Episode 379: The Signal (2007)

Not to be confused with the 2014 movie of the same name with Brenton Thwaites and Laurence Fishburne this is a mixture of the movie we watched before this, Cell, with a signal/pulse turning people homicidal, like The Crazies. So if you liked The Crazies this is for you.

It is written by and directed by 3 friends who each took a third of the story, but what this does is give us a slightly disjointed film. 

Part one tells the story of Mya and Ben who are having an affair and cheating on Mya's husband Lewis. It is New Years eve, although that isn't really used enough given NYE is a huge thing and it is barely mentioned, and Ben wants them to leave Terminus, their home city and move to the country to start afresh. Mya is still new at this infidelity lark and heads back to her husband, only to find cellphones, phones, radios and TV are all broadcasting this weird psychedelic signal. And that signal is turning people crazy homicidal.

She barely escapes the building with one of her husband's friends, Rod, and there are some nasty kills, baseball bats to the heads, pruning sheers to the throat. All fun stuff. Before they crash the car after Rod goes nuts and starts attacking Mya.

Part two tells the story of Anna and Ken and their landlord Clarke as Anna tries to throw a New Years eve party. Looking for Mya Lewis arrives with Ben tied up and unconscious in his van, and we have a comedy house invasion, complete with talking decapitated heads and cocktails.

Before part 3 has Ben and Clarke looking for Mya as Lewis chases them into Terminus.

I have to say, despite the switch in tone for the second part I genuinely enjoyed this movie. Far better than Cell, not quite as good as the Crazies, but still a very good indie take on it. The acting was great, the practical FX too. The dialog was snappy and funny when it needed to be and the violence bloody when it needed to be.

This joins Savageland and Interlopers in the very small club of movies on TUBI I have enjoyed and made 8 times it's budget.

6/10

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

And it is the weekend, dear listeners. Welcome back. It's quite sunny. I I joined a different gym. I have two gyms, one for work, one for home. And the one from home is based on where we used to live. Um, so I used to have to travel uh to go there uh at the weekend and on days where I'm working from home. But uh there's a gym literally five blocks up the road, so I just uh switched gyms this weekend and have been both days, so my muscles feel a little bit sore. So what I'm gonna do for the rest of the day, it's being and today being Sunday, is to watch shitty zombie movies on Tubi. Now, I did think last week uh that I only had a couple of zombie movies, two or three, that were left uh floating on the top of the murky water of the cesspool that is to be. I've been putting off going on watching those two movies. Instead, I watched the awful Mandalorian and Grogu, which was shit, even though it had Zeb in it, which was one of my favourite characters uh from the animated series. Um also just trying to get the taste of seeing Dave Falone in an X-wing out of my mouth, because that was just horrible. It's like yeah, yeah, yeah, you've kind of produced some stuff, but now you're fucking putting yourself into it, and it's just it's just not on for me. It's uh it's it's Gianni Infantino of FIFA decided thinking that he is now, you know, football. He's not. You're a lawyer, you're a Swiss lawyer, not anything to do with football, you're a fucking administrator. Uh Dave Faloni, yeah, you you're basically a showrunner and you can make decisions, but you shouldn't be in the shows. Anyway, I'm going off topic. I've got a cup of tea. Um that's an award-winning cup of tea if ever there is one. Um so as I said, the other day when I was watching some of the last um zombie movies uh that were you know Urban Flesh Eaters and Bloodthirsty on Tubi, I thought there were only two or three that I hadn't seen, but from time to time Tubi, much like Amazon and Netflix, uh, gets rid of everything that was on it and then adds new stuff, you know. So it is this whole thing, I guess, where um it gets syndicated to a um uh a third party who have it for a certain amount of time or a certain amount of showings uh before it is uh removed. You know, they basically get a license to own this movie for a couple of years, you know. So a lot of movies that are on Tubi have been on Amazon at some point, and you know, you had a chance to buy them on Amazon first for full price, then discounted and more and more discounted until they're part of Prime and they're free, but then people still don't watch them, and then they just take them off of Amazon, and next thing we know they're on to be um for maybe a couple of years before going back to Amazon again. So, and then they'll try to charge you again to watch fucking dead men walking, or urban flesh eaters, or interlopers, uh, or savage land or whatever. Um so I was uh shocked is the word. Uh the emoji uh with like the the mouth open. Oh you know, the O face emoji. Uh I was that level of surprise because when I logged