Chris Knipp
02-23-2008, 10:55 PM
DAVID BRUCKNER, DAN BUSH, JACOB GENTRY: THE SIGNAL (2008)
Media maniacs
Review by Chris Knipp
The Signal is a horror movie with a simple premise: a disturbance in the airwaves that's making wide-screen TV's broadcast psychedelic blobs and changing cell phones into useless noisemakers--is also getting into people's heads and transforming the general population (or at least suburban Atlanta where the film was shot, known here as the city of "Terminus") into a seething mass of homicidal maniacs. The press publicity summary sets the scene breathlessly: "It's New Year’s Eve in the city of Terminus and chaos is this year's resolution."
We start with the adulterous Mya Denton (Anesa Ramsey), who has had an evening in bed with her boyfriend, Ben (Justin Wellborn). His giant-screen TV was showing a really terrible slasher flick (worse even than what is to follow)--when all of a sudden the blobs come on. Mya wakes up and is leaving to go back to her husband, but in a rather touching little speech, Ben begs her to run away with him. This is about the closest we get to human warmth or positive emotional connection, though each of the main characters emerges vividly--for a few minutes anyway. Take Lewis Denton (A.J. Bowen), Mya’s husband. He's obviously a macho nut. Mya gets home and finds him with two buddies, and wouldn’t you know it? They were set to watch a ball game and the plasma screen came all over with those big blobs--which puts Lewis in such a foul mood that, after a conversation with Mya drenched in menace, he kills one of his buddies with a baseball bat. The third buddy, Rod (Sahr Ngaujah), ties Lewis up in a chair with duct tape and when Mya tries to flee this mayhem, comes in hot pursuit to "protect" her. This never really works out.
The idea is, some of the crazies pretend to be "protecting" others, but their charges usually wind up dead or all bloody. . It’s ironic the way some of the electric-signal-numbed crazies claim they’re okay and just want to protect the others. This is an interesting turn on the old zombie movie trick of keeping us guessing who’s been "turned" and who hasn’t.Sometimes they also come back to life. Mya finally shakes Ben off. For now anyway.
As low-budget B-horror/slasher/basher/terror/sci-fi movies go, The Signal is an original, and some admirers of the genre are already grooming the picture for cult status. It has some drolly delineated characters, whose manic and confused encounters seem drawn from some particularly kooky and unhinged Fifties absurdist stage play.
A serious weakness of the movie however is that, unable completely to transcend its extreme budget limitations, it winds up being claustrophobic without being consistent. It’s restricted to a few characters in not very memorable rooms, the shifts from scene to scene following no very compelling logic.
And this lack of consistency or momentum has a structural cause. Mastermind David Bruckner chose to divide up the film into three segments (he calls them "Transmissions") and let his longtime collaborators Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry direct the two other ones. They say they originally conceived of this as an "Exquisite Corpse"--one of those Surrealist drawings in which different artists add segments together without seeing what the others have drawn. But despite the spirit of adventure the guys may have felt, the effect unfortunately isn’t much different from any other movie where too many cooks turn out a muddy tasteless soup. Maybe the cultists won't see it that way though.
Bruckner himself directs the first part, entitled Transmission I: Crazy in Love. The next part, Jacob Gentry’s Transmission II: The Jealousy Monster, introduces a greater element of black absurdist humor and the action becomes even more gruesome, with a tied up woman getting industrial strength bug spray repeatedly squirted n her face--which, by the way, is anything but funny. There are characters carried over from one segment to the next, and the basic premise of a world of static-induced maniac killers is never forgotten. Somewhere midway in segment #2, however, the characters start getting confused about who everybody else on screen is. Perhaps some viewers, eager to turn this into a cult film, will interpret that confusion as a dark variation on Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. But if you’re feeling less charitable you may just see it as the collateral damage arising from the three directors working in a way that’s only loosely collaborative.
The second segment is nonetheless the best due to its dark humor, with Chad McKnight particularly good as Jim Parsons, who turns up expecting to get laid at a New Year’s Eve party and is slow to realize things aren’t going to work out that way at all. Scott Poythress is also good as an oddball neighbor, Clark. The physical abuse in this segment is hard to take, but the writing’s greater wit is underlined when segment three, Dan Bush’s Transmission III: Escape from Terminus, comes along and returns to the relative conventionality and solemnity of the first, but with an excessive amount of dialog--and one really kooky scene. Each segment has moments, as is to be expected from these three who have after all worked together before (as have many of the cast members) but the effect is choppy. At its best moments, the movie manages briefly to be both gruesome and triumphantly absurd.
The three directors were instructed to provide a killing every ten pages. This is a rule that could keep things lively--or make them numbing. As the slashing turns to bashing, the latter effect too often seems to dominate. This is closer to a slasher movie than to the kind of zombie-cum-socio-political commentary we’ve had recently from 28 Weeks Later or Shaun of the Dead. Not to mention the considerable, if somewhat obvious, conceptual pretensions of Romero's new one, Diary of the Dead.To the hardcore cult fan of this kind of film, The Signal nonetheless is likely to seem pretty special, and it does depart notionally from genre conventions throughout. But its very hardcore brutality robs it of crossover appeal despite original touches. Or so it would seem. This is probably what the original reviewers of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead said when it first came out, but needless to say, they were dead wrong.
