Signal, The |
  • USA • 2007 • 103m •    • Directed by: David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry. • Starring: Anessa Ramsey, Sahr Ngaujah, AJ Bowen, Matthew Stanton, Suehyla El-Attar, Justin Welborn, Cheri Christian, Scott Poythress, Christopher Thomas, Lindsey Garrett, Chad McKnight, Claire Bronson, David Bruckner. • Music by: Ben Lovett.      A horror film told in three parts, from three perspectives, in which a mysterious transmission that turns people into killers invades every cell phone, radio, and television.
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Review:
Set in a city called Terminus, the basic plot of this film is that all TVs, phones and radios start broadcasting a mysterious signal that drives people violently insane.
The first segment of the movie focuses on Mya (Anessa Ramsey), an unhappy woman with a controlling, jealous prick of a husband named Lewis (A J Bowen). After sleeping with Ben (Justin Welborn), a guy she just met who talks about running away together, she returns to her apartment where Lewis is having some friends over to watch the game. The deadly signal is already coming over the TV, though, and Lewis quickly kills one of his friends and struggles with another named Rod (Sahr. Yes, it's just Sahr) as Mya escapes into the hallway. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of people killing each other out there and Mya barely makes it into the apartment of her neighbor across the hall. The next morning, Mya tries to simply walk out of the building as though magical fairies are protecting her from harm and runs into Rod, who fills her in on his night of terror and violence with everyone going crazy. They get into a car crash and Mya announces she's going to the train station where Ben said they could meet and run away together.
The second segment focuses on Lewis. He follows Mya but when he sees her crashed car, he thinks she must have gone into a nearby apartment. There Lewis meet Anna (Cheri Christian), a deeply repressed woman who had to kill her husband after he went crazy, and Clark (Scott Poythress), a relatively nice guy but one who already seems paranoid even without the signal. The three of them engage in a comedy of slaughter, much like an episode of Three's Company, before the tone of the story turns sadistic and Lewis gets Clark to tell him where Mya went.
The third and final segment focuses on Ben. He went to Mya's apartment looking for her after everything went to hell and runs into Lewis, who beats him up and throws him in the back of his pest control van. Ben recovers to find Lewis torturing Clark. He and Clark join together to fight off Lewis, who at this point in the movie has become a Jason/Leatherface unstoppable killer. Ben and Clark head off to the train station to find Mya and run into Lewis there, which results in a final confrontation that really doesn't make sense, either on its own or in connection with the rest of The Signal.
This movie is sadly typical of a lot of a lot of modern filmmaking. It looks very good. I mean, VERY good. If you focus on it, though, you can't help but recognize how thoroughly flawed it is on very basic levels.
To start with, there's never any consistent theme or style or sensibility to the movie. The first segment is gory and chaotic and visceral, like the remake of Dawn of the Dead. The second segment, however, is comedic and tries to be satirical like Shaun of the Dead, before veering into sadism like torture porn. The third segment starts out quite violent, but then calms way, way down to a level of psychological and suspenseful horror. I'm sure the filmmakers though switching stuff around so much was clever, but it only shows they don't know how to tell a story. It may all look and sound fine, but the dramatic swings in tone prevent you from forming any emotional connection to anything that happens. Bruckner, Gentry and Rush may have though all the changes would be surprising. What they are is alienating.
The three segment format also fails by rotating the main character. We start out concentrating on Mya and her predicament. Mya is interesting as a person and Anessa Ramsey is an appealing performer. Just as we start to care about Mya, however, she's virtually absent from the second and third segments. Lewis is introduced as an unlikable dick at the start of movie, then he's forced on us as the main character in the middle of the film and he's even more present in the third segment than Mya. If the story had even attempted to give us some reason to care what happens to Lewis, it might not be so bad. But he's just the threat to the characters we do care about, who we don't get to watch for most of the movie. While Ben has a brief appearance at the start of the film, by the time he shows up again in the third segment he's been off screen for about an hour or so. You can't expect the audience to connect with a character when the film ignores him for such a long stretch of time.
The Signal is also a fairly stupid movie. The basic concept is smart but little else of the writing rises to that level. The effects of the signal are never defined and are essentially whatever they need to be to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer. The characters are also never allowed to act like real human beings. Mya's behavior, especially, makes no sense at all. And by the end, it's all degenerated to the point where Lewis can do things that are physically impossible because the story needs him to. The Signal sets up an intriguing scenario. The lack of intelligent, realistic response to that scenario reduces everything that happens to artificial and superficial pretension.
Review by Adfraser [IMDB 14 March 2007] from the Internet Movie Database.
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