Pontypool

One of the things that often helps horror movies is when certain moments and images are left up to the imagination. If something is left up to the imagination rather than being displayed (however graphically) by the camera, it’s a lot creepier because each individual viewer is going to picture the horrific image in a different way depending on what he/she finds scary. This is why it’s so great that the makers of The Blair Witch Project choose to never show us whatever it is that haunts the protagonists, just like it’s great that during a scene in The Silence of the Lambs in which Jodie Foster’s character sees a dead body, we don’t actually see the body, but rather, we just watch her terrified reaction, while hearing someone tell her that they were able to save only one of the guy’s ears. So many horror films nowadays decide to show us things in all their, um, gory glory, thus leaving little room for any actual fear to develop.

It’s because of this that there’s a lot of promise in the first half hour of Pontypool, during which we watch three characters who work at a radio station take calls in which they hear details from people about this weird and apparently catastrophic situation taking place outside of a doctor’s office. These scenes are gripping, well-paced, and they make this film a solid piece of thrilling entertainment… for half an hour. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill once the film starts trying so hard at explaining the phenomenon that is taking place; in doing so, it becomes terribly ridiculous and convoluted.

Pontypool certainly brings a new spin to the zombie movie genre. It presents words and language as a potential catalyst for a catastrophic epidemic, and this is a great concept because of what it has to say about the way people communicate with one another, and the effects that what happens on this film has on that. That’s exactly why it’s such a shame that it descends into laughably bad explanatory dialogue that occupies scenes that should instead give us the same level of tension that we had gotten during the movie’s first act. The doctor whose office is apparently surrounded by chaos eventually arrives at the radio station, and the purpose of having his character show up is apparently to help us understand what is happening, but his lines are so awful, his moments of “Eureka!” so lame and poorly staged, that it made me feel so disappointed at how this film could go from being so good to being so thoroughly mediocre.

The final few seconds before the credits start rolling are meant to be jarring, and they are, but not in an effective way, and more than likely, they don’t achieve the effect the filmmakers were hoping for. Once the credits start rolling, we get some audio that is supposedly meant to clue us in to certain things, but by this point, it’ll be hard to think about anything other than how dumbfounding it is that this initially restrained and creepy film eventually gave in to becoming so dense and over-the-top.

4/10