Shot for peanuts on HDV, this movie from a three-strong writing/directing team is a potent slice of technological paranoia riffing on the best of nervy 70’s American horror while continuing the central themes of more recent fare like KAIRO/PULSE. Structured like an anthology horror film, with the overall narrative split into three separate “transmissions” (each from a different director), the film follows inter-connected characters at different times during the same crisis. The three “transmissions”, entitled, respectively, “Crazy in Love”, “The Jealousy Monster” and “Escape from Terminus”, showcase opposing approaches to the same scenario, with a tone that veers successfully from intense horror to a kind of grotesque comedy of manners.
THE SIGNAL wastes no time in setting up its concept. A mysterious, all-powerful signal has infected the modern forms of communication that rule our lives in the 21st century. Those that experience it – via cell phones, radio broadcasts, television programs – are overwhelmed by homicidal impulses and, ultimately, madness. They turn on loved ones and strangers alike while losing grip on who they are and who anyone is.
If the story sounds like a cheeky steal from Stephen King’s disappointing novel CELL (itself influenced heavily by 28 DAYS LATER), bear in mind that this film had wrapped when the book came out. The look of the movie and its attitude owe a greater debt to early features by Romero and Cronenberg. This microcosm of a grimly convincing apocalypse is shot through with the kind of bleak irony (for starters, two prominent characters are named Lewis and Clark) and black humor that underscored THE CRAZIES, RABID and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. If the ending falls just short of being as satisfying as the downbeat resolutions to those classics, much of THE SIGNAL is dynamic.
As the film begins, to borrow a lick from 28 DAYS LATER, the end looks pretty fucking nigh. Streets are deserted and people everywhere are turning hostile. We don’t know anything about “the signal” except that it appears to be omnipotent and devastatingly effective. The story unfolds in the city of Terminus. It’s New Year’s Eve and an adulterous young woman (Anessa Ramsey) is preparing to leave her pest control husband (A.J. Bowen) for Justin Welborn. Throughout the three transmissions, we follow Ramsey’s plight, thwarted at every turn by the unpredictable actions of her now-infected husband and by the brutal onslaught of others affected by what is quickly termed “the crazy”.
The sense of crumbling reality that engulfs most of the characters in THE SIGNAL allows the filmmakers to take the movie into pleasingly off the wall and unexpected directions, including a moment straight out of an wacky 80’s gore comedy, involving the unlikely reanimation of a severed head resting in a vice. The film’s biggest, most impressive departure occurs with Jacob Gentry’s middle segment.
The second transmission, “The Jealousy Monster”, continues the main story but plays more as a self-contained Sitcom From Hell that just happens to be about “the signal”. Largely focuses on a cheery, infected wife who kills her husband with a balloon pump and still proceeds with her New Year’s party, it superbly combines loopy sight gags, pretzel-munching flippancy, bludgeoning violence and well played observational comedy. The segment is stolen wholesale by a hilarious loner who longs to bone an Indian girl and reflects nostalgically on the time he made out with a dog.
The whole of THE SIGNAL is well acted, proficiently edited and directed, with some startling bursts of brutality…but it’s Transmission Two you’ll remember.
-Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
