Pontypool: (2008. dir: Bruce McDonald) What if a virus could take refuge within a language, hide there and transmit itself through specific words? What do you do if you're the disc jockey on a radio station when the English language becomes its chosen method of transmission? McHattie plays radio shock-jock Grant Mazzy, recently shuttled out of the mainstream and into the Canadian hinterlands after offending the wrong people. It's early morning, the world is socked in with snowstorm, he makes it to work at his new podunk job, accompanied only by his producer (Lisa Houle) and a young engineer recently returned from service in Afghanistan (Georgina Reilly). After the usual struggles in the first part of the morning, things start to get weird.
It's a strange, bold idea, and early on it builds some terror by refusing to show us the horrors. We hear them described (masterfully) by the guy in the "weather copter", and then, in one instance, we watch a poster of Mazzy's face on the wall in skewed Dutch angle as we listen to a murder being committed just off-screen. McHattie and Houle, Canadian actors long married, work well together and give the piece a certain necessary cohesion even after its script has begun to fall apart. Before the end, it gets twisted up in its metaphors and chokes fatally on its own pretensions, but the two leads are so good we keep caring. The last moment before the credits is inspired. Then there's some silliness following the credits which must have been an inside joke. Anyway, I didn't get it.
Death Valley: (1982. dir: Dick Richards) This is a weird-assed little movie. It begins in an eastern city, with Billy (Peter Billingsley, he of the coke-bottle lenses in Christmas Story) spending a day of culture with his dad (Edward Herrmann): they play chess, visit museums, then make a tearful farewell. His mother has a new man in the Southwest, and he is off for a vacation in Death Valley. A plot which initially seems to be heading into "how will the new stepdad win the kid's affection?" country runs sideways into la-la-land when Billy steals a necklace from an RV which turns out to be a murder site, then sees the pendant's exact double around the neck of a waiter (McHattie), then reports this to the Sheriff (Wilfred Brimley, who might as well be Billingsley grown older)... and weird pieces of chaos follow, one after another, without making a whole lot of sense, but without seeming to care much about making sense, either, which somehow makes it more acceptable.
The reason to watch it, the one reason, is McHattie. He's given a lot of leeway with the improvisation, and he makes it great. The scene in which young Billy locks himself in the motel bathroom and bad hombre McHattie breaks him out by removing the moulding from around the door, all the while making light banter with the boy, is the kind of inspired that drags a bad movie upward a couple of pegs, a thing for which this actor is known. Once the boy escapes and runs to hide by the pool, just the way his predator prowls around it, calmly tracking, is beautiful to watch. Then McHattie improvises a whole bit while driving, including a rendition of "Billy Boy", and it all builds up to his dance on the rooftop: "I'm dancing on the roof, daddy, and there ain't nothing you can do about it!"
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