in onto my TV and then I went into Tubi, they have added a ton of shit to their shelves. Uh so let's see what's available and roll the dice, shall we? This is the Undead Symphony with me, Darren Smith, uh episode 379, and this is gonna be a random Tubi episode. Um to quote um to quote uh Pinhead. What delights have they to show us? Or to paraphrase Pinhead, what delights do they have to show us? Well, there's quite a few now. Um that's actually 25 zombie movies. Oh my god, it's like you've managed to clear all the shit out of the yard, and then a truck arrives just as you've done it, and then dumped a whole new truckload. That's exactly what it is. So we still have on to be to watch Zombactor City Centre Contagion, which I've been aware of since day one of doing this podcast, and I've put off for four years because it just looks so shit, and has one of the worst titles of any zombie movie ever made. Uh, there's a comedy, Wait Wait, don't kill me, uh, which I think is about Philadelphia being locked down. Uh, there's the British Acid Pit Stop, which is basically two guys, two girls, they're going away for a weekend in the UK, and the guys stop off to one of their friends uh who's a drug dealer, uh, to basically get some drugs. And I think at that point it all goes a little bit wrong, but it's a comedy. I think it's a comedy, it might not be. It's a comic title. Then there's Saffron. Um I've just seen clips of it. A guy and a girl in a car driving through the woods, zombies badly bad zombies, bad zombies. I mean I've I've done a sat about saffron for a long ass time. I think Saffron and uh Ravenus, the uh French Canadian movie, were kind of I saw them both at the same time and decided to watch Ravenous instead. Then there's Imune. Uh Amune, I think I've seen under a different name. Uh The Signal. Now the Signal kind of feels it's a bit of a sci-fi zombie movie where the A signal turns people into zombies, so it feels a little bit like Cell, which we watched last time. Um, but I think it's also Hive Mindy, maybe, uh, which might make it more aligned with colony. Difficult to say. Uh Overtime, which is a pro wrestler has to fight the zombies to get to his son. Uh Standoff, no, I'm not sure. Edges of Darkness has vampires and zombies. Uh Platoon of the Dead. Yeah, uh, I haven't even heard of that one. But uh After the Outbreak is the zombie movie that I recognised I needed to see from TB, and I still haven't seen after the outbreak. We then have the wonderful Nazi zombies and zombies of the Third Reich. Um, there's a good chance they are the same movie. Uh Zombie Club, which is this terrible-looking high school science club uh zombie movie. Um, not done well from what I could tell. Um, you're gonna guess that the teacher is a fat guy with a goatee and glasses, because that is a stereotype that they decide to use. Uh zombies of the living dead. Really? Uh surely the living dead are zombies, but zombies of the living dead. Uh, I don't know anything about it other than the the poster is of a VHS cassette being held by a and a zombie, the sort of like cartoony zombie. Uh attack of the corn zombies is quite well known. Uh clays as is clay zombies. Then there's the improbably named black hole alien brain zombies. Black hole alien brain zombies, yes, you heard that right. Um Johnny Gruesome, which kind of sounds you know, it's a lot the the trailer I saw was basically of this lank haired um sort of stoner stroke metal head teenager arguing with uh his principal. Um an accidental zombie named Ted, which is an interesting name, uh title. Uh redneck zombies again, uh much like clay zombies and corn zombies, it is a known entity. Uh stage five, flacca zombie drug, zombie cop, zombies, where the bees are zombies, I think, and I eat your skin, which I think is from 1971. So 25 zombie movies that are on Tubi that I've got to uh roll the dice on. Um, so I'm not gonna be completing 2B for a while. I thought I was gonna complete it this weekend with the last couple of movies, but no. In the meantime, let's randomly pick Eany Meeny Miney Moe Catch a Zombie by its toe. If it bites you, let it go. Eeny meeny miny moe. My thoughts. If I was gonna do a top five counting down, it probably would be um uh redneck zombies for some B-movie fun. Uh I Eat Your Skin for some classic cult horror. Um an accidental zombie named Ned has got uh my attention because it just sounds intriguing. I like the title Johnny Gruesome, uh 80s style, cheesy fun. Um, but no, I'm gonna go with what I class probably is an easy winner based on the quality of its trailer alone. Uh The Signal. So this is Darren Smith for the Undead Symphony, and this is the next Tubi movie I'm watching. Uh, before I can find a copy of the 2026 remake of Night of the Living Dead, um, with Ellie replacing Ben. Uh, this is Darren Smith, and this is the signal.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

