Posts by David Annandale

So, there have been approximately a godzillion zombie movies made over the years, and a goodly number of those just in the last few years. And there have been quite a number of very creative ones (Shaun of the Dead, Fido, 28 Days Later, but no, NOT the remake of Dawn of the Dead). Likely about to disappear from a theatre near you is one of the most interesting variation of late: Pontypool.

Directed by Bruce McDonald (most recently of The Tracey Fragments), and scripted by Tony Burgess (adapting a section of his novel Pontypool Changes Everything), Pontypool takes place in the eponoymous town, somewhere in the snowy wastes of rural Ontario. Grant Mazzy (erstwhile Nite-Owl I Stephen McHattie) is a former shock jock, turfed from his big city job, and now stuck hosting the morning show out here in the middle of nowhere. After a disturbing encounter with a babbling woman on his pre-dawn drive to work, he settles in behind the microphone to start his shift. Little by little, he and the station's crew of two (Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly) discover that something really, really bad is happening in and around the town. What that bad thing is, of course, is your basic zombie apocalypse.

Well, I might as well follow up last week’s piece with my own thoughts about Watchmen, now that I’ve seen it. Let me begin with the most important point: these musings must be understood as provisional. My feelings are mixed, and I think I will have to see the film a few more times before I can come to a definite conclusion about it.

That caveat out of the way, let me begin by saying that, all in all, Zack Snyder's interpretation is staggeringly faithful to its source material. One isn't really faced with a question of what is changed, because the answer is, other than one significant aspect of the ending, virtually nothing, and even that aforementioned change is true to the spirit of the original, and the case has been made that it is actually an improvement. It is certainly an elegant solution to one of the more problematic, much-debated elements of the comic. In any event, the question is more about what is left out, and even that is precious little, considering the task of packing the entire twelve issues into the space of a single film. Yes, there is compression, yes, there are events passed over, but there is barely a moment from the text that doesn't show up in some form or other.

I'm not even going to try to justify considering Watchmen a cult film. Not on that kind of budget and mainstream-saturation advertising. But the comic book (let's avoid the artificial marketing term “graphic novel,” shall we) is another story, a work whose brilliance is equaled only by the fanatical reverence in which it is held by its fans. Now that's cult. I won't be seeing the film for another couple of days, so whether it does a good job or not I will leave as an open question (what is beyond question, however, is that, whatever flaws it may have, it has to be better than the what the original stab at adaptation, back around 1987 would have been – I read a summary of the screenplay, and “desecration” is too weak a word). What I want to consider today is the rather strange set of conflicting emotions anticipated adaptations such as this provoke.

The basic conflict is quite simple: fans have been regarding a film version of Watchmen with both rabid impatience and all-consuming dread. The latter is easy to understand. Watchmen, with its intricate narrative structure and stately pace, defies easy transfer to film, and audiences not ready to view a deconstruction of the super-hero might well put up a (misguided) resistance. But it's the former emotion that I find puzzling, even as it is one to which I am not immune.

Last week, I offered my paean to King of the Hill. Today, another recent European horror film, which also has a mountain setting: the Norwegian Cold Prey. If King of the Hill was related to the slasher in terms of the idea of the characters being stalked through the countryside by a killer who could strike at any moment, Cold Prey fits far more comfortably within the slasher subgenre. It is, after all, ultimately the story of a group of young people running afoul of a giant masked maniac. Hardly original, I know. But it is how Cold Prey handles its familiar material that produces a delightful gust of fresh air.

Two couples and a fifth wheel head off to the mountains for some off-trail snowboarding. The fifth wheel breaks his leg partway down the slope, rather inconveniently in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately (or so our heroes think, since they don't know what kind of movie they're in), there's a mountain resort nearby. It turns out to be abandoned, but it's shelter, and they can make do. But then, of course, it further turns out that it is not completely abandoned, and one by one they come to gruesome ends.

The European horror revival continues apace. Today's entry in the please-don't-remake-it category is the 2007 Spanish entry King of the Hill, directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego. It's another case of a simple premise worked out rigorously, and with great skill. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Quim, a man on his way though the Spanish countryside. Stopping at a filling station, he has a quickie encounter with shoplifter Bea (María Valverde) in the washroom, after which he discovers that she has lifted his wallet. Catching sight of her vehicle heading up a mountain road, he takes the detour in pursuit. Then, once he is well off the beaten track, nicely far away from civilization as he knows it, he sees a glint on a mountain peak, and then a bullet hits his car.

From that moment on, things very rapidly become much more bizarre and much, much worse. Before long, he and Bea (whose car has also been disabled by the mysterious sniper) are on the run through mountains. They don't know why they are being targeted, and they cannot see their attacker, and therein lies the simple brilliance of the premise. Sure, we've seen many a rural stalking film, be it Deliverance, Rituals, Friday the 13^th, or even The Edge (where the stalker is a bear instead of a person). All of these films play on the vulnerability the urbanite in particular will feel in the wilderness. All directions look the same, there are no landmarks, there is no shelter, there are no means of calling for help, the human form is dwarfed in the chaotic immensity, and danger can come from anywhere. King of the Hill takes this idea a step further in that the killer doesn't even have to be anywhere near his victims to strike them down. His reach is infinite.