Pontypool

Zombie movies and bottle movies are a fairly common pairing. It makes for a natural set up: a hoard of mindless killing machines besieging a place with survivors trapped inside, hoping for escape or rescue. It’s so common, it’s hard to envision a zombie movie that doesn’t involve hunkering down and fortifying a building, and it’s doubly hard to imagine a zombie movie doing something new with that formula. Pontypool finds that something new to do with it. It changes the nature of the murderous infection (they’re closer to the rage zombies of 28 Days Later, but that’s still not accurate) and builds a mystery around it. It doesn’t focus on survival and combat. And most importantly, the building is a radio station in a small Canadian town, and the three people inside are the on air cast and crew, learning about the outbreak and mayhem as they broadcast. This last part is the important part in Pontypool achieving its scares. We only hear about the atrocities happening in the town; the riots, people being torn apart and murdered, the rampant destruction, it’s all presented as eyewitness accounts from callers to the radio show. As much as I love a good visceral scene like Rhodes in Day Of The Dead getting torn in half, NOT seeing it has a whole different kind of impact. The brain of the viewer has to hear the descriptions and the sound effects in the background and see the faces of the deejay and the producer and the call screener, and it has to fill in the blanks. That’s so much more effective. And when there is some blood and guts (very little, really only one scene), it hits so much harder than 90 minutes of continual arterial spray and viscera. It makes Pontypool play out like a visual radio play. A modern twist of Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds broadcast. This should be a tricky concept to pull off, but the acting, music, and direction all come together here. The movie takes its time building the characters and slowly peeling back the madness we don’t see outside the doors, and we get to see how each of the three main characters processes it. The deejay, Glenn, is a shock jock and an egotistical ass who was fired for going to far, and is now stuck rebuilding his career in a podunk cowtown in rural Canada. He thinks the whole thing is a hazing of some kind. The producer, Sydney, doesn’t want to believe it because she’s trying to be a responsible broadcaster. And Laurel-Ann, the screener, has some hero worship going on with Glenn, so she wants to feed into it. The movie takes its time to build these people and then drip-feed the horror, and watch them cope with the growing feeling that it is real, it is terrible, and they’re stuck. Adding to it all is the mystery of how and why it’s all happening. It is the most novel twist on a zombie movie I’ve seen. Some might be angry that the how is explained but the why isn’t, but it didn’t bother me at all. I loved the unanswered question. It made the horror hit harder for me. I won’t spoil it here; you just need to see it. Just know that once the how is figured out, it adds a whole new level of terror to the movie. The minor quibbles I could give it are a bit of a slow start, and a need to make the characters a little slow on the uptake. There’s an element to the mystery of the infection that is tipped fairly early on that the trio seem to completely forget about until way later than they should, and it kinda feels forced. That’s it, though. Otherwise, this thing is a damned good time, and a hell of a unique take on zombie siege bottle movies. Suspenseful, atmospheric, and dripping with dread and imagination — both its own and yours — Pontypool is a must-watch.