Review of Pontypool (2009) by Jesse O — 12 Nov 2011

This is a pretty freaking great horror movie. It's not the best one I've ever seen, and it's definitely not as good as, for example, Lake Mungo. Despite all that, the feeling I had after watching this movie is that this one of the freshest and coolest horror movies I've seen in YEARS.

And this is not cool like Pulp Fiction characters or some such, but the way the story is told is incredibly inventive and smart. There's little if any gore at all, yet they get a lot of very intense scenes out of just dialogue and the description of what is going on in this town.

And there's some genuinely creepy scenes, and keep in mind that, again, all of this was through dialogue and not actually showing you what happened The presentation for what is, essentially, a low budget horror movie is incredible.

It really puts a lot of the bigger budgeted horror movies to shame. When they finally reveal what's causing the infection, I was almost ready to give up on the movie and for a while there I was like "This is stupid.

" But goddamnit if they didn't ever find a way to make it make sense within the context of this world and they took something that would've potentially killed other movies and made it into an incredible positive.

I didn't like the 'military/government fucks them up in the end to contain the virus' bullshit as I just feel too many horror movies use it because it's easier than writing up a REAL reason for this virus to be contained.

Weaknesses aside, this is still a great horror movie that's worth going out of your way to seek out. As mentioned, it's one of the freshest horror movie in years.