Meanwhile, The Scariest Thing...

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... that I saw over the break was the Canadian horror flick Pontypool, a mostly unheralded gem from early 2009. I'll refrain from describing too much of the film because part of the film's power, part of what makes it so terrifying, is not being aware of what's up. The film, if you sit there and really pay attention, if you allow your mind to travel along the long passages of dialogue - this film lives and dies by its dialogue - it becomes completely disorienting for long spells in the creepiest of ways.

Anyway, think of George Romero's The Crazies mixed with Adrienne Barbeau's scenes in The Fog and you'll have some kind of idea what you're in for.

I think the first half of the film - when we're only getting increasingly insane accounts of what's happening in the outside world (the entire film is set inside a radio station while... something... horrible happens in the town outside) - is slightly stronger than the second half. So much of the film's power is, appropriately, in its ability to describe the horrors, to weasel these stories inside ours brains where the telling is so much more powerful than the showing. Once things start getting shown later on the film, like so many before, loses a little of its early power. But not as much as you'd expect either.


Anyway, when word comes into the station of a mountain of people climbing on top of a car, Mom and Dad and Baby inside, the people all mimicking the sound of the car's windshield wipers in unison, I was hooked. The film is ripe with that sort of imagery, the sort that your first instinct is to laugh at how bizarre it sounds until the reality presses in on you, of that really happening, of being crushed beneath a mountain of crazy people babbling crazy sounds at you... something about it reminded me of Clive Barker, actually - the ability to walk the line between the ridiculous and the horrific. The nightmare place where those two meet.

It's a solid little flick, well worth seeking out, is what I'm telling you.
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