Hi, this is Harry Aspenwall, David in Eradication, and you're listening to the Undead Symphony.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Okay, and so I've just finished it, actually. I finished The Signal from 2007. Not to be confused with The Signal from 2014 with Brenton Thwaites and Lawrence Fishburne. In this, the 2007 movie, it's told in three parts. Is that triptych? Or was the painting in three parts? In which ultimate telecommunication and audio visual devices transmit only a mysterious signal, turning people mad, and activating murderous behaviours, and many of those affected. Um so it's actually more like the crazies, uh not like um not at all like colony, but quite like cell. So it's a it's cell without the idea of this evil presence, right? So if the the the noise from the cell, the pulse, um, caused the crazies, it's this movie, albeit an independent version of it. And the film is uh has three interconnected chapters, or they call them transmissions, and they're presented in a non-linear narrative. What does a non-linear narrative mean? Well, it means that it does, you know, part one, part two, and part three, but they keep jumping around. Uh, and you keep seeing parts of part one and part parts of part one and two and three, and parts of two and three, and and lots of flashbacks and all that kind of nonsense. Um, each of them uh manifests several different elements, uh, psychological horror, splatter film, black comedy, post-apocalyptic love story, and it was met with a mixed but largely positive critical reception. I would say that's warranted based on what I've just seen. So the idea is that Maya is cheating on her husband Lewis with Ben. Ben asks Maya to leave the city with him, but she remains a little bit non-committal. As Maya exits, Ben turns the T turns the TV on and watches this bizarre psychedelic sequence of images. As Maya listens to a compact disc that he has given her, he's basically a burned uh the equivalent of a mixtape. So a mixed disc. Um but um as she heads down to the parking tirage, she is menaced by one man who says that he's been stabbed, and clearly he has, and another uh who hasn't been stabbed, but both of them kind of come after her, and she gets in the car and drives off. When she reaches her apartment building, she finds more people acting b you know acting strangely. Uh unknown to Maya or Maya, a static-like interference coming through communications media has amplified people's negative emotional traits, causing them to act out irrationally and in most cases violently. So it's made in three made up of three parts. Each of the directors, David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Yaak Jacob Gentry, um, have recorded one each. Um David Bruckner did Transmission 1, Crazy in Love, Dan Bush 2, The Jealous Monster, and Jacob Gentry, uh the uh the third and final part, Escape from Transmission. They each wrote their parts as well. So you know what it kind of feels like? I don't know if you did this as kids, but when we were kids, what we did was we'd get a piece of paper, like A4 or letter, as you have in the US, and we'd fold it as like a fan a dozen times, and someone would draw the head of a creature, a person, and then just have his like neck at the bottom of it, just two lines for the neck, and then fold it over. So the next person who has to draw the shoulders and the top part of the torso can't see what the head looks like, but knows where the neck was. That person draws the top half of the torso and then folds it over, and you can call it the lines where the arms should be and where the the lower torso is, so there's like two, four, six lines, and that person then draws the rest lower parts of the arm plus the lower torso down as far as sort of like the top of the legs, and then it gets folded over again, and then the next person draws the legs, and then the next person draws the feet, and when you unfold the whole thing, it's got five different interpretations of what it could be, and people can be as creative as you like. So, in this, it would have been nice if they didn't, but yeah, they had to have done that's a thing. They just all wrote and directed their own parts of it, um, but they must have had tons of crossover. It would have been interesting if they didn't, uh, and to be fair, the second part is a have a has a very, very different feel than the first and the third. So it stars Anessa Ramsey as Maya Denton, who's married to Lewis Denton, who's played by A.J. Bowen. Justin Wellbourne plays Ben, and he was in The Bay, and he was in the remake of The Crazies, and he was in Dance of the Dead, and he was in the computer game Plague of the Damn. So, Justin, my man, you are scoring very high on the zombie charts for us. It also has a bit part for Lindsay Garrett. Uh, Lindsay Garrett appears in the minor role of Laura, who literally arrives, wanted to be at a party, and has a head caved in. Um, she was in The Walking Dead. So, again, keep it keep keeping our seven degrees of Rick Grimes going. Uh the signal gets 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is pretty good. Who said it was gruesome, funny, with and has some big thoughts about society, but those disparate elements failed to come together convincingly. Kind of true. Uh give uh Metacritic gives it 63%, genuinely favourable. Total film included it on the list of the best independent movies of the year. Noting