Of eight features “that offer fresh, robust interpretations of familiar movie themes” making up the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth annual Canadian Front, two are takes on the undead horror staples of vampires and zombies. Starting slightly later than already late scheduled times -- to let out nearer the witching hour, joked series curator Laurence Kardish – Pontypool and The Death of Alice Blue show what can be done sans FX on low-to-no budgets.

Alice Blue is less successful, staking its all on parodic deadpan acting and young people’s jokes which found favor with the many in the audience who had motored in from the cold north for this world première. In black mild-Goth, speaking before and after, Toothin Theater founders Park Bench (aka Robert Maynard) and producer Alex Appel acknowledged the among-friends nature of this début film, even to the music, which is “fiction” and not a dig at the soul-sucking world of advertising in which director-screenwriter Bench once worked.

Tiny Alice (Appel) lives with shallow pushy mother Mary (Carolyn Dunn) and an overfed cat but hopes to prove her creative chops at a new job with Raven Advertising. Aryan dreamboat ideas director Stephen (Kristen Holden-Reid) leads her on in the retro-color office of oddballs, while employee Peter Green (Bench) would caution and recruit her against the sinister bosses. The red liquid of the Nether Wines ad campaign, the cold storage down below, and hidden blood relationships draw Alice into the communion of her race, hinging on her compliance or refusal.

Titled from its snowy Podunk Ontario town, Pontypool is sophisticated and imaginative beyond its cyber-age variation on townies turned into cannibalistic zombies, usually aimed at teens in J-horror’s cassettes, monitor images, ringtones, or text messages. More mature than the other, vampire company-coven movie in not pausing to admire its own debts to horror/sci-fi/alien invader predecessors -- apart from end-credit b&w-to-color seconds -- this East Coast première is screenwritten from his own novel by Tony Burgess, a friend of director Bruce McDonald.

Claustrophobic in a dimly radio studio in a former church basement, the story is relayed in the actions and re-actions of an underinformed crew of three, as lines of communication go down except for the odd bulletin or phone connection. The whole depends on, and is carried marvelously by, Stephen McHattie’s am news/talk/call-in Radio 660 patter “from down here in the dungeon.” Imus to his urban cowboy duds and face crinkles, his Grant Mazzy sips whiskey from a coffee mug while running his sarcastic, sometimes obscene mouth that has gotten him demoted to producer Sydney Briar’s (Lisa Houle) small-time station.

In starstruck admiration of the grizzled veteran, young technician Laurel-Ann Drummond (Georgina Reilly) follows his every word and direction, while Syd cringes at his acerbic asides and deviations from the rural Lake Wobegon format of weather, school-bus routes, lost cats named Honey, weddings, births and deaths. Listeners expect local pap even if it is the falsity of blackface singing “Arabs” or pedophile Ken Loney (voice of Rick Roberts) in the weather Sunshine Chopper that is in fact his parked Dodge Dart.

SPOILER ALERT

Unconfirmable from the cellar studio, incomplete garbled aural reports trickle then snowball in, of deaths by murder, suicide or crushing, of massed residents at Golden Dawn Facility or at Dr. John Mendez’ office, of monstrous births, dismemberment, eating of human flesh. BBC-1 calls but, not a believer in UFOs, Grant is told to deny all rumors. Sight evidence soon appears among the three, not limited to the strange entrance of Mendez (Hrant Alianak) and the hordes who besiege the building.

The Armenian-speaking doctor posits a “virus” as the cause of deadly contagion, spread not by submicroscopic protein agents or computer programs but through the hearing of certain words in the English language. Switching to pidgin French and writing on notebook sheets, Mazzy and half-drunk Syd retreat, barricade doors against the cannibal crush, and rack their brains for anti-viral antidote words.

A film historian has noted that “off-screen sound figures importantly in the [horror] genre” and cites another that “the felt presence of the events is enormously enhanced by the sound of voices and other noises.” Using a minimum of gore, and that mild and more shocking in its bump sound that its optical effect, Pontypool develops an interesting modern variant on an oft-used plot inciter. Reporting on what he and we do not see, McHattie is convincing in his unbelief that becomes skepticism and then acceptance calling for action, and Pontypool, which strange town name his Mazzy first rendered a dirty joke, succeeds where many a less intelligent, purely visceral-visual movie leaves us cold.

(Released by IFC; not rated by MPAA.)