Sunday, October 8, 2017

October Horror Challenge 2017 #26: "Dark Signal"



That's a pretty awesome movie poster, isn't it? I've heard good things about this movie for awhile, and with images like this one floating around, it's easy to believe that the movie will be a good one. Neil Marshall is credited as being responsible for this movie on the poster, though he didn't direct it. I guess they thought using his name would draw people in, and I suppose it worked for me, because while I'm not one of those people who fawns over everything he makes, he has some good stuff. One thing he seems to understand very well is how complicated people can be, how people's motivations and actions are endlessly complicated and not easily understood. Because of this, his characters are often well-developed, so even though this movie sounds similar to other movies I've seen, such as "Pontypool" and "The Signal," I'm willing to give this movie a chance to see the spin  he puts on what might otherwise be a familiar story.

I said that the plot sounds familiar, but all I really know about this movie is that it involves possibly supernatural events that occur serve to further complicate things as some of our characters are stuck in a radio station. Is there some signal going over the airwaves that brings people back from the dead? It seems like that might have something to do with it, but I ran screaming away from every description i found of this movie because I didn't want the whole thing spoiled for me. That seems to happen too often these days, when people feel the need to ruin every plot point of every movie they describe. Seriously, it gets old.

Because I didn't know much about the plot of this movie coming into it, at first the plot is hard to follow. It seems like a lot of random events are happening and I'm not sure how they fit together. There seems to be a serial killer roaming around killing people, a woman and a guy (who might be her boyfriend but I'd definitely a jerk) seem to be commiting a crime to get money, and a local small town radio station is spending its last night on the air with the long-suffering DJ basically playing and saying whatever she wants because she's fed up and losing her job after tonight anyway. She has a male co-host who doesn't seem to share her "who gives a shit" attitude, and therein lies the drama of their situation (even before anything scary happens).

Things start to fit together eventually. The male radio show co-host is friends with the girl possibly committing the crime (we know because they talk on the phone). For the radio station's last night they're going to have a famous psychic on the air who seems to sense something evil going on, and to make matters even worse, the killer might be targeting the girl who is helping her boyfriend possibly commit a crime. Things might tie together eventually, is what I'm saying, though the movie takes its sweet time to do so.

Once things do start to tie together, the movie gets interesting. It seems like a bunch of events are converging here (psychic at the radio station for its last night, possible crime happening, murders happening) and then among all these things, a supernatural force storms in and makes everything worse. Though Neil Marshall didn't really direct this movie, I think he'd like the complexity of the characters here. It's part mystery, part slasher, part ghost story, part compelling reason to never listen to the radio again. It's a creepy mix, and it's not perfect, but I definitely liked it.

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