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'The Signal'

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BY JAN STUART | Special to Newsday

February 22, 2008

Divided into three parts, each written and directed by a different artist, this feisty indie horror flick tracks a New Year's Eve gone kablooey in the imaginary city of Terminus.

Mya (Anessa Ramsey) is having a perfectly lovely time with her lover, Ben (Justin Welborn), when a strange signal transmitted through the city's TVs and phones turns people into psychopathic killers. No. 1 psycho is Mya's husband, Lewis (A.J. Bowen), who goes on a jealous rampage, seriously ruining a lot of friends' holiday party plans.

Initiated as a kind of tag-you're-it narrative experiment in which one filmmaker begins the story and then passes it to another, then a third, "The Signal" exhibits the highs and lows one might expect from such a collaboration. David Bruckner's scene-setter "Crazy in Love" gets the affair off in tautly wigged-out fashion, as Mya returns home to find everyone in her apartment building in a hair-trigger state. Dan Bush's "The Jealous Monster" picks up the ball with tongue firmly in cheek ("This is getting to be ridiculous," editorializes one character, quite correctly), while Jacob Gentry's windup "Escape From Terminus" pushes the gore envelope to a nonsensical fare-thee-well.

The actors get into the spirit of things, with honorable mention going to a droll Scott Poythress and Sahr Ngaujah, who enjoys a dippy act-three moment as a talking head. "The Signal" is a well-oiled example of that oxymoronic Tarantino phenomenon: the arty grindhouse picture.

THE SIGNAL (R). 1:39 (strong brutal bloody violence, pervasive language and brief nudity). At the Empire 25, 84th Street Theatre, Village Theatre 7, Manhattan.