Do you have the crazy?

The Signal
AMC Towson Commons
Towson, MD
35mm
12/17/07

So last week I got two tickets in the mail for a preview screening of The Signal. I don't know why. I don't recall signing up for anything with Magnolia Pictures, so when my brother-in-law-in-law and I went up to Towson last night there was an equally good chance that we would either see a movie or get raped and murdered. Or possibly both.

Turns out we saw a movie.

The Signal is a low budget independent horror film about an unexplained signal that begins transmitting through television and radio and telephones and basically makes people go bugfuck crazy. It's the same basic premise as Stephen King's Cell, but more successful in execution. I'm not going to go too much into details because it's not coming out until the end of February and it's probably best to go into it knowing nothing.

What I will go into and what's most interesting about it is how it's structured. There are three sections, each of which follow one of three central characters and has a different director. According to the Web site, it started as a cinematic game of Exquisite Corpse where one filmmaker would begin the story and then hand it off to another to do the next part. Knowing that, it's easy to look back on the film and see that being its origin. What's really cool about the different directors is that there's a definite shift in tone from one section to the next, so that we go from horror to comedy and then back to horror. The most surprising thing is that they manage to pull off the tonal shifts successfully. There's a point where the movie suddenly becomes funny and then there's a point where it's definitely not funny anymore and it works. That's not easy.

I did have a few quibbles with it, the biggest one being that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have a character go out into a city full of bugfuck crazies and put headphones on so she can't hear the bf-crazies coming towards her unless she's a complete idiot. And she doesn't appear to be a complete idiot. And they don't go into reasons why the cuckolded husband deserved to be cheated on other than the fact that he kinda resembles Roy from The Office. But they don't go into backstory on anybody.

I heard some people commenting as they left the theater that The Signal was the worst movie they'd ever seen. Hell, this isn't even the worst movie I've seen this week (see Sunday's post). It's an interesting indy-horror flick and should be seen. I can't imagine that it's going to get that wide of a release, but you know what? The transmission effects may actually work better on television.