Pontypool does great stuff for nearly its entire running time. It kinda blows it right there at the
end, but you’ve got to give this picture credit for how much it gets right.
Stephen McHattie
plays Grant Mazzie, a has-been shock jock relegated to reading the school
closings listing at a third-rate AM station in the sticks somewhere outside of
Ontario. He has a deep, gravelly
voice, perfect for radio; and a tired, weathered face, perfect for film.
Mazzie is settling
in at his new gig when the first reports of something very disturbing start
trickling in. There’s a gun battle
at a nearby lake. A mob surrounds
a doctor’s office. People start
killing each other in particularly nasty ways. Everything’s quiet in the church basement where radio station’s
studio is tucked away, but it sounds like the end of the world out there. What’s going on?
Pontypool nails this. McHattie gives a
virtuoso performance as a man going from depressed, angry, and a little drunk
to skeptical, worried, then scared.
Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly, as his engineer and assistant,
respectively, give him people to bounce off, to fight, to work with, but it’s
his show. His reaction to the
offscreen threat makes it real, and it shows us how the anticipation of horror
can be scarier than horror itself.
It’s at the end
there, when the revelations and realizations hit, that Pontypool falls apart.
But right up ‘til then, when it’s all mystery and dread, this movie is
fantastic. Pontypool may be a qualified winner, but it’s a winner nonetheless.
