Broadcast Signal Intrusion – 8MM meets Censor
Director: Jacob Gentry
Writer: Phil Drinkwater, Tim Woodall (Screenplay)
Starring: Harry Shum Jr, Kelley Mack, Chris Sullivan, Michael B Woods, Arif Yampolsky, Richard Cotovsky, Steve Pringle
Plot: In the late 90s, a video archivist unearths a series of sinister pirate broadcasts and becomes obsessed with uncovering the dark conspiracy behind them.
Tagline – Follow the tapes
Runtime: 1 Hour 44 Minutes
There may be spoilers in the rest of the review
Story: Broadcast Signal Intrusion starts as the video archivist James (Shum Jr) starts investigating the mysterious pirate broadcast that hit the airways that nobody ever got to the bottom off. The disturbing video show the horrors of a figure from sitcom, in a set of jarring images.
As James starts investigating, he learns of a group that have been searching for answers, digging deeper into the mystery, he starts to become obsessed about what the meanings are as he looks for answers to help him deal with his own grief.
Thoughts on Broadcast Signal Intrusion
Characters & Performances – James is the video archivist who starts looking into a mysterious pirate broadcast that was placed into television that nobody has gotten to the bottom off. He starts to look for clues in the tapes, becoming more obsessed with each viewing, covering up the grief he has been through in his own life. He will search out all clues, listen to all sources, which will only make things even more complicated for him, creating a bigger level or paranoia in his mind. Harry Shum Jr does show us a man who is on the edge of losing everything, as he becomes paranoid about what is real, reflecting this through every scene in the film. Alice is a woman that offers to help, believing she knows more than she is letting on, filling in clues that James has been missing, after she has spent time studying the tapes herself. we get to meet a host of characters along the journey for the truth, a man that investigated the case before, suspects that might be involved and people who have spent their lives searching for answers themselves.
Story – Broadcast Signal Intrusion follows a video archivist that starts looking into the mystery behind an unsolved pirate broadcast, one that starts to have disturbing connections to real world situations. This starts to become an obsession for the man, as he starts diving deeper into a spiral of terror he simply can not explain, with each clue offering up even more disturbing factors. This story could easily be compared to an 8MM, showing someone going into a world they wouldn’t consider learning a terrifying truth they weren’t prepared for. There is a constant feel of paranoia, playing into the grief the man is experiencing, which will be the driving force for him to keep going and try to understand what he is going through. This is also based loosely on a series of pirate broadcasts that were thrown into the world, putting a disturbing spin on the ideas behind them.
Themes – Broadcast Signal Intrusion is a horror mystery thriller, that could be seen as a lighter version of last years ‘Censor’ seeing a professional dive into a world they weren’t prepared for, putting them on the spiralling path into a crime world. The horror will come from the constant tension with each interaction, leaving plenty of the unsolved on the table, making you rack your brain about what could be happening, putting us firmly in the shoes of James, as we are left with the same questions he would have through the investigation.
Final Thoughts – Broadcast Signal Intrusion is a tense disturbing crime thriller, that could easily be a doubler header with Censor.
