BLOGGING SUNDANCE: Great World of Signals

Before I saw The Signal, it seemed like Teeth was the successful low-budget horror entry at Sundance this year. But I'm glad that's not the case—the plot of Teeth, centered on a shark-toothed vagina that dismembers male members, has as much shock/schlock appeal as it sounds. It probably would have been a major standout as a short (even as a long short), but as a short feature the movie grows tedious. That didn't stop Lionsgate from picking up the film, but those folks tend to have no shame (the moronic slasher See No Evil) or sense of boundaries (that incredulous Crash Oscar).

Fortunately, Signal also managed to turn a few heads and land a distribution deal with Magnolia Pictures in the wee hours of the morning after its premiere. It's tough to say how well it'll perform, since a large studio movie that's currently in development shares its premise and has a source novel to give it clout. I'm referring to Cell, the upcoming adaptation of Stephen King's quasi-zombie novel that finds cellphone users worldwide transforming into monstrous savages intent on decimating the small amount of humanity left sober (the director, Eli Roth, is the talented young horror savant who made Hostel and its upcoming sequel).

Signal is much better than King's overlong and muddled saga, and it does a much better job exploring the satiric potential of a story centered on humanity getting brainwashed by technology. The possibilities are broadened for creepier effect: A strange static transmission emanates through all airwaves, including cell phones, radios and TV screens, which project hallucinogenic colors that look like they were borrowed from the iTunes visualizer. In this case, such low-tech effects do their job. The base fear of Signal stems from the idea that any innocuous digital helper could turn on you mercilessly. Like Cell, the crazies in Signal don't eat brains or stumble around in a rigid stupor. Instead, the transmission introduces a psychotic logic that drives people to justify their destructive behavior and become enveloped in phobias. It's never clear exactly what happens throughout the movie, since directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry (who each directed their own act) smartly screw with the characters' subjectivity, as the infected survivors imagine their companions as threats, dispose of them, then realize the senseless murder before diving back down the rabbit hole.

Oh, and did I mention that it's funny? And not in a sardonic, winking, zombies-are-all-around-us way like Sean of the Dead (a classic of the genre in its own right). Signal has a cosmic sense of justice that's often hilarious; a sense of irony about the suggestion that we really could amuse ourselves to death. That was the prediction put forth by the late media scholar Neil Postman, although I doubt he imagined that it would unfold this way. But, then again, he wasn't alive for the onslaught of the (i)Pod people.