.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

Zombies - as I have written in many a review - are maybe the most boring of horror film villains. Although 28 Days Later and Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead did their best to revamp the genre, zombies for all intents and purposes are boooooring.

Yet, there doesn't seem to be a week that goes by that a new zombie film doesn't hit the DVD shelf or have a limited run at the local hole-in-the-wall theatre just outside of town.

At age 39 (yeah, that's right), I had come to believe that the best of all the zombie films were behind me and that there would be nothing new for the genre to show me that hasn't been done in everything from Death Becomes Her to Pet Cemetery.

I am gleefully happy to report that …well, that I was wrong. And it took a small Canadian film to show me that you can still take a stale, boring, near dead genre and breathe fresh crisp air back into an unsuspecting audience.

Pontypool stars Stephen McHattie as Grant Mazzy, a talk radio DJ that just so happens to be on the air when reports start to come in about strange mob behavior in the Northern Ontario town of Pontypool.

He along with Sydney and Laurel (Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly respectively), spend most of the movie sitting in the station trying to put the pieces together through various call-ins from town locals. It is a fascinating trip where the audience uses their own imagination from the descriptions to accompany any horror or violence that is ensuing within the town borders.

Information comes slow at first. They are told that a mob of hundreds are attacking the office of Dr. John Mendez. From there, reports of murder and horror come in spurts. All unconfirmed but all truly believable thanks to the convictions and the terror in the voices of each caller.

Later, in fear for his life, Dr, Mendez stumbles across the radio station and he helps connect the dots that might sound ridiculous, but are shear genius. Seems these zombies are not created the old fashioned way wherein one bits a living person and thus transforms them thanks to the transfer of fluid.

Nope, director Bruce MacDonald (based on a script by Tony Burgess), instead has people becoming violent and insane for the taste of death due to a virus spread by words in the English language. If you understand and hear a certain word, it can trigger your transformation.

Genius.

What results are Mazzy, Mendez and Sydney using French and writing down all communication as to not trigger a response.

If all this sounds confusing, well, I am sure that is exactly what Bruce MacDonald wanted. Taking something as simple as zombie's and putting it under a whole different microscope.

The result is a movie that is fresh and powerful even though you have to wait a full hour before a zombie even appears on screen (and at that, the gore quotient is lower than my SAT scores).

When it comes to zombie films, you are never going to get me to knock Dawn of the Dead, Lifeforce, Dead Alive or The Re-Animator out of my top 10, but Pontypool finds itself right along side some of these classics.

An intelligent zombie film. Huh. Who knew.