that uh the signal had a if it had the bigger budget, it would have had more room to explore its big ideas. On IMDB it also gets six out of ten, so that's a very good score uh from twenty-three thousand votes. Twenty-three thousand people have bothered to go onto IMDB and explain why they liked the signal. I mean that's enough, right? To say it was really good. So let's watch, shall we? Yes. We open uh on a this is this was the this was weird this bit. A woman is in a garden, she is handcuffed to a tree, I think, and crying. A guy, and she's covered in blood, a guy with covered in blood as well, uh wearing glasses, comes out and then kills her, watched by two women who are prisoners of the man uh in the shed. One of them has been wrapped, has barbed wire wrapped around her, and the other one uh is hanging up by her wrist, so he's obviously a serial killer who kills women. Um he drags the body away of the first woman, and the second one uh basically knocks some wire cutters off of the uh the table in the shed, uh frees herself before the other one is actually hanging by handcuffs to say, I'll go and get his handcuff keys and come back for you. He then she then goes out to get the keys. A music for its very over-the-top, very cheap psycho variation, by the way. Um, and it whole thing that is like heavy grain, looks like it was made on a handheld camcorder. Um, the guy then appears behind her, and then that ends because that was actually on the TV, and now we got this very psychotropic uh sweet weird swirling signal on the TV. And a guy, this is Ben, is naked in bed with his woman Maya. Um the TV he says the TV must have come on when they were asleep. So Maya is cheating on her husband with Ben, and this is her first affair. Uh, she must stink off sex and sweat given the two. We're clearly fucking laying in bed, and now she realizes, oh shit, I need to get home because my husband's gonna be waiting for me. Um she tries her cell phone, but the weird signal one from the TV comes through her cell phone, and she tries his landline as well, but the weird signal is coming through there too. So she is a cheater, she he is uh both of them are adulterers, effectively. Uh and unless the husband is a piece of shit, I'm already anti them. Uh sleazy scum pigs that they are. Uh Ben wants them to leave Terminus and to go and start a new life in the country. Um so the one bit I couldn't quite understand before we get there is they live in this city called Terminus, and apparently people don't leave Terminus, you can't leave Terminus, which confused me when they said it, and it doesn't make sense. However, Transmission 1 or Part 1, Crazy in Love. Maya goes to her car, and there's a guy sitting quite close to it. It's just basically the parking garage under under uh Ben's building, and there's a guy who says that I've been stabbed. Some guy just came up to me and stabbed me, and he is genuinely bleeding all over the place. Uh she turns around, she is gonna help him, but she turns around and sees another guy who comes running at her and she panics, jumps in her car, and drives off. Oh yeah, before uh before she left though, Ben gave her a um a a mixtape, but a CD version of a mixtape. She's burnt her a mixed CD uh because she carries around an old Sony Discman. I used to have a Sony Discman by the way, back in the day. Uh, prior to university, I had a Sony Discman as well. Um, and yes, so these guys just run after her in the car and she drives off. So it is gonna be a lot like the uh the crazies, in my opinion. Uh her cell phone is still giving this weird signal, so she just puts it down. But after driving for a while, she stops and closes her eyes, which in my opinion uh is stupid. Why, after being chased by two random men um would you then stop? It's like all these people who've basically been battling their way through a house, manage to burst their way out of like the back door or front door, but then after a few yards just stop. If I was chased by Leatherface, for example, around the hut, I managed to get out through a window or a door, I'm not stopping. I'm not stopping until I can't can't run anymore. I will just start running and running in one direction as fast as far as is humanly possible before to get as far away from there as possible. However, she just uh stops. She then puts her C D does she put the C D on here? No, she doesn't. She heads home first before she puts the CD on. She hides the CD uh with in her bag with the um with the disc one. She gets back to their apartment building, the one she shares with her husband. And people are very angry with her. There are people banging on doors, people being confrontational with each other. One follows her, uh, but then she you know she Call runs and heart, you know. You think he's this woman who's actually following her is going to attack her, but she manages to get back to her apartment when she lets herself in. And her husband there uh is with two friends, and the three of them are kind of just waiting for the baseball game to come on, and they're all drinking beer. Uh, the husband is Lewis, who's works as an exterminator, a domestic exterminator, and