The film could have been brilliant, had it been a little bit more courageous. It starts off with some form of third-person narrative, where a radio anchor gets in reports about strange events around his remote and snow-plagued Canadian town. Crowds go crazy, reporters go missing, eye witnesses start babbling during the live interview and eventually crack up. Just imagine telling the whole film from the confinement of the radio studio, what a creepy and claustrophobic little bugger that would be. Instead, at some point they decide to show what is actually going on, they bring on the zombies or infected (you have to be careful these days about those distinctions. I think we learn at some point that it’s some form of rabie infection, transmitted through sound, and highly contagious).
Apart from the general setting, and the main character, the grumpy and alcoholic radio news anchor who needs his first shot of Johnny Walker into his coffee before he can even thinkl about starting the breakfast show, there are some gems in the film, stressing how creative these guys are: a crazy montage where some of the recently deceased are introduced, together with an list of whome they killed and ate before they themselves were subjected to one form of extermination or the other. Or a sequence that follows the discovery that the infection only gets transmitted through the English language, and consequently everybody tries to gather the bits of poor French, poor Russian and poor Hebrew that they can scrap from their brain cells (actually, I think that was a very Canadian joke…). The exclaim “shit!” when a zombiething attacks, only to correct themselves to “merde!”.
Because the movie lost a bit of its originally very dense atmosphere, I lost some interest over time, but still it was an original bit of horror movie, with some new angles.
thomas4cinema 