Pontypool

Highly literate and brilliantly conceived, Pontypool (2007) is a thinking man's zombie movie.  This low-budget Canadian film is virtually unknown in the United States, presumably because it lacks the gory (and expensive) special effects that characterize Hollywood pictures of this sort and, also, I think, because the movie's premise is one that resonates most powerfully in a bilingual society like Canada where both English and French are official languages (or like most of Western Europe in which everyone is almost as fluent in English as they are in their native or mother tongue).  The film's premise is overtly allegorical.  A deadly virus has hijacked our language.  Certain words trigger bizarre reactions in the people speaking and listening to them.  The speaker becomes fixated on the word, repeats it interminably until the utterance becomes a series of nonsense syllables, and, then, runs amuck as a bloodthirsty, deranged zombie.  The concept that language operates according to memes, or viral units, is familiar -- William Burroughs advanced the notion that language "is a virus from outer space."  Pontypool simply materializes this metaphor in its nightmarish scenario:  as reports emerge that people are inexplicably ripping one another to pieces, the protagonists, locked in a AM-radio station studio in the town of Pontypool, find themselves under siege.  The bunker-like studio is beset by both slavering zombies and French-Canadian troops from Quebec who, because they don't speak English, seem to be immune to the plague.  The picture is claustrophobically shot, all action takes place in the radio studio, a shadowy zone dense with glass cubicles and equipment, where the camera prowls ceaselessly from close-up to close-up.  The zombie apocalypse occurs on the first day of work of a somewhat down-at-the-heels shock jock, a man with a craggy face in his late middle-age who seems to be modeled on Don Imus.  The shock-jock, Grant Mazzy is well-read and hyper-articulate -- he cites Norman Mailer in his first broadcast -- and he imagines that he has been summoned onto the air to "speak truth to power".  Like Imus, he seems to have run afoul of political correctness at his last gig and been exiled to this AM station in a remote and rural part of Ontario, -- outside the one window in a door leading into the studio, it is always snowing. The show is managed by a female producer and there is a girl engineer who operates the soundboard, splicing into Mazzy's paranoid rants commercials and morning drive-time reports from the "Sunshine Chopper," a reporter purportedly in a helicopter but, in fact, merely a guy in a car located on a hilltop overlooking the freeway.  Pontypool seems to be conceived as a four or five character one-act play -- as reports emerge as to the violence in the community, it becomes clear that everyone is turning into blood-crazed zombies, although in our post 9-11 world the killings are first reported as "some kind of insurgency."  The allegory is blunt, powerful, and effective.  Our discourse has been poisoned, seized by those who wish to foster and spread hatred, and so, something, must be done to cure the pathology in language that is afflicting the media.  Pontypool suggests two course of action -- the first is poetic:  words can be purged of their virus if they are used in idiosyncratic, personalized, and hermetic ways.  Mazzy suggests that people substitute the word "kiss" for "kill", that they regard the word "stop" as a color, and that they take steps to defamiliarize the language that they are speaking.  In a concluding peroration that seems derived from famous scenes in the film, Network, Mazzy suggests that we must speak with the utmost caution, that we must purge our rhetoric of noisome abstractions, and that, somehow, the truth will save us.  Whether this inspiring soliloquy, in fact, speaks the truth is left ambiguous.  The French-Canadian forces, hearing English still being broadcast from the Pontypool bunker, blow the place to smithereens.  Pontypool is immensely resonant, particularly in an era that features Donald Trump's candidacy for president, and the film is brilliantly directed and filmed.  Canadian actor, Steven McHattie is particularly effective as the bruised, ultra-articulate shock-jock -- his deep baritone voice oozes sincerity and cynicism and wounded idealism all at the same time.  This film, unknown to most people, is excellent, thought-provoking, and possibly the wittiest and best zombie movies ever made.