Pontypool: Critic Reviews

Think of this witty, economically gory little tour de force as 28 Days Later written by 
linguist Noam Chomsky.

A small Canadian horror film that makes the most of its minuscule budget.

An utterly baffling and stunningly boring zombie horror thriller.

For a film about the perils of too much talk, there's quite a lot of babbling presented as profundity.

A horror flick that's all talk and (almost) no action? The risk pays off better than you'd think.

Pontypool is, in all senses, brain food -- and juicy.

If it wasn't so boring, the dialogue would be a laugh a minute. The acting is so abominable that the cast is better off unmentioned.

However shrewdly contrived to keep its budget low, Pontypool, set almost entirely in a basement radio station, is a zombie flick sans bite.

What's a zombie movie without zombies? A dull zombie movie.

The judicious use of humour makes the fear seem all the more real.

Pontypool is ultimately a testament to its frequently besieged director's audacity and vision.

If you're a devotee of the deranged mind of Canadian indie auteur Bruce McDonald, then I can just tell you that he's made a horror movie (kind of) and that Pontypool is it.

This low-budget picture is a little too claustrophobic, and it grows tedious. The ominous, overbearing musical score tries but fails to jack up the tension.

Alarmingly intelligent and deeply disorienting, Pontypool plays as a radically different film upon subsequent viewings, its metaphor-filled dialogue seeming to shift and alter in meaning with every scene.

A winning combination of shuddery suspense and intelligent observations.

Its a mighty strange beast, an intellectual B-movie that offers equal parts semiotics and projectile gore.

Laurie Anderson would be proud: language is a virus in [this] zombie(-esque) thriller set almost entirely within the walls of a basement radio station.

Interesting zombie flick. A little too claustrophobic with all of the scenes in a makeshift radio station. Too much description and not enough action, almost like War of the World's radio broadcast. Still, worth watching once. Paul Chambers, CNN.

This year Canada's PONTYPOOL ranks as high as any United States science fiction films I have seen.

An entertaining cerebral chiller.

Compellingly apocalyptic.

An original take on genre movies of its kind.

This is one of those little films that proves that you don't need a blockbuster budget to make a high-concept movie. McDonald and Burgess create a mass-chaos apocalyptic thriller with essentially just three characters in a windowless room.

In an era of generic horror films, this has enough ideas to stand out.