Lost Signal

Every once in a while, well these days more often than not, there comes along a flick so bad that after struggling through it, I feel compelled to sit down here and warn people against it. Dead of Winter aka Lost Signal is such a flick. It is so bad on so many levels that it seems a crime to invest in its 104 minutes. Wretchedly ridiculous, I found myself watching the clock with my finger hovering over the fast forward button like it was the trigger and the remote was some gun to end my suffering, my eyes glazed over frostbitten by boredom.

Kevin (Al Santos) and Tiffany (Sandra McCoy) are a young couple making the foolish plunge to move in together. On a New Year's Eve, as if to christen the event, Kevin talks Tiffany into snorting some meth followed by a shot of liqueur. When Kevin catches his pusher making moves on Tiff, he and Tiff leave the party abruptly. Before long, it becomes evident that the liqueur was laced with a hallucinogen of some sort and Kevin and Tiff begin to trip out in the woods suspecting someone is after them to do some harm.

Sounds intriguing enough, doesn't it? Well, don't be seduced to the lousy side with this one. Right from the start, you cannot help but despise Kevin. He's rude to Tiff's father. He's a piece of garbage for pushing meth, of all drugs, on his girlfriend, and he is the most pathetic Jack Nicholson wanna-be to ever violate celluloid. He even takes off running from perceived danger leaving his lady far behind in the freezing snow.

Dead of Winter, like so many B-horror releases in recent years, feels like some failed film school project. It's just a dumb movie that insults the viewer's intelligence by taking itself seriously. It was just so stupid!

I believe this movie is based on the Nebraska couple, Mike Wamsley and Janelle Hornickel. I first saw their story on Dateline or 48 Hourse, one of those shows. Then I rented this movie, titled as Dead of Winter, and started to realize it was following the same storyline of that real life Nebraska couple. I can't guarantee this is the story that McNamara based his film on but it sure seems to be. Anyway, really unfortunate situation those two kids got themselves into.

Overall I think the movie pretty good. Some of the interior shots, especially the scene where Kevin talks to Tiffany's father, were pretty hot and washed out. The night stuff was done well and the snow backdrop at night was effective. I think the pacing is good and with so many bad horror or thriller indies out there, this one is above those no question. If nothing else, it's worth watching for the story and what happened to these kids.

Simply put, this is ridiculously bad. The film's first 15 minutes or so caused me to divide myself. Half of me was moaning "Boo! I've seen the slasher movies all before. Well, maybe this time it'll actually be scary" and the other half is screaming "Bring on the gore!" Neither is correct. Instead, I was treated to an unbelievably terrible movie that wanted to be something it most certainly is not. It's the psychological thriller version of a when a TV show tries to recreate a Hollywood disaster ... OK, I know that barely makes any sense but neither does the movie ... or the acting ... or the fact I wasted £3 on it. Maybe I should spend longer explaining my previous statement but that would mean giving the movie more of my time and I've wasted enough buying it, watching it and now trying in vain to make sure none of you decide to make the same mistake. You have been warned!

This movie sucks! The acting is a joke. The screenplay is horrible. The real-life story was unnecessarily altered by preposterous details such as the couple had been given LSD when, in fact, they had taken a ton of meth. This is one of those movies you watch to make fun of. What a waste of 2 million dollars. It could have been made so much more interesting if the writers would have stuck to the facts and not made it a "horror" film. It was like a bad lifetime drama. Do not watch unless you have an hour and a half of your time that you don't mind wasting and you know in advance what you're getting yourself into. You have been warned.

Many people have made the experience that they were staying in a foreign city and went out in the night for a drink into an inn only 10 or 15 minutes foot-distance remote from their hotel. And although they were not drunk and thought that they did memorize the way from the hotel to the inn, they did not find their way back again. Somebody to whom this happened in Vienna has told me that for his great luck he finally found a taxi that brought him back to the hotel. When he entered the taxi, the cab-driver laughed and said: Are you sure that you don't want to walk? It's just around the next corner. When they arrived there, the cab-driver showed him on a map that the man must have walked more or less in circles for about an hour - and every time turning into the false last street before the hotel, as if he had been magically attracted by "an evil force".

The colleague who told me this episode also described that from minute to minute his fear was increasing. Now, imagine he had been drunk. Then, it could have happened that he would not have been able to wave a cab towards him, as busy as Vienna is during the night. He might have ended up on a parking-bench, or even worse in the Vienna-river or in a Danube canal. Orientation means the semiotic mechanism to move our body safely through a labyrinth of contradictory information which has first to be deciphered in order to serve to reach the goal of our movements. If this semiotic mechanism collapses, which means that the signs cannot be deciphered anymore, we are not only lost in the outer, but also in our inner world.

"Lost Signal" (2007) shows this complete loss of information step by step, caused by LSD or a related drogue which seems to paralyze practically wholly the capacity of orientation of the two protagonists. Their own visual perception starts to create monsters, the words heard at the cell phone have completely changed their meaning and sense. When orientation is gone, the human is no longer a semiotic being, because with the orientation he has lost its environment. Therefore, he becomes his own environment, projecting demons created by his brain into the vacuum of where the environment used to be. Although I cannot judge if the world of appearances caused by LSD is correctly depicted, I can tell that the movie does a magnificent job. This movie did not go out of my head (as many thematically related films did), it has this "mystical" glue that sticks to your brain.