Pontypool

Shame on the IFC programmers that are lumping writer/director Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool with the rest of their “IFC Midnight” program. That lame line-up is just another group of genre fodder unceremoniously dumped onto their “On Demand” cable station, packaged and ready to be forgotten before its even released. Only Pontypool and two other of the program’s six titles will receive limited theatrical runs in Manhattan, which is particularly unsettling considering how McDonald’s Burroughs-esque complication to the zombie formula begs to be spread like the film’s verbal plague.

With Pontypool, McDonald and screenwriter Tony Burgess (adapting a script from Burgess’ novel Pontypool Changes Everything), take the zombie back to the deadpan polemical tone of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. An unknown plague is spreading in the small titular county and only Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), self-proclaimed “shock jock” and teller of unpleasant truths, can spread the word about what’s happening. Thanks to these new zombies and the mysterious disease they care, free speech is no longer a theoretical value but a literally vital imperative.

Grant’s idealized role as a voice of the people is the cornerstone to Pontypool’s stentorian political message regarding the necessity of dissidence. In his sound-proof booth, alongside Laurel (Georgina Reilly) and Sydney (Lisa Houle), the only two other people in the station, Grant lives out his phantasy of being the last sane voice in the wilderness.

Mazzy’s provocations are therefore less like Howard Stern’s potty-mouthed musings and more like the free-association ramblings of Jean Shepherd—except they’re more rancorous and self-serious. With a craggy face, cowboy hat and scraggly goatee that make him look like the love child of Bob Dylan and Vincent Price, Grant is more cocky than he is really smart—he condescendingly quotes Norman Mailer and Roland Barthes with truly “shock”ing ease—but then again so is Pontypool.

Though it’s in the service of an inscrutable meaning, there’s a wildly imaginative sense of innovation at work in McDonald’s apocalypse. The twist he gives to Romero’s tried-and-true cannibal formula is refreshing not because of the ontological questions it toys with but because of how it shows that somebody out there is still thinking of new ways to make zombies relevant. With any luck, it will develop the cult it deserves because while its urgency makes it an easy target, Pontypool’s new ideas are commendably gripping.