News|Movies|BD & DVD|Writings|Other

Monday, February 22, 2010

BD impressions: Pontypool

12:13 PM / BD Impressions / 5 Comments

I believe PONTYPOOL first came to my attention thanks to Mark Kermode's Radio 5 show. He didn't review the film himself, but if memory serves me correctly several listeners wrote in to recommend it. I'm glad I decided to check it out, because it turned out to be one of the best horror movies I've seen in the last year. Set in a small, isolated village in Ontario in the middle of an icy winter, it focuses on a radio host, his producer and her assistant as the three of them become trapped in their studio as a sinister virus, spread through speech itself, begins infecting those on the outside.

To say any more would be to give too much away, but suffice it to say that PONTYPOOL is a film that takes you by surprise in terms of just how effectively it exploits what, on paper, must have seemed like a rather restrictive premise: a largely fixed cast locked in a single location for over an hour and a half, HEARING about the carnage that is unfolding in the world outside but unable to SEE it. (According to Wikipedia, it was produced simultaneously as a film and as a radio play.) Effectively, it's what DAWN OF THE DEAD would have been like if Gaylen Ross had remained in the TV studio for the duration of the film. The bulk of the film is basically a three-hander for the leads, Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly, and all three of them are pitch perfect. Their performances are such that you quickly overlook the budgetary limitations, which dictate that the carnal rule of filmmaking - show, don't tell - is flouted throughout.

I'm reluctant to spoil any more of the film, so I'll simply see this: if you're a horror movie fan, see PONTYPOOL now. In terms of horror movies released in 2008, it's up there with LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

Image quality: Well, this looks much better than the last film I watched on BD that was shot with the Red One camera, ANTICHRIST. Despite the middling bit rate, compression is never an issue, and detail is generally pretty pleasing, although the complete lack of grain leads to an image that looks rather flat and dead (although this is, I admit, down to my own personal bias towards the look of film). The single overriding issue with the transfer is the noticeably elevated blacks, an issue that it present right from the get-go (during the opening credits, simple red text against a black background, the black of the background is considerably brighter than that of the letterbox bars, a problem that persists throughout the film's duration). While it's true that the subject matter demands a rather drab, understated visual style, the raised blacks create an overly murky effect which I doubt was intentional. 8/10

Pontypool
studio: Kaleidoscope; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 16.7 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 24.8 Mbit/sec

5 Comments

 
To combat spam, commenting is automatically disabled on entries older than 30 days.

Did a comment you tried to post accidentally get eaten by the spam filter? It happens from time to time. I get upwards of 200 spam comments every day and unfortunately don't have the time to weed through all of them in case something genuine ended up there by mistake. If one of your posts gets incorrectly flagged as spam, email me at whiggles[at]ntlworld[dot]com and I'll do my best to retrieve it.