Pontypool
Balladeer’s Blog’s month-long celebration of Halloween continues! If you’re like me you’re bored with all of the zombie and pseudo-zombie films and tv shows that seem to come out every few months. Pontypool is at least a zombie film that defies the formula.
PONTYPOOL (2008) – Pontypool is based on the novel by Tony Burgess and is set in a small town in Ontario. The best way to describe this original and thought-provoking movie would be by saying “If PBS decided to do a zombie film I think it would go something like this …”
The movie stars Stephen McHattie who portrays Grant Mazzy, a former shock jock from America. He’s currently languishing on a small station in the backwoods of Canada after his provocative antics got him fired one too many times from radio stations in the States.
He tries to liven up his boring gig on local radio by suggesting some unorthodox public behavior to his listeners and is as surprised as his female producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) when people around the area begin taking him up on the suggestion. As reports continue to come into the tiny radio station it soon becomes apparent that the population isn’t just extremely receptive to suggestion, many of them have become living zombies with a desire to kill anyone not similarly stricken. Continue reading
I am always glad to interact with readers of Balladeer’s Blog! Many of you have been asking for a guide to my examination of the surreal horrors in The Songs of Maldoror. Readers asked for it to be the same format I used for the Navajo epic myth about the war god Nayanazgeni battling the dark gods called the Anaye. 
Gaston Leroux’s The Machine to Kill was written in NINETEEN TWENTY-FOUR. Many book sites list it as 1935, but that was just the year it was finally translated into English. 
