Big Smash! Productions presents
Director Bruce MacDonald (Hardcore Logo, The Tracy Fragments)
IN PERSON with a sneak screening of his new film
PONTYPOOL

Friday March 6th – 9:00pm
screening held at Cinematheque – 100 Arthur St.

Tickets $15 door / $13 advance – includes post-reception at Platform and free drink

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About the Film:
Shock jock Grant Mazzy (veteran cult actor Stephen McHattie) has, once again, been kicked-off the Big City airwaves and now the only job he can get is the early morning show at CLSY Radio in Pontypool Ontario, which broadcasts from the basement of the small town’s only church.

What begins as another boring day of school bus cancellations, due to yet another massive snow storm, quickly turns deadly canadian online pharmacy no prescription needed when reports start piling in of people developing strange speech patterns and evoking horrendous acts of violence start piling in. But there’s nothing coming in on the news wires. Is this really happening?

Before long, Grant and the small cheap viagra overnight delivery staff at CLSY find themselves trapped in the radio station as they discover that this insane behaviour taking over the town is actually a deadly virus being spread through the English language itself.

Directed by acclaimed maverick Bruce McDonald and based on a novel by Tony Burgess, Pontypool could be called a zombie movie, but the elements (like the incident with the ice fishers) do not quite tally up, genre-wise at least. For one thing, the virus is not spread by the traditional means, at least according to the aforementioned Mendes, who believes it’s airborne. Nor is Mazzy your price of propecia from canada average talk show blowhard. He may suggest Don Imus visually – right up to the beat-up cowboy hat – but he’s fond of quoting Norman Mailer and Roland Barthes, neither of whom is likely to show up on Imus’s reading list.

The levitra vardenafil nachnahme film breaks with the gore-laden tradition of zombie movies. In fact, McDonald and company have dropped us into a far more disturbing world of metaphysics and linguistics. It is as if the makers of Dawn of the Dead decided to keep all the action in the television studio from that film’s beginning, but had the script rewritten by Umberto Eco, Noam Chomsky and Carlos drug hair loss propecia Castaneda.

With last year’s The Tracey Fragments, McDonald united the hipster and more experimental elements of his work for the first time. Pontypool is an even more seamless and audacious step along the same road; an avant-garde genre movie that’s both thought-provoking and creepy. (Steve Gravestock, TIFF)

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Bruce McDonald was born in Kingston, Ontario. He has worked extensively in television and has been a maverick on the Canadian film scene since he made his breakthrough feature, Roadkill (89), which won the Toronto-City Award for best Canadian feature at the Festival in 1989. His films include Highway 61 (91), Dance Me Outside (94), Hard Core Logo (96), Picture Claire (01), The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess (04), The Tracey Fragments (07), which was one of Canada’s Top Ten films of 2007, and Pontypool (08).

Special Thanks to our sponsors Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts and Maple Pictures.

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).