Radio Armageddon
Way back in 1968, George A. Romero’s enormously influential horror Night of the Living Dead was first unleashed on unsuspecting audiences. Its deceptively simple set-up – a group of survivors barricade themselves away from apocalyptic events, the situation deteriorates as what’s outside threatens to get in – has been used so often since (to very good, very bad and indifferent effect) that it’s now largely a genre cliché.
Thankfully, while young Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (2008) would appear at first glance to be yet more of the same, McDonald, along with writer Tony Burgess, has managed to contrive an ingenious approach to the familiar set-up, as well as an ‘explanation’ for the horror that is at once original, intriguing and arresting.
In Romero’s film, the existence-threatening nightmare came in the form of marauding zombies – for reasons that are never fully explained (save for a ‘radiation from a returning Venus space-probe’ MacGuffin), the recently deceased have returned with an insatiable appetite for the flesh of the living.
In Pontypool, it takes a little longer for the threat to become concrete – Stephen McHattie (who was excellent as one of the chilling killers in Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005)) plays early-morning DJ Grant (‘He Takes No Prisoners’) Mazzy, who’s driving to work in the blizzard-struck town of Pontypool in Ontario, Canada. The strangeness begins early – a dishevelled woman stumbles out of the snow when Mazzy pulls over to make a call, and who, when he asks her if she’s OK and who she is, makes no response except to repeat his question and then run off.
A touch bemused, Mazzy thinks little of the incident – there’s plenty of community news and muzak to put out on air, under the critical eye of station owner Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and switched-on young recruit Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly). But, right in the middle of the customary weather reports, gossip, interviews and jingles, a real news story breaks – hundreds of residents are converging on the surgery of local physician Dr. Mendez (Hrant Alianak), and reports are coming in of the crowd becoming unruly, then maniacal, then murderous. And eye-witness accounts?
Callers to the station are exhibiting frightening symptoms of the ‘virus’ that is seemingly taking hold – speaking incessant, repetitive gibberish. It’s not long before the entire town is quarantined – Mazzy, Briar and Ann have to hole-up, hold the station and keep broadcasting, while the horror closes in…
As is so often the case with this set-up, the first hour works far better than the last 30 minutes – the slow but sure depiction of society (local, and perhaps global) beginning to unravel is very well constructed. Terrified callers, suggestions of an approaching apocalypse and subtle shocks, with likeable and believable characterizations from the three principals, combine to very good effect as the ‘infected’ advance.
Yet, despite the felicitous device at the heart of the narrative (the infection is spread by ‘words’, and that’s all I am saying), both director and writer seem to have resorted to crude shoehorning of an overall ‘meaning’ at the film’s last gasp, with metaphors about ‘the human condition’ clogging up what might otherwise have been as thrilling a denouement as was the first act.
Still, this thinking person’s fright-fest is nicely off the beaten track. There’s a sequel already in the works, and that may well be no bad thing.
96 mins. In English and French.