his friend Rod and the other guy who's not Rod. Uh, they're waiting for the baseball to come on, and the other guy called Rod is kind of like swinging the bat around whilst they're waiting for the TV to come on. Because at the moment it's just showing the signal as well. Lewis could kind of sense that she's up to something. Her story of oh, I went out drinking after work with the girls, and he's like, Who? And she kind of stumbles over that and then where? And she kind of stumbles over that. Oh, in the city, a place you wouldn't know, kind of thing. All feel feels very suspect. Um she goes in the bedroom and he's like, You smell because she's wearing too much perfume. Uh, she's basically trying to hide her sex stank with perfume. Uh, and he's like, Go and go and shower. I like the smell of your sweat. At the moment, the smell of her sweat is also the smell of Ben's sweat and probably his cum. Um, he seems very mean and controlling. She's also got blood on her shirt from the guy who was stabbed, and she lies about it being blood, even saying that, oh no, that's just barbecue sauce from the bar that I uh that I went to earlier. Lewis then gets way too close to the TV, and he's staring right into the signal while she goes into the bathroom to get showered. Now the two guys are going to the two guys who are his friends and they're there to watch this baseball game together. But one of the guys is like swinging this baseball bat around and Lewis is like, you nearly hurt my wife. And he's like, I was nowhere near her. He goes, You nearly killed my wife. He goes, What? He goes, You're trying to fuck my wife. And then they start arguing. When Maya comes out of the bathroom, Lewis has beaten the guy to death with his baseball bat and is currently fighting Rod. Maya runs out of the her apartment, and there's a there are dead bodies now in the hallway. She sees this woman run into this guy who's got a pair of pruning shears who just does her throat. That was pretty gruesome and incredibly well done. Actually, I would say the tension and the violence and the blood and the gore is done incredibly well. There's also nothing wrong with the acting at all in this movie. She asks her neighbour, who lives directly opposite, for help, and this is this lady who she was speaking to earlier. The woman Labour's like, oh yeah, come in, absolutely, come in, come in, come in, and after helping Maya in, starts trying to strangle Maya before the woman stands up and is stabbed from behind by the pruning shears guy before Maya can finally close the door. Um, and discovers that the woman also had the signal on, so Maya turns the TV off. And I had to say, after 20 minutes in, I thought it was pretty good. I was thoroughly, thoroughly uh entertained by this movie, uh The Signal from 2007. A bit a little bit like The Cell, just better than The Cell already. Um it's kind of like If the Cell Met Mads, I would say at the moment. Um and the crazies. So the crazies and cell meet mads. Uh and I'm rating it. Uh Maya hides in the apartment for a while, and we can hear all the chaos happening outside. Um we cut to dead people on the street and the sounds of screams racing from the city. Um after checking her phone, which is still just playing the signal, she heads out into the hallway and there's Carnage. Um, she heads home and Lewis has been beaten up by rods and gaffer taped to a chair, which is funny. Um and this is this bit annoyed me. It really did annoy me. I can see why they did it, but it annoyed me. In a situation where people have randomly started killing each other, she decides to put on her discman, put on Ben's mix CD that um he made for her, put on her headphones so she can't hear anything, and head out, which for me is arguably one of the most stupid things anyone has ever done in a movie. Homicidal people are killing each other in your building, and you want to warse out listening to music, but just as he is heading out, she is grabbed by Rod and dragged into a I think it's gonna be like the supers, uh like broom closet kind of thing. Rod, who is the guy from the party earlier who basically ended up beating up and then taping taping Lewis to the chair. Um he's made this badass weapon out of tons of kitchen knives that he's taped to the end of this huge punk of metal. Um, he then does this superb monologue. It was absolutely superb, and because it had all the different emotions, it had it had um doubt and anger and upset and hope and fear. It had everything in this monologue that Rod gives while she is not speaking because he thinks she thinks that he's nuts and he actually thinks that she might also be nuts. He has taped her up though, and he says, I saved 12 people last night by taping them up, and um all by you are dead now, suggesting they've all been killed. So the plan, according to Maya, is we get in my car and we drive off. And Wads goes, Where? He goes, It doesn't matter, we just leave. Now um the whole before um she left Ben at the beginning of the movie, uh, he asked her to go with her to terminal thirteen at the train terminal and to leave Terminus with him to go and live in the country. And she says, I