Pontypool -- Canadians revisit "The Crazies" a la Orson Welles

There's a whole genre of books and movies involving small town, everyday folks becoming infected with a disease that causes everyone but a handful of main characters to turn homicidal.

Often, these are zombie movies, but I think flicks such as 'The Crazies,' 'Tommyknockers' and 'Children of the Corn' also fit the bill. In the apocalypse, your worst enemy is the milkman... You've seen the drill: Farmer Bob's otherwise sweetnatured, grandmotherly wife decapitates him with hedge clippers, the good folks from American Gothic turn on each other and chase each other down the street with their pitchforks, the postman or Girl Scout cookie sales girl runs into the house to gnaw at your arm. Americana becomes an inverted caricature of itself. Creepy, no?

Well, about nine nights ago, seeking emotional refuge from a fight with my significant other, I lost myself in "Pontypool," an unusual Canadian film that found an interesting twist on the 'Homicide has gone viral' genre. The New York Times review is here. Almost all of the action aside from the opening scenes takes place inside of a small town's 3-man talk radio studio. You rarely see the infected townspeople.

Mostly, the radio station workers (a grizzled shock-jock style talk radio host, his exasperated female producer, and a young studio girl on the controls) just get reports from callers and their eye-in-the-sky news helicopter guy, who of course makes the mistake of landing the chopper at some point and hiding out in a silo. His panicky descriptions of the insanity he's witnessing are all phoned in.

There's a ton of death, but the audience sees only two fatalities throughout the entire flick. All the rest is called or radioed in and recounted, so you have to picture the killing for yourself.

Well, I liked this movie, but I could see how someone else would get bored stiff. Here's a spoiler: the way the infection gets transmitted... do you really want to keep reading? Are u sureeeee?? Well, ok then...is words. Certain words are infected, but the infection seems to bounce from word to word. So the same word isn't necessarily infected for everyone. At least, I think that's how it works.

Someone says 'everyone is being killed!' And suddenly they're repeating the word killed over and over until they're crazy, and then bloodthirsty. How the infection works and how it gets cured aren't really fully fleshed out, which left me unsatisified but resigned... the characters never fully comprehend what's going on, so why should the audience?

The New York Times review makes accurate note of the pretension here (We're telling you something deep about language and media and... aw, no we're not. Bring on the zombies!) and picks up on the whole Orson Welles, 'War of the Worlds' parallel.

Orson drove half of America nuts when he delivered War of the Worlds via radio half a century ago; people were so naive and fresh to media back then, they figured the alien invasion he was documenting must be true! Anyhow, I was mostly impressed that 'Pontypool' could keep me interested while telling rather than showing, and left my ears to translate pictures of this infected town to my head. It also helped me cool-down after my to-do with my girlfriend. I'd suggest it to fans of the 'small town turns crazy' genre, but not to everyone.

Your scary movie fan signing out!