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- Stephen McHattie has a freaking amazing voice and so fit the role of radio personality perfectly.
- Every so often someone asks me why I never review horror movies and it’s simply because I don’t watch horror movies. I have no interest in them. I like violence and I mostly like gore, but I don’t like horror movie gore and violence so I mostly steer clear of them. This movie isn’t quite horror, but it’s about as close as I’m going to get.
- The reason that everyone (the TIFF programmers, the director himself, etc.) seem leery of describing this as a horror film is that it departs from the genre by not showing any of the zombies until at least half-way through, and even at that point you’re only seeing arms and hands banging on windows. The story takes place in a church basement radio station and the main characters are experiencing the zombie takeover as it is reported to them by listeners and by their eye-in-the-sky weather guy. It’s great because as the movie progresses, the characters are forced into progressively more claustrophobic spaces (the studio, the sound booth, a closet) and it was a nice and easy way to heighten the psychological drama without having to show the zombies.
- Evidently this was shot in chronological order, which they could do because there was only one set.
- What I find absolutely mind-boggling about this movie is that at the Q&A afterwards, Bruce MacDonald, the director, said that it was thirteen weeks ago today that their funding came through for the movie and they could start shooting. THIRTEEN WEEKS. They made this entire movie in thirteen weeks. They just finished it last week. It’s a low-budget zombie movie and it doesn’t remotely feel like it. This should be a lessen to everyone that you can do a lot with very little.
- The explanation of the virus left a little to be desired. Despite the fact that these kinds of things are pure fantasy, there should still be an element of logic in this, e.g. a vampire or werewolf biting someone turns that person into a vampire or werewolf in turn, etc. This virus is based on the English language and hearing it is what turns people into the living dead while simultaneously giving them the desire to kill other people. This in and of itself makes sense in the context of the film and the genre (I guess), but there’s one character who puts two and two together about how the virus spreads and it just seemed like it would take a huge mental leap to be like “The virus is infecting our language, specifically English”. Like… what? No.
- This did provide a lot of great French being spoken at a Grade 7 level. The best was when they introduced a little bit of Franglais when one character couldn’t remember the French word for “kill” so she kept speaking in French and throwing in “kill” when necessary. (Tip: Kill Bill in French is Tuer Bill.)
- They started off the film with a regular, run-of-the-mill broadcast of the radio show and one of the segments is the reading of obituaries. This feature comes back hilariously later on in the movie when they start reading the obits of everyone who has died that day in the zombie riot because it’s a huge long list of people and it often sounded like “Jim Smith, 41, was passed away today at the hands of Jane Smith, 41, who was later killed by her neighbour Don Thompson, 26, who was eaten by his father, Ralph Thompson, 57…” etc.
- Technically, the zombies in this movie are not zombies because none of the people are dead. They prefer to be called “conversationalists”.
- I don’t know if this will ever be released in the U.S. or elsewhere, but Entertainment Weekly had a bit about it earlier this week.
- Atom Egoyan and Brian De Palma were at our screening, apparently.
Pontypool
I’m not one for zombie flicks, but this worked for me.
IMDB Plot Synopsis: A psychological thriller in which a deadly virus infects a small Ontario town.
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