Picks of the Day: Pontypool (midnight) and Zombie Girl: The Movie (12:30 p.m.)
- A scene from Pontypool
Two zombie-inflected pictures are highlights on this year’s Indie Memphis line-up: The fictional thriller Pontypool and the documentary Zombie Girl: The Movie.
Pontypool is perfect for its midnight movie time slot. The film is a claustrophobic tour de force, one of the best films to screen in Memphis this year. Set in the titular small town in Ontario, Pontypool premises a talk-radio station as the hub for a strange news day that begins with reports of a hostage situation and evolves into what could be a zombie-type event.
The film is set entirely in the radio station, and as bizarre and terrifying calls come in throughout the morning, the characters register a confusion and fear that seems palpably real-world. (Stephen McHattie is magnificent as the on-air host Grant Mazzy, and Lisa Houle is heartbreakingly good as the show producer Sydney Briar.) With its insular vision and reimagining of the zombie trope of undead spread, the film is brilliant to the end, when its opening utterances come flooding back into your mind. Pontypool is something like The War of the Worlds as if imagined by Arthur Miller.
- Zombie Girl
Zombie Girl: The Movie is more straightforward and certainly a sweeter, cheerier imbibe than Pontypool. The documentary introduces us to Emily Hagins, a 6th grader in Austin, Texas — where else could this happen? — Who instigates a fairly mature amateur film production with her zombie-horror Pathogen. Zombie Girl is essentially a making-of doc, but it doesn’t require you to have seen the movie it’s about. The star here is Hagins, a super-sweet, precocious kid who fell in geek with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and was inspired to try her own hand at filmmaking.
