Review: Pontypool

Pontypool (2008)

Pontypool is a zombie movie, but with very little zombie in it, its mostly about a talk radio DJ and his producer and assistant hunkered down in their radio station. The thing that makes this different from every other zombie movie is that the people are infected not with a virus in their bodies but in their minds by repeating words. The movie plays with the idea that language being mimetic is infectious like a virus, and that ideas and meanings behind words are infectious, but it specifically and almost contrary, the infection is caused by the repetition of a word until it becomes meaningless and the victim goes crazy and starts trying to kill people. This churns into a mass hysteria, but we don't really get to see too much of it since most of the action is played out in our minds as we hear it phoned in (literally) to the radio station. The drama plays between the characters in the radio station as they try to make sense of what is going on and how they can use their position to help people. I didn't really enjoy this one that much, but I don't want to say it was a bad movie. I applaud them for taking a different approach and trying to breath more life and intelligence into the zombie genre. I do like the idea of building the analogy of infectious ideas that spread like a zombie plague, but I'm not a fan of how they implemented it. The way it infected only words of the English language didn't really make sense to me. Also the part where they are repeating words over and over until they don't make sense, but then the way its defeated is by thinking the word means something else was a little weird, and it was never really explained how that would travel from person to person through exposure. That and the guy's voice sounded too much like Space Ghost which took me out of the movie a little. Overall it was an interesting idea, but the details of how they implemented it didn't make sense to me.