Sydney Briar Is Alive

The radio play is a lost art form. It was from a day when story and writing were the most important things on the minds of our entertainers. Building a setting and characters using only words and sound effects. Letting our imaginations fill in all the gaps. Today we're so accustomed to having our hand held that we lose any appreciation for something that actually challenges us to dust off our imaginations. Pontypool is one of those.

In what is basically a live action radio play, we are thrown into a small Canadian town in the middle of a blizzard. Shock jock Grant Mazzy is working at a local radio station when he starts to get reports of people acting strangely and attacking their friends and family members. His producer Sydney and his technician Laurel-Ann are the only people working the station that morning. A station that is located in the basement of an old converted church. We are never given any real glimpses of the outside world except for what Mazzy gets from news reports and reporters calling in. There is an outbreak going on outside and, like our characters, we can only imagine what the hell is going on out there. Things are going crazy and bloody beyond the walls of that church but Mazzy has to keep on reporting. It's what he was made for and no potential apocalypse is going to stop that.

Bruce McDonald directs this tale with such a simplicity that you can't help but be jealous at his skill. Three characters, one location. What could be boring turns out to be scary as hell and incredibly effective in making us imagine the worse. You can even close your eyes and just listen and you can still get the crap scared out of you. Stephen McHattie plays Mazzy with such gravelly-voiced aplomb that you wish men like him would read you the news. He is our guide and so much of the movie is placed on his shoulders and he pulls it off. In a better world he would have been nominated for an Oscar but we all know that genre movies never get nominations. Just like the previous movie I reviewed, The House of the Devil, this movie requires patience and an active imagination. Which is what I've been blessed/cursed with much to the annoyance to people who know me.