Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I reeeeeeeeeeeeeally want to see this one. Soon.
Hey Harry and Mori, I've sent a few scoops in the past but never a review before. I was invited to a secret screening at the Atlanta Film Festival on Friday night and decided check it out with a friend of mine. The film turned out to be THE SIGNAL which is no surprise since it was produced in Atlanta by Atlanta filmmakers. I had read a lot about the film including all of the reviews on AICN and a few other sites. I was excited. Let me start out by saying that I am a tried and true zombie fan and after all I had read about this little film was genuinely excited that I would be seeing THE SIGNAL. My heart was beating faster and I just knew that something special was in store for me. Well... I was wrong. THE SIGNAL was almost good, maybe even almost great. The film was written and directed by three seemingly cool guys: David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry. Each of them directed one act of the film. In the film a rogue signal infiltrates televisions, phones, radios and things like that causing the person using the device to go crazy. They can still function and think, but they are no longer logical and become violent. This happens in the city of Terminus and we get to follow a few people through the mayhem while the city gets the "crazy", as its called in the movie. It starts out with footage from a fake zombie film. Poor looking video that the filmmakers tried to make look something like a low grade 70s zombie film in post. Clever, huh? How ironic is it that you turned into a zombie by watching a zombie movie? Well the guy turns off the TV and we find out that he is Ben, Simon Pegg's twin. He is in bed with Mya, who happens to be married. They are in love and Ben wants Mya to leave her husband. They can just drive away and live the simple life on a farm or something to that effect. She does love him, but has to go home and they part... sad but still yearning to be in each others arms. Tragic. At this point I'm thinking this thing is a lost cause, then Mya puts on her head phones and listens to a cool song (Lou Reed's Perfect Day covered by Jon Thomas Hall) and the screen freezes and reads "Transmission One". This transmission has a title, but I don't remember it or any of the other transmission titles. Transmission One: This is basically the set-up. We follow Mya in this act. It becomes apparent that something is going on, things are not quite as they should be. As Mya leaves Ben, she has an odd encounter in the parking lot where a crazy dude attacks her. She barely escapes and heads home. She walks into her apartment to find Lewis, her husband, suspicious of where she has been. Lewis then turns on the TV, sees the signal and goes crazy. He kills one of his friends with a baseball bat and the chaos begins. This section was scary and hilarious, just good all around. There is a hallway scene that is better than almost anything I've ever seen in a horror movie. This section ends as Mya escapes the building and heads to a train terminal to hopefully meet Ben and leave the city. Tansmission Two: In this transmission we follow Lewis on his quest to find his wife. Since seeing the signal he has become obsessed with finding her. Most of this takes place in a house that Mya had crashed her car in front of. This is the home of a young couple that was getting ready for a New Year's Eve party before the signal hit. Lewis thinks these people should know where Mya is. A.J. Bowen, the actor that plays Lewis, is great in this section. Hilarious. Looks a bit like Ryan Reynolds in Blade 3, and talks like him too... but is much, much funnier. Clark (Scott Poythress) is also great here playing the community landlord. The whole scene is great for the most part, really funny and gory. To this point the strength in this film lies in its ability to combine the gore and the humor into something great. Then the movie starts to fall... and it falls fast. Lewis stops being funny and starts killing everyone in the house. The movie gets very grim and mopey way too fast. Transmission Three: Ben, Lewis, and Mya have their final tear-filled showdown, with a few twists and turns thrown in there for good measure. I was pretty torn up when the film ended. A potentially great movie opportunity had been squandered. I think the reason this movie worked for the first half was the use of humor and gore together. This is not a movie that should be taken seriously and the filmmakers did just that. They took the material and tried to make it something it's not... a humorless drama. It looks like an attempt was made to take the movie on a similar route to 28 Days Later without any reason to do so. The characters in 28 Days Later were full of heart and you cared for them. This had not been accomplished with THE SIGNAL and when the fun dried up the movie became really boring in just a few minutes. It would be like SLITHER, FEAST, or PLANET TERROR having a complete tonal shift for the last act. I like it when horror films reach a different level and become important, but its tough to make that happen and this is an example of how it can go wrong. What makes it worse is it almost made the funny parts seem fake, like they were there simply to make that jump in tone even more noticeable. Great moments used as filler until we were so comfortable the real movie could begin. The real movie never began. It went from "wow this is a fun little horror movie" to "whoever wrote this is more than a little fucked up". Once the humor was gone, the movie felt mean... and not in a good way. I guess its not too surprising in the age of Hostel and Saw. Maybe this is the new standard for American horror. I hope not. I am probably being a little hard on these guys as it is quite a task to make a low-budget feature that looks this good. It looks very filmic, and there are only a few moments where I could tell it was video. I feel like all three of the filmmakers have a great future, and all of the actors delivered performances that made them seem like seasoned pros. They made a Hollywood movie on an ultra-low budget. To me that is an odd goal, but these guys pulled it off and I'm sure will all be very successful in the future. If you use this call me kingdaywalker.
