This
is the last night of live and local radio in a remote, English-speaking corner
of Wales. Radio JAB (dig that groovy call sign) was already scheduled to
convert to a national network format, but the final night of the Laurie Wolf
show is still likely to give the UK’s FCC a cow. There will be psychic
connections, spectral voices, and mass murder broadcast live and direct in
Edward Evers-Swindell’s Dark Signal (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in Los Angeles.
For
several years, the good residents of this Welsh district have been terrorized
by the Wedlock Killer, who snips off the ring finger of his victims, wedding
band and all. We will see him methodically dispatch Sarah Keller in her far too
isolated farm house. Rather bafflingly, we will return shortly thereafter with
Kate Komisarczyk and her dodgy boyfriend. For reasons that are not immediately clear,
he is convinced there is a small fortune stashed in the house. She is not the
criminal type, but she desperately needs money to care for her wheelchair-bound
son, so Komisarczyk will be the lookout—and there will be plenty to lookout
for.
Simultaneously,
Wolf is starting her final show and she is packing plenty of bad attitude. She
is even less thrilled when she learns her technician Ben Evans has booked the
book-hawking psychic Carla Zaza as her final guest. However, things start to
get interesting when Zaza and Evans start picking up some sort of ghostly
communication, apparently from one of the Wedlock Killer’s victims.
Pontypool remains the
ultimate when it comes to horror movies set in radio stations, but
Evers-Swindell does not lack for ambition. There are a lot of moving parts in
this serial killer-ghost story hybrid, some of which rely heavily on
coincidence to set them in motion. Still, when Madame Zaza makes contact,
things definitely get spooky. In fact, Evers-Swindell masterfully capitalizes
on the claustrophobic nature of radio studio to heighten the tension.
Unfortunately, most genre fans will immediately guess who the Wedlock Killer
really is, because it’s the sort of person it always is in horror movies.
Regardless,
it is jolly good fun to see giallo veteran Cinzia Monreale returning to the
genre as the mysterious Zaza. Siwan Morris is also appealingly disdainful as
Wolf. However, Joanna Igaczewska’s Komisarczyk does not look like she could
last five seconds in a farm house of death.
