Review – The Signal

The first couple of minutes made this look so much like another low-budget pile of torture porn that I almost shut it off. However, I’m glad I stuck with it. After they got the opening vignette out of their systems, the film-makers get down to a much better piece of indie horror. The thesis seems familiar at first: a mysterious signal transmitted by televisions and phones causes everyone to go insane. However, unlike King, Romero and other predecessors, this time around the victims don’t become mindless, blood-crazed zombies. These lunatics retain at least some capacity for thought and can even pass for normal when they have to. Of course that makes them far more dangerous than shambling corpses. The picture is a bit uneven, at least in part because the running time is divided between three different writer/directors who take slightly different approaches to the same set of characters. But overall this is a lot more innovative and interesting than the DVD box made it look like it would be. Worth seeing