"The Signal" is told in three episodes, in three styles, by three directors -- David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry, none of whom seems to take credit for any one chapter. And it is set in a WORLD GONE MAD (cue Hollywood voice-over guy . . .).

The basic setup: The transmission of all mass communication has slipped into a frequency that somehow drives half the population into a homicidal rage. The rest of the people, faced with looming death, a corpse-strewn landscape and the sudden cancellation of "The View," become a bit crazy, too.

Chapter 1, or "Transmission I," is a tense, palpably terrifying exercise in blunt-force cinema and cinematographic manipulation. The momentum picks you up and carries you past any disbelief, until you're nearly as unnerved as Lewis's (A.J. Bowen) soon-to-be-ex-friend Rod (Sahr Ngaujah). Not knowing who will come after him next, Rod disintegrates into a walking/stumbling embodiment of whatever precedes post-traumatic stress disorder (which, we suppose, must be traumatic stress disorder). Terrified out of his wits, he embraces what he fears. Ngaujah's performance is utterly convincing and absorbing.

Not so much the second episode, or "Transmission II," which immediately embraces the style of tongue-in-cheek horror best exemplified by New York's Troma Entertainment ("Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.") The problem isn't just that the comedy gore isn't particularly amusing or new. It's the 180 we've done from the first chapter -- a perfectly effective and affectingly violent piece about people, who are, whether the directors believe it or not, what makes horror work when it really works. "Transmission III" is, at best, an amalgamation of the first two parts.

It's a bad sign when the most informed guy in a movie is wearing aluminum foil on his head. And it's hard to feel the directors intended emotional impact when they have inured you to such grotesque/satiric violence as contained in the latter parts of "The Signal." In a movie about perception, misperception and the ramifications of misunderstanding, it's a bit ironic that the directors can't get out of one another's way.

-- John Anderson (Feb. 22, 2008)

Contains brutal, bloody violence; strong language; and brief nudity.