerous zombie now that he’s missing his jaw) has basically written off the entire concept as an exhausted exercise in underdeveloped characterization, more exploding skulls than a 12-pack of The Departed DVDs, and the sort of hollow, exhausted feeling afterwards that you get when you eat a CostCo-sized bag of Cheetos for dinner.
All of this might explain why nobody saw Pontypool when it came out back in 2008. It was small and indie even by the standards of the Canadian film industry, though what it lacked in publicity it more than makes up for in proof of concept, enjoyable acting and deft execution. In fact, it might just be the most clever and original zombie movie I have seen in quite a while. It doesn’t have the self-aware mayhem that makes Zombieland so goddamned fun, or the wit that makes Shaun of the Dead proof positive that comedy really is one of England’s finest exports. But it does have the courage to go for atmosphere rather than viscera, and it takes an overexposed horror concept and manages to pull off a subtle form of dread with it. In a genre that virtually demands you go over the top, Pontypool plays it cool and provides the kind of horror experience you’re not likely to come across very often.
In Pontypool, Grant Mazzy, an arrogant shock-jock exiled from his old gig in the big city, is doing his career penance by running the morning show at the local radio station in Pontypool, Ontario. Housed in the basement of a church, Mazzy in the Morning is run by sound engineer Laurel-Ann Drummond, a spunky hometown girl recently returned from a stint in Afghanistan and produced by Sydney Briar, a weary divorcee who is having second thoughts about her decision to hire Mazzy at all.
The story begins with just another morning at the station, with Mazzy being the kind of dickhead that got him huge ratings until it got him fired, and with Laurel-Ann and Sydney trying to keep Mazzy from alienating their entire audience, which one suspects is roughly equivalent to some crappy MySpace band. Then they get a strange phone call that there’s a mob trying to storm a doctor’s office downtown. The people are all repeating gibberish as if they’re speaking in tongues, and it all reminds Mazzy of a disturbing encounter he had with a townsperson on the way into work. Very quickly, the three realize that there is something really horrible going on in the ass end of the Canadian outback, and somehow, they’re the only folks able to tell the world about it. And that, as they say over on FARK, is when things begin to get weird.
Pontypool goes directly against a bunch of the conventions I’ve come to expect from a typical zombie movie. Most of the action is off-stage, delivering the kind of gradually ratcheting tension that Hitchcock was such a master of. And what action there is is mainly dialogue; this is easily the most talky zombie movie ever produced.
We don’t see a single gunshot get fired throughout the entire movie. (Remember, this is Canada we’re talking about here.) The vector of infection comes from a most unexpected source, putting every character at the kind of risk that really lets you know that nobody in this thing is safe. The few characters we see act with uncommon intelligence for a horror movie, which deprives us of a lot of predictable and unentertaining carnage. And there is a conspicuous absence of the old “the only thing worse than the zombies are the other survivors’ motif.
In this story, the situation devolves too quickly for people to turn on each other; they are all too preoccupied with staying alive. But most importantly, the film fixes the location in a very tight spot, forcing the characters to listen to the end of the world more than take part in it, and it is this where Pontypool gets its best material. It’s all a bit like if Orson Welles decided to do Night of the Living Dead, and I mean that as a good thing.
As Grant, Laurel-Ann And Sydney listen to the world outside of their pitiful little radio station fall apart, their story made me think about the power of communication to bring people together, whether they are on different continents or they are in two entirely different states of mind. The town of Pontypool itself is in the middle of nowhere. The radio station is itself all by itself in a forgotten corner of a forgotten burg. And in their own way, the heroes are all isolated from each other and the people in their lives. They make their living talking to people, but at a time when their talents are needed the most, they find that perhaps staying on the air might be the worst possible thing they can do.
The marketing tagline for this film is “Shut up or die,” and by the time the credits roll, you’ll understand why. But you might also be picking up what, for me, was a more subtle message of horror I am not used to getting in modern cinema at all, let alone zombie movies. What if we’re really all alone? I mean, really all alone? And what if, when we finally begin to break down that isolation, we realize, perhaps too late, that keeping quiet might have been the only thing that kept us alive? What if miserable isolation was the best thing that ever happened to us?
They say that really good zombie movies aren’t about zombies at all. The zombie thing is just a stand-in for a bigger issue. And here, it’s all about why and how we talk to each other in an age of sound bites, half-truth and doublespeak. We are under a daily assault by politicians, pundits, marketers and journalists who all wield our language like a madman’s straight razor. And at the end of it all, Pontypool is about how language can confuse us so badly that we begin to doubt not just the words we use to communicate with each other, but the each others we’re trying to communicate with in the first place.
If you don’t believe me, just say the first word that comes to mind, and then repeat it over and over and over again until you get to the point where the word doesn’t even sound like the word anymore. And then imagine an auditorium of Glenn Beck fans screaming that word at you and see if you don’t feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise. That may be a bad example, though, since every time I take a look at that fat crybaby’s ratings I start thinking the zombie apocalypse has already begun.
DYLMAG Rating: As far as zombie movies go, this one’s an 8. As far as movies go in general, I guess I’d give this a 7. It’s a 6 if you’re tired of all of the goddamned zombie movies already. And it’s probably a 5 if you never saw the point in them in the first place.
