Weirdest of all is the otherworldly accent in which he’s chosen to drench his words - at times it sounds like Elvis with a head cold and a jaw that’s been wired shut, while other times it approximates Tom Waits impersonating Fire Marshall Bill. What Cage does here - sweaty and slit-eyed, perpetually wearing big black wraparound Bono shades - can’t be contained by the notion of “chewing scenery.” He tears off great chunks of the scenery, shreds it, gnaws on it, pounds it into powder, snorts it and shoves it into whatever orifice happens to be handiest.Įven by Cage’s standards, he’s way off the leash here, and it’s mesmerizing to witness. But then, Nicolas Cage pokes his bewigged dome into the film. ![]() If you want to see Nicolas Cage go absolutely, mind-blowingly batshit crazy: Deadfall (1993, Christopher Coppola)Īt first, Deadfall plays like a generic neo-noir, with a drippy Michael Biehn ensnared in One Last Job after he accidentally kills his father during a con gone bad. Pontypool perversely offers us the horror of understanding too hard. So much at the base of the horror genre is about terror of that which we can’t understand. At the center of it is McHattie in a deliciously curmudgeonly turn, quietly frightened yet still willing to rip into a corker of a joke if he can make one (“Do we really want to provide a genocide with elevator music?”). It’s a thriller for both the senses and the mind - a clever conceit exploited for both the sinister and the darkly humorous, where a conversation can turn from everyday to dangerous with a mere repeated word signaling oncoming derangement. McDonald and writer Tony Burgess let this build slowly, like a virus taking hold more importantly, the two take the irrational nature of the premise and expand it until it’s the whole point, the problem and the solution - fight repetition with repetition, violence against the flesh with violence against language, the unexplainable with the deliberately scrambled. ![]() Seems there’s something multiplying in their brains, making them act violently towards others - could it be related to the muttered, repeated mantras they all seem to have? Stephen McHattie, with his gloriously gravelly voice, plays a no-bullshit radio talkshow host whose snowy Monday morning goes from bad to disastrous when folks in his tiny Ontario town of Pontypool start acting a little odd. How, then, to revitalize it? Let’s see… what if the infection was not physical but mental, coded in language and how we process it? That’s the hook of the terrifically creepy Pontypool, a film that lets chaos spin from the mere act of speaking. French’s cat is missing…” So many zombie movies have slithered from the digital pipe in the last year that it’s natural for the genre to be suffering burnout. If you want a horror film with personality: Pontypool (2009, Bruce McDonald) Somebody has to be The Guy Behind the Counter. And if you end up hating that film, you can’t mouth off to the algorithm, aside from logging a one-star rating and maybe writing a review that no one’s going to read anyway. It can’t champion that film, argue passionately for it, tell you exactly how gorgeous or exciting or chock fulla boobs it is. ![]() Thing is, though, while that code can tell you that you might find a particular film interesting, it can’t tell you why. ![]() And to sift through it all, they’ve got algorithms, bits of code that relate titles you might be interested in to titles you’ve liked. Their library is vast and daunting, filled with a striking number of films previously unavailable since the heyday of VHS. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the darker corners of Netflix Instant. Those guys and those stores are gone now, yet there’s still plenty of work to be done - the rise of streaming video has resulted in the unearthing of a staggering amount of forgotten, underloved cinema. These were the guys who knew most every faded, dust-covered tape they had, and they were happy to steer you towards something interesting and unfamiliar, whether it be a foreign film that bypassed your area’s theaters or a forgotten bit of genre sleaze given a second life on a burgeoning new format. It used to be, if you had just seen something and wanted to pick up another film in the same vein, maybe something a little off the beaten path, you’d talk to your friendly neighborhood video store clerk.
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