Dead Air

After reading a brief description of this film I thought someone had remade PONTYPOOL already. Well it is not a remake...but it really, really, borrows heavily from it. It also borrows quite a bit from 28 DAYS LATER.

Terrorist simultaneously detonate chemical bombs at major sporting events across the United States. The chemicals turn people into highly contagious, rabid, homicidal maniacs. A radio talk show host (Bill Mosely) and his crew are broadcasting live while the events unfold.

Most of the events take place at the radio station ala PONTYPOOL. Luckily the virus is man-made and not verbal (a plot point of PONTYPOOL that, while original, just didn't work for me). The infected have bleeding eyes, run fast and can infect you with just a scratch ala 28 DAYS LATER. So basically this movies takes the best parts of both films and mixes them together for its own purposes.

Over all I thought this was a great, entertaining movie. It moves along quickly and has some truly disturbing and horrific moments. Unfortunately the similarities to the other films was a bit of a let down and will probably turn some people off.

Just have to disagree with kosmap. Better script does not equal better story. You can easily have a better story idea but a worse script. That review should be ignored simply because of the ridiculousness of that comment. Anyways imo this was better than Pontypool. I like the main character in that movie better though.

I watched this film mistakenly thinking that it was that other radio station zombie flick. The shonky production values and low-rent cast soon gave away that this was another one of the those cheap sci-fi channel style knock offs.

The central performance from Bill Moseley is initially quite engaging as the dubious radio shock jock but as the film goes on becomes less and less convincing as he is actually required to act. The rest of the cast have little to do other than look concerned and have no depth whatsoever.

The cinematography is dull, flat and completely uninspired, like so many of these kind of films. It doesn't even manage a decent bit of convincing gore, the zombie make up is literally pathetic apart from one notable exception towards the end of the film.

The film tries to inject originality and a message into it's concoction of half baked and ripped off ideas by somehow equating this outbreak with intolerance towards Islam and the war on terror. This is woefully handled with all the intellectual clout of a 6 year old. As the characters and seemingly the writers are unable to distinguish the difference between race and religion - describing all people of a certain skin colour as "muslims." Most notably one character is revealed to be Muslim by skin colour alone. At the same time the "muslim" terrorists who cause the outbreak are the usual psychopathic stereotype.

Presumably the far far superior Pontypool had a similar budget as Dead Air yet shines everywhere where this film fails miserably.

If you watch one movie with a radio station and an infection make it "Pontypool". If you want to watch more than one, this one is decent enough for you to watch it once. It's certainly refreshing to watch Bill Mosley in a different sort of role/character. While he's doing a good job, McHattie was just terrific and could not be matched (which of course is also a sign, that Pontypool has the better script and therefor also the better story).

The effects are good enough for a small budget and the movie does do a decent job in getting the movie along. You have to excuse the movie for some stupid character behaviour of course (something that quite a few horror movies seem to be infected with). If you can do that, you will be able to enjoy it (or if you cut the movie quite some slack, you will even rate it higher than I did)

"Dead Air" is a zombie film with a few different elements of surprise thrown in for good measure. An overtly, competent talk radio host (Bill Moseley) speaks his mind to a late night audience, while an outbreak of toxic zombie-juice (brought on by Muslim terrorists) engulfs an unsuspecting city. Not a bad premise, but really nothing new. It was a bit preachy for a horror flick, and spent a lot of time using underlining character relationships to tug at the viewer's heart-strings (sorry, didn't quite work here) and this slowed the pacing down for much of the film. Moseley, along with the (always sexy) Patricia Tallman do a decent job as the film's protagonists, while the zombies themselves (with blood dripping from their eyes) tear apart their victims. I'm guessing the film's Armageddon theme was a lesson in hatred, and the writer's views on the world today. I didn't realize until the end credits that "Corbin Bernsen" was the director... I guess I didn't even realize that he was a "director" for that fact, but "Dead Air" is a pleasantly fun zombie movie if zombie movies are your thing. Breaks no new ground, but none the less "entertains" the way it's supposed to.