can't do that. Because she's only just started having affairs, she's not having affairs before, she's not a dirty skank who has no emotional attachment to people. She wants to go back to her husband. Anyway, so Rod and um Maya uh head out. As they head out, Rod sees a cop, a female cop that he recognises. So he's walking towards her and he goes, Are you crazy? Are you crazy? She pulls her gun up and shoots him repeatedly. Uh to which Maya shouts, Rod. Um, and Maya's thinking, shit, I need to get out of here, looking back and seeing Rod beating the cop to pieces with his weapon. Um but she slows down and Rod gets in, but he's also acting nuts. He puts the radio on and it's also got the signal going. He then punches Maya in the face a few times. Um because he thinks that she was gonna leave him and he's gone a bit nuts. Uh he she early as soon as she got in, she said, put your seatbelt on, but he doesn't, so after she's been punched a few times, she just speeds up the car and then crashes it, sending him through the windshield. Now, the rot sorry had stolen the cop's gun and says, I've got a gun. Maya looks back into the car after it's crashed, and rather than getting the gun to protect yourself, she gets her disconnect so she can listen to the mix C D that her um boyfriend that she's cheating on her husband with's music is on. Um people then come to help, including uh Clark, uh, who comes over and tries to help her, uh, but she just gets up and starts walking away. Um and sets he goes, Where were you going? We're just trying to help you, and she goes, Terminal 13, and she leaves. It's supposed to be New Year's Eve, by the way, uh, and they were gonna leave at midnight on New Year's Eve. Um Ben um apparently. Ben um has been captured by Lewis. Um apparently, because Ben uh helped Lewis escape, maybe, and then gets bundled into the back of Lewis's van, bloody and beaten. That is the end of episode one. Transmission one. Transition two is directed by somebody else, uh, and this is the jealousy monster. In the jealousy monster, Anna and her husband Ken um are having a New Year's Eve party. Anna has got blood all over her and is talking to the TV and say talking to the camera point of view, saying, uh talking into the camera saying, Hmm, do you think we shouldn't be going ahead with the party? And then we see that Ken uh is probably dead with tons of blood coming out of his neck. Um Clark, uh, who then tried to help Maya, helps Rod instead. And then Bakesley bangs on the door. Oh, thinks Anna. One of my guests has arrived. Um, but then realizing she's just killed her husband. She killed her husband with a bloom pump after he was staring at the TV and tried to strangle her whilst they were blowing up balloons for the party, and she jams the blue pump into his throat and then pumps it. So Clark bangs on the door uh and says, Um, can I borrow um can I get my hatchet back? I lent it to Ken. And then Anna sort of shows that she killed Ken, and then uh and then uh Clark sort of says, Yeah, um, I killed Rod. Because when he got Rod back in his uh workshop, um Rod went nuts at him, and then he chops Rod's head off with a spade. Um at whilst the two of them are talking, like someone who's on fire like runs to the window and starts banging on it as well. Um, however, this this part of the three-part movie is a comedy. Okay, it is too much of a comedy because Clark is talking about societal norms and all this other stuff, like he's like this hyper-intellectual that fully understands what's going on. Um, and Anna's just like, Can I have my party? There's another bang on the door, and this is Lewis pretending to be an exterminator. Well, he's not pretending he is an exterminator, but he's pretending that he was called by Ken. Uh so Anna lets him in and he keeps talking to Anna like she's Maya. Because he sees her as Maya, even though she isn't Maya. Um he then sprays both her and Clark with a pesticide as he comes in. Uh, but then they show him that dead Ken and dead Rod. To which to which um he goes, I killed him, and then um and then uh Lewis says, Yeah, he probably deserved it. Or he had it coming, now he had it coming, and they're like, What? And he goes, nothing. Um because you know the guy had beaten him up and taped him to a chair. Uh and it was too comedic, this bit for me, with some very over-the-top lines, and and obviously the guy what the second part wants to be more of a comedian, and it is the word it's too wordy, it's too much of a farce, it is amusing, but it's out of keeping with the first part. Lewis then takes him to the back of his van where Ben is in the back of his van. Um, and again, they're talking in a comic tone as a couple runs behind them, and then they turn round to look back as a guy with a chainsaw chases the couple. Um so now we have Anna, Clark, and Lewis who are drinking cocktails on the couch and eating snacks. Laura, um, who is Lindsay Garrett from The Walking Dead, then arrives, and this is Anna's friend who's like, I'm here for the party. My mother just killed me, my dad killed my dog. Uh Lewis then kills her, uh, beating her to death with his sort of like the canister that