Filed under: Celebrity Interviews, Interviews, Movies We Love, Horror
Pontypool is a movie everyone should see. Or at least every self-respecting horror fan. Amidst the Final Destinations, Saws and glut of unoriginal tripe that pervades the theaters, Pontypool serves as a thinking man's horror film, one that implores the audience to look beyond that surface for subtext that you might not otherwise find in a horror film. Sure, Saw 6 did it with its heavy-handed attack on the current state of health care, and Larry Fessenden's The Last Winter managed to tackle global warming by giving it a supernatural bent, but these are all broad social issues that are no stranger to satire or lampooning, thus making their ubiquity come off as annoying. Pontypool manages to avoid this by taking a common horror trope (the zombie) and injecting in it heaping doses of commentary concerning the nature of language and of words.
This week's Movie Club will be a bit different, as Pontypool is not available on Netflix Watch Instantly nor any other streaming movie sites that I know of. If you're able to find a copy, I urge you to do so and watch it this weekend so you can participate in the discussion on Monday. I'm not going to begin to pretend that I know just exactly what point the film is getting across - that's why I chose it for this week. I want to hear what you think, and in this I hope we can come to a clear conclusion as to what exactly Tony Burgess intended with his original novel-cum radio play-cum movie.