The Signal opened wide February 22, 2008.
Media maniacs
Review by Chris Knipp
The Signal is a horror movie with a simple premise: a disturbance in the airwaves that's making wide-screen TV's broadcast psychedelic blobs and changing cell phones into useless noisemakers--is also getting into people's heads and transforming the general population (or at least suburban Atlanta where the film was shot, known here as the city of "Terminus") into a seething mass of homicidal maniacs. The press publicity summary sets the scene breathlessly: "It's New Year’s Eve in the city of Terminus and chaos is this year's resolution."
We start with the adulterous Mya Denton (Anesa Ramsey), who has had an evening in bed with her boyfriend, Ben (Justin Wellborn). His giant-screen TV was showing a really terrible slasher flick (worse even than what is to follow)--when all of a sudden the blobs come on. Mya wakes up and is leaving to go back to her husband, but in a rather touching little speech, Ben begs her to run away with him. This is about the closest we get to human warmth or positive emotional connection, though each of the main characters emerges vividly--for a few minutes anyway. Take Lewis Denton (A.J. Bowen), Mya’s husband. He's obviously a macho nut. Mya gets home and finds him with two buddies, and wouldn’t you know it? They were set to watch a ball game and the plasma screen came all over with those big blobs--which puts Lewis in such a foul mood that, after a conversation with Mya drenched in menace, he kills one of his buddies with a baseball bat. The third buddy, Rod (Sahr Ngaujah), ties Lewis up in a chair with duct tape and when Mya tries to flee this mayhem, comes in hot pursuit to "protect" her. This never really works out.
The idea is, some of the crazies pretend to be "protecting" others, but their charges usually wind up dead or all bloody. . It’s ironic the way some of the electric-signal-numbed crazies claim they’re okay and just want to protect the others. This is an interesting turn on the old zombie movie trick of keeping us guessing who’s been "turned" and who hasn’t.Sometimes they also come back to life. Mya finally shakes Ben off. For now anyway.
As low-budget B-horror/slasher/basher/terror/sci-fi movies go, The Signal is an original, and some admirers of the genre are already grooming the picture for cult status. It has some drolly delineated characters, whose manic and confused encounters seem drawn from some particularly kooky and unhinged Fifties absurdist stage play.
A serious weakness of the movie however is that, unable completely to transcend its extreme budget limitations, it winds up being claustrophobic without being consistent. It’s restricted to a few characters in not very memorable rooms, the shifts from scene to scene following no very compelling logic.
And this lack of consistency or momentum has a structural cause. Mastermind David Bruckner chose to divide up the film into three segments (he calls them "Transmissions") and let his longtime collaborators Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry direct the two other ones. They say they originally conceived of this as an "Exquisite Corpse"--one of those Surrealist drawings in which different artists add segments together without seeing what the others have drawn. But despite the spirit of adventure the guys may have felt, the effect unfortunately isn’t much different from any other movie where too many cooks turn out a muddy tasteless soup. Maybe the cultists won't see it that way though.
Bruckner himself directs the first part, entitled Transmission I: Crazy in Love. The next part, Jacob Gentry’s Transmission II: The Jealousy Monster, introduces a greater element of black absurdist humor and the action becomes even more gruesome, with a tied up woman getting industrial strength bug spray repeatedly squirted n her face--which, by the way, is anything but funny. There are characters carried over from one segment to the next, and the basic premise of a world of static-induced maniac killers is never forgotten. Somewhere midway in segment #2, however, the characters start getting confused about who everybody else on screen is. Perhaps some viewers, eager to turn this into a cult film, will interpret that confusion as a dark variation on Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. But if you’re feeling less charitable you may just see it as the collateral damage arising from the three directors working in a way that’s only loosely collaborative.
The second segment is nonetheless the best due to its dark humor, with Chad McKnight particularly good as Jim Parsons, who turns up expecting to get laid at a New Year’s Eve party and is slow to realize things aren’t going to work out that way at all. Scott Poythress is also good as an oddball neighbor, Clark. The physical abuse in this segment is hard to take, but the writing’s greater wit is underlined when segment three, Dan Bush’s Transmission III: Escape from Terminus, comes along and returns to the relative conventionality and solemnity of the first, but with an excessive amount of dialog--and one really kooky scene. Each segment has moments, as is to be expected from these three who have after all worked together before (as have many of the cast members) but the effect is choppy. At its best moments, the movie manages briefly to be both gruesome and triumphantly absurd.
The three directors were instructed to provide a killing every ten pages. This is a rule that could keep things lively--or make them numbing. As the slashing turns to bashing, the latter effect too often seems to dominate. This is closer to a slasher movie than to the kind of zombie-cum-socio-political commentary we’ve had recently from 28 Weeks Later or Shaun of the Dead. Not to mention the considerable, if somewhat obvious, conceptual pretensions of Romero's new one, Diary of the Dead.To the hardcore cult fan of this kind of film, The Signal nonetheless is likely to seem pretty special, and it does depart notionally from genre conventions throughout. But its very hardcore brutality robs it of crossover appeal despite original touches. Or so it would seem. This is probably what the original reviewers of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead said when it first came out, but needless to say, they were dead wrong.
The Signal opened wide February 22, 2008.