[IMDB link] [Netflix link] A horror flick, told in 3 parts (but ONE story), about an “evil signal” that makes people murderous via synaptic disruption. To me, this makes it a “zombie movie”, but with smater-than-usual zombies. The infection is done via a means much like In The Mouth Of Madness, and the feel reminds me a lot of 28 Days Later (urban zombie survival) combined with Cloverfield (realistic feel, lovers trying to reunite during what is essentially an apocalypse). And, just to keep you on the toes, the beginning 5 minutes play like Grindhouse for some reason.
QUIRKS: The catch is — infection is cumulative, so you can’t tell if someone is “crazy” (infected/zombie) by looking at them. Or even speaking with them, in some cases. This makes things a lot harder. Do you indicriminately kill everyone you see? Also: I wasn’t really familiar with any of the actors in this movie, which added to the “realistic” feel. Also, I thought it was cool how ‘the signal’ itself pushed the limits of the xvid codec. The signal itself does not compress very well–that implies it carries a lot of information. :)
BAD STUFF: Why oh why would anybody wear headphones during a zombie attack? That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.
CONCLUSION: OMG! As far as horror movies go, this is at least a 9! Horror movies aren’t that profound, though, and as a film overall I would give it an 8 on IMDB, and 4 stars on Netflix.
RECOMMENDATION: If you watch 2 horror movies this year, watch Cloverfield and The Signal.
MOVIE QUOTE: Clark: “This is without a doubt the most fucked up day in the history of mankind. We should go back inside.” Anna: [cheerful, despite just killing her boyfriend] “Who wants cocktails?”
Music: Chemlab – Mega Hurts / suture (Acucrack Ver.)
July 21, 2008 at 10:10 AM
[...] (The Signal, Amityville Horror 2005) Two movies within a month or so that had a [highlight for spoilers]→ [...]
July 27, 2008 at 6:14 PM
Just saw it. Good movie, even though I wouldn’t rate it quite as high as you did. It’s getting a 3 star rating on Netflix. It would be 3 1/2 if Netflix had a half star rating system.
FYI, just because the signal itself compresses really badly, does not imply it carries a lot of information. You’ll find that white noise, which carries absolutely no information actually compresses really really badly. In fact most any random pattern will compress really badly. They structured patterns of actual information actually help the compression algorithms.
July 27, 2008 at 6:27 PM
Actually, White noise compresses badly because it’s already information compressed as much as it can be compressed.
Random numbers are a form of information. White noise carries a stream of random data in a very bandwidth-efficient manner.
This is basic information theory, something covered in my first year computer science studies.
Random anything is more information always. Just because you can’t find *meaning* for it, and thus call it “noise”, doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s not carrying information. It’s just not *useful* information. Info is info, whether or not you can decode it, and whether or not it is useful or not.
The better the compression algorithm, the more a resulting file compressed by said algorithm resembles a string random characters. That’s why you can’t re-zip a zip file, but you can zip a text file QUITE A LOT, due to the repetition of letters [vs symbols], vowels, words, etc.
And in a similar vein, uncommon data carries more info than common data — which is why a stream that *seems* random is the most efficient way to carry information.
How much can you glean from “AAAAAAAAABAAABAAAAAAAAAA” vs “AJ3Z4I3W2EO343ZE9302423″. It doesn’t really matter. The second string contains more information, even though it contains fewer bytes.
Similarly, “man bites dog” contains more information than “dog bites man”, because it’s more unusual. Hell, that was an exam question of mine.
July 27, 2008 at 9:31 PM
I meant to imply useful information. Technically, yes, any data stream contains information, weather meaningful or not.
The word information has many meanings depending on the context in which it is used(wikipedia). I should have been more specific.
Even the Merriam Webster definition leaves a lot open to interpretation :|
And not being a CS major, I never took information theory.
July 27, 2008 at 9:40 PM
As for compression algorithm, an algorithm doesn’t “care” (or even “know” ) if the information is meaningful or not …. That’s really something only humans can [currently] do. So it really doesn’t matter whether the information is meaningful or not for purposes of my original statement.
March 17, 2009 at 2:53 PM
[...] Signal, The [...]
May 30, 2010 at 7:08 AM
[...] later, things get really bad. It approaches more of the level of the [non-Japanese-related] horror The Signal. Since wifi is a signal, and hardware gets “infected” by this evil signal, in the end [...]