Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021)
Premise: It is very pointedly the year 1999 and our dude is an archivist who restores both taped broadcasts and VHS tapes for a living. A really grim cyberpunk job if you ask me. Anyhoo, one day while going through the footage from this local station as part of his super boring job he finds a one-of-a-kind tape! It turns out someone pirated the broadcast and there’s this creepy as hell video involving some weird animatronic and distorted voices and is that morse code? Whatever could all this mean!? Could it be related to his wife’s disappearance, somehow?!? Is this all a huge conspiracy!? Am I going crazy with all these questions!?
Under 90 minutes? 15 minutes over the mark.
Do they say the title? Oh boy, yes they do!
One sentence review:
Okay, more: One of those noir movies that are actually horror movies, or the other way around. Very very fun slow burn where we see our dude go from being curious at the weird video to being completely obsessed like he was the protagonist of some crappy lovecraftian story or a pog collector. It has some weak moments and I’m going to admit the very very ending (like, the last 30 seconds) feel a bit disappointing since they’re cheesy as hell and kind of go “huh? huh? get it? GET IT?” to the audience, but the rest was a very fun creepy watch.
A simple way to improve it: This movie reminded me a lot of the very initial parts of Archive 81, where the main character’s job involves restoring very old analogue media. That show makes a point of showing you some extremely satisfying scenes of the dude painstainkingly working on those films, cassettes, you name it, and it is like one of those great youtube channels that are pure dopamine. So, uh, yeah, a simple way to improve this movie would be to either add some of that or silly batman 66 sound effects whenever the character did anything, I guess.
Trivia about the IMDb trivia:
[A character] says he turned 15 in 1987, and the movie’s set in 1999, making him 27. But the actor who plays him is over 40, and clearly looks it.
Of course it would be completely against the whole point of the movie that either A) a character was openly lying to our protagonist or B) it didn’t really happen like that. It’s not like that exact same thing happened [checks notes] OH MY GOD THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
