Bruce McDonald says the zombies in his new movie Pontypool aren’t really zombies. They’re “infected people.” Sounds sort of like zombie political correctness, doesn’t it? It makes sense in the context of the movie, though making sense of some of the other elements of Pontypool is a bit more difficult. Bear with me here, we’ll get into the complicated stuff a bit later.

In Pontypool, three people, host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie, pictured above), producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and engineer Laurel Ann (Georgina Riley), are broadcasting a morning radio show in rural Ontario near the village of Pontypool. Mazzy is a former big city radio shock jock, fired from his last job for being, in his words, “too honest.” He’s arrogant, doesn’t take Briar’s direction well, and, coming from the city, has trouble with the idea that in a small community everybody knows everybody else. But after some run-of-the-mill traffic reports, some snide comments from Mazzy about the local OPP being drunk, and a visit from vocal group “Lawrence and the Arabias” to sing one of their happy tunes about spilling the blood of infidels (I’m not making that up. Nice one, Bruce), things get weird in Pontypool. Scattered reports start to come into the trio’s isolated broadcast location in the basement of a local church about a large group of people acting very strangely indeed. First deemed a protest, then a riot, then finally a herd of people chanting incomprehensibly, a doctor’s office in town explodes, cars are swarmed by the herd, and many people are killed.

Through all this, the movie’s focus never shifts from the three main characters as they try to figure out what’s going on from their isolated basement. Eyewitnesses call in, only to be disconnected moments later. The traffic reporter calls in with panicked, sporadic reports. The BBC calls in seeking comment from Mazzy on the “radical French separatists” their sources are saying are the reason for the area being quarantined by strictly French-speaking troops. Mazzy begins to think that it’s all some hellish prank someone is playing on him and starts to wig out.

Then one Dr. Mendez (Hrant Alianak) shows up with the zombies close behind, and things start to get really weird.

I like that Pontypool is a different sort of zombie movie. I quite honestly loved the movie up to this point; I like the idea of these people being isolated from what’s going on, and trying to figure out how to warn the public about a zombie attack when they can’t see it. It’s suspenseful and compelling, in no small part thanks to Stephen McHattie’s performance. You may know McHattie from the old Cold Squad TV series, or more recently as the old retired Nite Owl, Hollis Mason, in the Watchmen movie; I remember him most clearly as coach Dick Irvin in the 2005 Maurice Richard biopic The Rocket (“I DON’T WANT MAURICE TONIGHT. I WANT THE ROCKET”).

It’s easy to imagine the zombies swarming over cars and devouring people and being very scary, for as we all know, what you don’t see on screen in a horror movie is far scarier than what you do see. But then the zombies show up, and pretty quickly Pontypool turns from this radio drama-like production into a more standard running-from-zombies thriller, and at the same time has the characters spend a lot of time explaining why it isn’t really a standard running-from-zombies thriller. Turns out the zombies aren’t really zombies, in that they’re not the dead brought back to life; they’re actually living people infected with a virus that makes them zombie-like. But, in a further complication, it’s not an airborne pathogen or a virus that spreads through contact. Instead, in a twist that’s repeatedly explained by the characters but still a bit difficult to grasp, it somehow lies in words, and you get infected by it when you hear the magic word and understand it. It’s entirely possible that I’m kind of thick, but while the idea of this “zombie” virus spreading through words dovetails nicely with the protagonist being a radio host, most of whom deal in meaningless words, I find the overall concept a little difficult to grasp.

Not only that, but being so specific with the cause of the zombie outbreak creates the biggest problem I have with the movie. Namely, director McDonald and screenwriter/original novelist Tony Burgess get so very specific with exactly how this zombie virus spreads and describe in great detail why people react to it the way they do, but say nothing about the virus’s source or why exactly it’s in rural Ontario. I was fine with having a zombie attack of unspecified origin when the zombies were being described from afar, because when I’m imagining the zombies I can easily run through the imaginary list of ways they could’ve been created: military experiment gone awry, illegal toxic waste dump, bad aspartame in a shipment of Diet Coke, whatever. But as soon as the zombies show up on screen, so does the ubiquitous “mad scientist” character in the form of Dr. Mendez, who knows a whole lot about the virus and it’s effects and very clinically observes and catalogues the symptoms when the radio show’s sound engineer gets infected and traps Mazzy, Briar and Mendez in the sound booth. But if he knows that much about what’s going on, why doesn’t he know how this mess all started?

Still, I like the first part with Mazzy and his crew trying to comprehend a zombie attack and communicate it to the masses effectively a whole lot, partly because I’m a communications nerd (I’ve got an MA in the subject). McHattie is great, and despite having basically four characters in the whole movie the cast do a nice job of keeping everyone’s attention. McDonald is a skilled director and keeps the suspense and feeling of isolation going with various closeups and cuts. It gets bogged down in the details during the second half but is still pretty entertaining.

3.5/5 for Pontypool. All in all a good flick.

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