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 and programmer, founder of Spectacular Optical Publications and The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She has been a programmer for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, co-founded Montreal microcinema Blue Sunshine, founded the CineMuerte Horror Film Festival (1999-2005) in Vancouver, was the Festival Director of Monster Fest in Melbourne, Australia and was the subject of the documentary Celluloid Horror (2005). She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (FAB Press, 2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (FAB Press, 2012) and contributed to Destroy All Movies!! The Complete Guide to Punks on Film (Fantagraphics, 2011), Recovering 1940s Horror: Traces of a Lost Decade (Lexington, 2014) The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul (University of Toronto Press, 2015) and We Are the Martians: The Legacy of Nigel Kneale (PS Press, 2017). She co-edited (with Paul Corupe) and published the anthology books KID POWER! (2014), Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015), Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin (2017) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She edited the book Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (forthcoming), and is currently co-authoring (with Amy Searles) the book ‘Unhealthy and Aberrant’: Depictions of Horror Fandom in Film and Television and co-curating (with Clint Enns) an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., as well as writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter. She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: the Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s and Sean Hogan’s We Always Find Ourselves in the Sea and her first film as director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is due out from Severin Films in 2020.