For Father's Day, my children suggested that we have a nice family dinner and then screen a movie on DVD -- my choice. Unfortunately, my choice was to rent this barking dog of a film. Some of the reviews here gave me the idea that this might be an original, "technocreepy" kind of flick. Brothers and sisters !?! Can I get an "Amen"? No ?? Here's why. "The Signal" is, hands down, the absolute worst film that I've seen in the last twenty-five years. Not since being forced ( by an ex-girl friend ) to sit through "The Model Shop," have I been this repulsed by a so-called entertainment.
This film is flat-out terrible in every important regard. The acting, if there was any, is wooden. We're talking mahogany wooden here.
The blood is plentiful beyond any demand for it, every 'crazy' scene was the same in context, the three fellows who made this barking dog did NOTHING at all original. If you are working on a budget that is so slender you have to borrow your friends' apartments, at least pick some locations where there's enough room to turn around.
This story-line is 100 % nihilistic. There is no redemption for these characters' suffering. That's a plot failure. The best-looking actress in "The Signal" is tortured mercilessly for no apparent reason. That's a moral failure which rests on the three co-creators.
These fellows have committed a crime against humanity itself in the making of this cinematic fiction: the idea of a corrupt signal making people go crazy is hardly new, but they took that interesting premise and built a slaughter-house on it. Shame on them for doing so.
The three fellows who made this film -- I dare not call them gentlemen in any sense of that term -- reveal only one thing to us who are their audience and their market. They have not one ounce of compassion in the text of their story-telling, not one ounce of humanity, and not so much as ONE original thought about how to make a meaningful fiction. What a shameful waste of their time and my money.
So, yes, and "hell yes!!" Shame on all three of them. The foundation for the story -- the appearance of a rogue pattern of interference -- was apparently borrowed or maybe pirated from "Pulse". The cheating wife and her idiot husband was borrowed from somewhere else, like maybe any of a thousand TV movies one can see free on Oxygen or Lifetime.
And as I said, the most interesting character appears in Part Two only, and is then scripted to be brutally assaulted, tortured, and then dispatched. Sickening and vile and pointless.
They could have driven this film almost anywhere, because it is indeed, a character-driven vehicle. They chose to drive it into a dumpster ( quite literally ), and with any luck that is where all of the known DVD copies of "The Signal" will inevitably reside. And not a moment too soon, in my opinion.
This film is flat-out terrible in every important regard. The acting, if there was any, is wooden. We're talking mahogany wooden here.
The blood is plentiful beyond any demand for it, every 'crazy' scene was the same in context, the three fellows who made this barking dog did NOTHING at all original. If you are working on a budget that is so slender you have to borrow your friends' apartments, at least pick some locations where there's enough room to turn around.
This story-line is 100 % nihilistic. There is no redemption for these characters' suffering. That's a plot failure. The best-looking actress in "The Signal" is tortured mercilessly for no apparent reason. That's a moral failure which rests on the three co-creators.
These fellows have committed a crime against humanity itself in the making of this cinematic fiction: the idea of a corrupt signal making people go crazy is hardly new, but they took that interesting premise and built a slaughter-house on it. Shame on them for doing so.
The three fellows who made this film -- I dare not call them gentlemen in any sense of that term -- reveal only one thing to us who are their audience and their market. They have not one ounce of compassion in the text of their story-telling, not one ounce of humanity, and not so much as ONE original thought about how to make a meaningful fiction. What a shameful waste of their time and my money.
So, yes, and "hell yes!!" Shame on all three of them. The foundation for the story -- the appearance of a rogue pattern of interference -- was apparently borrowed or maybe pirated from "Pulse". The cheating wife and her idiot husband was borrowed from somewhere else, like maybe any of a thousand TV movies one can see free on Oxygen or Lifetime.
And as I said, the most interesting character appears in Part Two only, and is then scripted to be brutally assaulted, tortured, and then dispatched. Sickening and vile and pointless.
They could have driven this film almost anywhere, because it is indeed, a character-driven vehicle. They chose to drive it into a dumpster ( quite literally ), and with any luck that is where all of the known DVD copies of "The Signal" will inevitably reside. And not a moment too soon, in my opinion.