his pesticide comes in, beating her head in, uh, imagining that she is a knife. Again, comedy with a comic tone and comedy music. Uh, just this isn't a comedy, so why are you making it a comedy? But comedy kills. The doorbell then goes again, and this is Jim Parsons. Clark looks through and goes, It's Jim. He goes, Who's Jim? He goes, He's just in the neighborhood. Uh, Lewis thinks that Jim is infected, but Jim actually is blissfully unaware of what's going on. He's just there for the party, and he's a pervert, he's an absolute pervert, talking about women, you know, talking about Anna's breasts, and he's just there to get some pussy, and you know, all these different things, and he's just a weird creep. Um, Anna, sorry, yeah, Anna is getting um dressed, changed for the party, even though she's covered in blood, and Ken then gets up and the two of them start dancing. But as Clark goes in to check on her, she's dancing by herself and hallucinating dancing with Ken because she is clearly infected and mad as a trumpet. Again, out of step with the first part of this movie. Lewis imagines pervert Jim is now Ben, talking about how much he fan he loves Maya and his fucking Maya, and so he beats the shit um out of um out of Jim before then going in to see Clark kissing Maya, but it's actually not because Clark is actually kissing Anna. After everyone realizes that they're not Ken and Maya, uh Lewis thinks Clark did something to Maya, and so attacks Clark before spraying him Anna in the face with a pest in the eyes with a pesticide, demanding to know where Anna is before killing Anna by spraying her repeatedly in the eyes and then jamming it into her throat and killing her that way. Not a nice way to go. So Clark tells Lewis that he is insane. So Lewis puts Clark in front of the TV and puts the signal on to make him watch it, and it warps Clark's brain. And he says, Where is my wife? Where is my wife? And he's like, Oh, she went to terminal 13 to leave Terminus. And it's at that point Ben appears from nowhere and knocks and not and knocks um knocks Lewis out. So that was the end of Transmission 2. I mean it isn't terrible, it was just a comic farce setting this one apartment building, one apartment, rather than you know, escaping a violent tenement building where we've had an outbreak of the crazies and lots of particularly nasty deaths. It's now a comedy for this one part, and it is just that part because the third part is like the first part in it's a drama. Ah, the third part, the third transmission, is Escape from Terminus. Ben wakes up in the back of the van and remembers uh trying to help Lewis, then Lewis beating him up with the baseball bat back at the apartment, uh, and then beating him up in the baseball, beating him with a baseball bat on the street. Him seeing the car driving off, but then being beaten unconscious uh by Lewis with the baseball bat and thrown in the back of the van. Back in the present, he just opens the back of the van, gets out and finds Maya's car where it crashed and follows the trail of blood into the house. Although it wasn't Meyer's blood at all, it was Rod's blood. Ben beats Lewis into unconsciousness, and Clark is still tied up, and Ben is going to release him when Lewis gets up and chases them both back to Clark's workshop, the place where he killed Rod. So much much of it is the tone of the first part of the movie until Insane Clark, after being forced to watch the signal on the TV, thinks that when Ben says, you know, where did Maya go? And he goes, I don't remember, but but Rod knows, uh, is gonna jumpstart Rod's decapitated head. And he does this by drilling into Rod's skull. And now we have Clark hallucinating Rod and talking to him, which is new and crazy and kind of a mixture of the two. Rod wants a cigarette before he tells Ben where Maya is. Rod tells Clark to tell Ben she went to Terminal 13 because she wants to leave Terminus at midnight, which is their plan from the first part of the story. There is this whole again, there's this weird thing about Terminus, and why is it called Terminus? And why are people not able to leave, according to Clark? Is it like Dark City kind of cannot leave? If you've not seen Dark City, by the way, with Rufus Sewell and Kiefer Sutherland, you fucking well should. Uh or Cemetery Man, uh de la Morte de la More. If you haven't seen that, you also fucking should. So if you have not seen Dark City uh or Cemetery Man, you go and watch them now and come back and listen to the rest of this. Because my thing is like, well, why is it called Terminus? Um, and why can't you leave Terminus? Lewis um has found Clark's sledgehammer and says, Hey guys, I've found Clark's sledgehammer. I'm gonna use it to smash my way in now. So the guys are like, Oh fuck. So uh Ben picks up a saw, which there's one out of juice, and just as after smashing a hole in the door, Lewis puts his arm through to um unlock it. Clark, who's now getting back to normal, uses an electric uh screwdriver to screw two huge screws through Lewis's arm to jam it, fix him to the door. Clark seems to know all about the signal and and how it went wrong and protocols and