A Pandemic Playlist, Part 2: Movies

If you're staying inside to stop the spread of COVID-19, you'll need entertainment, so I've put together a "pandemic playlist" of disease-related media for your consumption (of course, while this list is lighthearted, do please heed the health and safety recommendations of the WHO and CDC). Here are some movies to watch while you hunker down:

12 Monkeys




This is easily Terry Gilliam's most commercially successful film, and it's not hard to see why: you've got a star-studded cast (Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt - heck, even Christopher Plummer) and a pleasingly baroque time travel tale about a man forced to choose between salvaging a future devastated by a killer virus, and the literal woman of his dreams. You could say it doesn't end well, but really, it doesn't end at all...


Day of the Dead



George A. Romero's "The Crazies" is certainly a better fit for this list, but it's not half as good as Romero's third Dead movie, "Day of the Dead." Originally intended to be the "Gone with the Wind" of zombie flicks, budget constraints trimmed the story and cabined the setting into a dreary underground lab, where desperate scientists try to find a cure for the undead plague. While not as good as "Night" and "Dawn," "Day" is still fun since it has the most over-the-top characters and lines of the entire series (yes, even including "Land of the Dead," which has a character played by John Leguizamo).


Pontypool



The tips for fending off the coronavirus are a lot more straightforward than the cryptic advice doled out in "Pontypool," a very low budget, very Canadian horror movie that does a good job of riffing on zombie movie tropes. The film is about a radio shock jock (played by veteran character actor Stephen McHattie) who finds the world crumbling around him due to a mysterious virus - to say more would be to spoil the surprise.