Pontypool (2008)

  This was a great little Canadian zombie film.  As you may know, it has been an on-going quest to map the different attributes of zombies around the world. Japanese zombies can shoot at you, Thai zombies use teamwork, English zombies are fast, and so forth.  Well, apparently, Canadian zombies can't shut up.

Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is a radio DJ for a small town in Ontario called Pontypool.  On his way to work one day, he has a strange encounter with a woman who bangs on his car window at a stop light, then disappears into the snow.  He writes it off and does his show, only to receive a news report from their traffic guy of a mob of people attacking a doctor's office.  Isolated at the radio station with only his producer Sidney (Lisa Houle) and his tech person Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), Grant grows increasingly convinced that something terrible is happening.  Ned the traffic guy reports sights of cannibalism and destruction and the peculiar fact that the perpetrators seem to be afflicted with some sort of speech disorder.  They all repeat phrases over and over.  The military interrupts the broadcast with the announcement, in French, that the city is under quarantine and that citizens are asked not to speak to each other, especially not in English.  See, that's how the illness travels.  It latches onto a word and, once understood, affects the hearer.  Now Grant must figure out how to save the people around him.  But how do you un-understand your mother tongue?

I thought this was an extremely interesting concept, less of a zombie virus and more like a zombie meme, an idea that is passed and shared among people.  You can kill a virus with a vaccine but you can't kill an idea.  And the idea that repeating a word until it becomes meaningless--glossolalia--as a form of immune response is clever.  Think of how fast something like that would spread.  Think of how many people you talk to, listen to, on a daily basis.  And it would only take a couple of good bilingual people for it to jump between languages.  Granted, the idea stops short at reality but that's what makes it a good horror movie:  you get the delicious thrill of the "what if" tempered by the secure knowledge that you'll never have to find out for real.

If you're a 28 Days Later fan, I think you'd definitely appreciate this one.