everything. Either he's a genius or a madman, um, because oh he's like a conspiracy theorist that has all these conspiracies. But the thing is, the way he's talking like a gibbering idiot, uh, makes you wonder one way or t'other which uh which it is. So uh the two of them jump in the car and they're gonna head to terminus into the city, uh to the terminal 13 at the train station. Um Clark puts a tinfoil hat on, uh, and then they get out and they're going in on foot. They then see who they think is Maya, but she turns around and has no face. It's being eaten, but it was all in Ben's head, because Clark kind of brings him back to reality. This idea that listen and smell and and hear that is the earth, the earth, the nature, and nature was here before us, nature will he'll be he'll be here after us. So use that as your grounding element. I liked that. You can hear people screaming, uh, and they find my own my own. She is sitting, she's tied to a chair, staring at a bank of TVs that have got the signal on, so she is clearly being warped. Lewis then appears and strangles Clark, uh, and then he starts beating and choking Ben. Um basically telling Ben that you'll never gonna lay your eyes on my wife again, and puts his eye thumbs in his eye sockets, which is never a nice thing. I know Michael hates that. Lewis has gone absolutely nuts, Arama, thinking that the catatonic Maya is talking to him, but then Ben gets up and puts his head right next to the TV and stares into the signal, and then he turns and reverses the whole thing, telling Lewis that Lewis is Ben, and that that Ben is Lewis, and that Maya is my wife, not your wife, and you're the one who's cheating on me and with my wife, causing Lewis to absolutely lose his mind. I really like that whole 360 there or 180 there, and then he goes to the TV and starts punching the TV until he breaks the TV, and then he punches into the TV and he electrocutes himself and is finally dead. Thank fuck. So hopefully Ben wasn't mad. Um, and it's difficult to say because what's real and what's not. Clark is also um alive, and the three of them get up and head out. Into the country on a train. And they've got no bruises or scars. Which obviously suggested it was in his head. And it was in his head. Because now we're back again to the terminal where Ben is trying to get a catatonic Maya to talk to him. Obviously, she is now just a catatonic mess. But he puts his Disman on her head and puts the uh earphones on and starts playing the song that he put on his um C D for her, and she immediately closes her eyes and starts crying, suggesting that she has calm out of it. And that was it. Uh that's the end. The signal from 2007. I was expecting out of those 25 movies, I realise it's 26 because I'm Omega wasn't on my list. Um I was expecting nothing but the worst of shit from from 2B this weekend. Um look, even fucking I don't know. The only other movie I watched was Disney and you know Mandalorian and Grogo, which was also fucking shit. So even an indie could be better than that, and it was this was genuinely entertaining. I think the three stories, even though the second one was done in a comedic way, did link them together, given the fact that the media medium middle story was more about Clark and them all catching up with each other. Um and uh it was done comically, you know. We had a talking head, multiple deaths, uh comedy deaths, um, but it was just too funny. It was just too funny. Uh it did feel out of keeping with part one and part three. Um, but it was still good. I'm gonna say that. It had you know what it felt like, it felt like the Ryan Reynolds the voices, because it was very dark, and you didn't know what was real and what wasn't, because the characters didn't know what was real and what wasn't. But all three parts, superb acting, excellent gore, super practical effects. Um the the third second part was actually genuinely funny. Uh the first and the first and the third part were genuinely traumatic and uh tension building. Um I actually really like people just going psycho. It's like if Crazies was just in one tenement building, that's what that's what the first part was. Um I thought the acting from all of them was superb. Um maybe maybe Lewis was a bit too villainous, but he actually did it incredibly well. I think Ben was a great little actor. Um I had trouble understanding Maya to start Meyer to start with. Uh she kind of mumbled. But the rest of it, yeah, I kind of liked it. I mean, that's the thing, you know, there aren't that many movies on Tubi that I've enjoyed. Uh you know, uh Interlopers and Savage Land were the only other movies that I've truly enjoyed from Tubi. So I think this is gonna go there. This uh is it gotta be up there, yeah. So what am I gonna score it before I do anything else? Ladies and gentlemen, if you have not seen the 2007 The Signal, you should. It's quite like the Cell in its concept, but if the Cell then fed into the crazies, so if you like the idea of the crazies and you like Cell, although you might not like Cell because a lot of people don't like Cell. I genuinely like Sick The Signal from 2007. I'm gonna score it six out of ten.