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Reviews Counted:71
Fresh:58
Rotten:13
Average Rating:6.6/10
Consensus: Witty and restrained but still taut and funny, this Pontypool is a different breed of low-budget zombie film.
Theatrical Release:May 29, 2009 Limited
Synopsis: It’s not just the snow storm that’s chilling in this Canadian zombie movie from director Bruce McDonald (THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS). Stephen McHattie (WATCHMEN) stars as controversy-courting radio DJ... [More]
Starring: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Hrant Alianak, Georgina Reilly
Director: Bruce McDonald
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...most of the pleasures the movie offers are visceral, from the silken roar of character actor McHattie's FM shock jock voice and the bloody meltdown of a production assistant to the bizarro epilogue appended to the credits.
The film works as a tour de force for McHattie -- a veteran character actor making the most of his character’s long, fluid monologues -- and as a sly commentary on journalistic responsibility.
While PONTYPOOL is a thought-provoking and suspenseful film, some of the flaws will really take the audience out of the movie.
McDonald's limiting the action to the radio studio induces claustrophobia and then devolves into staginess.
As much about ideas as it is about generating scares, the film is an arresting linguistic mystery.
This unsettlingly quirky account of semiological breakdown and small-town apocalypse plays like My Winnipeg for fans of intellectual horror. Pontypool is as astonishing as it is original, and amply repays multiple viewings.
Pontypool loses what easily could have been a great story.
Effective and spooky and definitely smarter than your average studio fare, Pontypool is an off-the-wall little offering that rewards viewers looking for something different.
Hemmed in by theatrically bound staging, "Pontypool" is an overly inflated zombie flick that makes overtures to a weighty theme of social consciousness that the screenwriters are ill-prepared to fulfill.
Sometimes gets bogged down in its own weirdness, but a genuinely unique piece of horror filmmaking.
In its best moments the film offers an entertaining throwback to the Seventies heyday of John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, when a creepy situation could be just as effective as a burst of stomach-churning special effects.
Too much jaw, not enough gore.
Tight as a drum and the most inventive spin on a zombie-plague premise in years.
Riddled with nail-biting tension and scenes that are quite simply scary as hell, Pontypool as of now is on my best of list for 2009.
An entertaining cerebral chiller.
Inventive and genuinely suspenseful, this is a welcome addition to the expanding zombie/virus canon.
Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as 28 Days Later written by linguist Noam Chomsky.
Top Criticthrows up so many Freudian slips, mixed metaphors and free-associative leaps that in the end the main characters' (and our own) grip on reality comes unstuck, and the unfolding apocalypse takes on a positively Saussurean aspect.
A film that wrings its terror not from gruesome imagery or sudden visual jolts but through a smart psychological rendering of our universal fear of the unknown.
a frightening little Canadian chiller
May 28, 2009:
Critics Consensus: Up And Drag Me to Hell Are Certified Fresh
This week at the movies, we've got a high-flying house (Up, with voice work by Ed Asner and Christopher Plummer) and a demonic curse (Drag Me to Hell, starring Alison Lohman and... More...
May 10, 2009:
Trailer & Poster review 
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