Reed Alexander's Horror Review of 'Pontypool' (2008)

The whole movie starts out with seemingly no real direction. Some alcoholic disk jokey, who does the 'fire and brimstone' shtick, starts his day at work, and from there, shit just gets weird. And that's the only way it can really be described at first. 'Weird.'

That's also the movie's basic description from the blurb on the Netflix. But here's the thing, the movie starts out with this broadcast that actually explains the whole movie before it even starts. It seems like just a garbled message about a play on words involving this missing cat, and how the world is full of coincidences, but really, it's the key to the whole plot. You'd just have to be a total lunatic to pick it up.

The whole movie is about language and understanding and how this affects our minds. It holds this theme where, if you repeat a word long enough, it looses all meaning and becomes incoherent.

Then the plot ramps up when people start calling in, chanting at times, but repeating words incoherently. The rationality begins to break down and the unknown starts to take over.

Needless to say, the overarching plot is really convoluted and hard to follow, but it's added nicely to a much more simplistic plot that I'll get to in the spoilers. Importantly, if you just don't get the larger picture, the general plot is entertaining enough.

The acting is absolutely fantastic, especially for horror. To be honest, I'm not particularly familiar with the careers of any of these actors, but they were each incredibly capable. None of the main cast was overshadowed or faded into the background.

The setting is also fantastic because it's a throwback to the cramped isolationism and claustrophobia of some of the best horrors in cinema such as John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), or my all time favorite, Alien (1979). The whole movie takes place in a tiny radio studio while all hell breaks loose outside, preventing the characters from leaving. This, of course, lowers production costs for small studio like this, but the important part is, they new how to work with it, and they did make it work.

I abso-fucking-lutely recommend this movie. Not just to Horror Heads who are almost guaranteed to appreciate it, but also general adult audiences.

SPOILERS!!!

So this is actually a zombie movie, which surprised the shit out of me. I went back and looked up the genre on Netflix, and it did say "Zombie Horror," but you never would have guessed it from the simple description.

The zombies are infected with a dormant virus that is triggered by brain synapses firing. This happens when the victim hears and understands a word that's associated with those specific synapses. The virus, now awake, sets the synapses on a cycle, effectively frying the brain. This causes an incoherent chanting in the victim. It's hard to describe how freaky the process really is, how communication breaks down and starts to lose all meaning. Without our ability to communicate and never knowing what word might set off the virus, society could completely collapse.

The best part about this movie, even when you start to suspect that it's a zombie film, is that there is no certainty until near the end, when the first infected victims show up in the studio. There are just too many variables, too much unknown. The setting is just a church basement which has been retrofitted as a broadcast studio. So the only communication they have with the outside are the call-ins, all of whom slowly become incoherent.

It's the madness of the call-ins that really struck me. It just makes the unknown that much more obscure, that much more esoteric. Eventually there's a scene where someone calls in and says "They're eating people," and you know it's a zombie movie, but for the first half of the movie, the unknown becomes an absolute abyss.

Also, there's a really weird "Film Nior" Easter egg at the end of the credits. It was kinda cute, so skip to the end and give it a look.

Do watch this. You won't be disappointed. It's not just another zombie movie.