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An intriguing, and sometimes frightening, latter-day addition to the Seventies genre of paranoid thrillers like The Conversation, Jacob Gentry’s foray down the rabbit hole is well worth a look

Broadcast Signal Intrusion

Dir Jacob Gentry, USA 2021 On Digital Download & Blu-ray

This very watchable horror-ish investigation thriller can be traced back to those three great Seventies films All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, and The Conversation, more than it can to The Blair Witch Project, although there are some similarities there too. No, the purpose of this film is not really to scare (although it does do that) but to create an atmosphere of doom and dread – of fighting against something so unknowable that continuing to do so might send the hero mad before he gets anywhere near the truth.

That hero is James (a superior performance from Harry Shum Jr), who by night transfers archive TV recordings to DVD, this being the late 1990s. By day he repairs old video and film equipment and ponders the disappearance of his wife some time before. Working one night, transferring a 1980s current affairs show, he discovers a broadcast signal intrusion (the name for an occurrence of some other broadcast intruding on an unrelated programme) in the form of grainy footage of a mysterious masked figure making disturbing electronic sounds.

Naturally intrigued, James does a little digging and learns there was a second such intrusion a few years later. Looking for official records connected to the incidents, he is told that the Federal Communications Commission and the FBI have seized them. And this is only the beginning: over the course of his journey he is stalked by a hooded figure, sees someone commit suicide right in front of his eyes and meets an underworld boss working out of the basement of an antique store.

That may sound bizarre, but the further James digs the more the film starts to suggest that while the tapes might be odd, it could just be that everyday life is even more threatening: in other words, the events upon which we place such significance are less bizarre than the people who believe in them. There’s clearly a comment on contemporary conspiracy theory here, in that people who require an explanation for everything are prepared to imagine all sorts of insane goingson to satisfy themselves. Is it the tapes that are driving James mad, or is he driving himself mad looking for a truth that simply isn’t there?

As is the case with films of this nature, it does slightly start to lose steam once partial explanations are offered, but until then it’s a gripping thriller that demands your attention. Not only should you take the time to watch this, but you might benefit from watching it twice... Daniel King ★★★★ ★

The Spine of Night

Dirs Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, USA 2021 Streaming on Shudder

Harking back to the Ralph Bakshi animated fantasy features of the 1970s and 1980s, The Spine of Night is a nice thick slice of old school sword and sorcery. Eschewing modern techniques, the film uses the rotoscoping method which has been around for over 100 years: essentially, it involves artists and animators tracing, frame by frame, over previously shot film footage. It has long been associated with fantasy and SF films: famously, Bakshi used the technique for his ambitious but truncated stab at Lord of the Rings and the adultoriented Fire and Ice.

The suitably epic story concerns a mystical bloom and its magical blue light that holds tremendous power but corrupts utterly those who use it. The film follows the efforts, over many centuries, of various parties to put an end to the reign of terror perpetuated by the corrupted sorcerer Ghal-Sur. Linking the vignettes is a wraparound story in which an ancient guardian of the blossom relates to a witch how this great evil was born.

Like Fire and Ice, this is being marketed as a “adult animated dark fantasy”. And why not? Who says cartoons have to be child-friendly? Who says cartoons can’t deal with heavy themes and doom-laden material? Absolutely no one, actually, so I’m not sure who is crying out for this sort of film. In practice, what adult animated fantasy appears to mean is tits, fannies and knobs plus plenty of graphic battle scenes: I have never before seen a film in which characters are cut in half both horizontally and vertically.

Now this sort of thing will be the Holy Grail to a 14-year-old who’s just read Tolkien, started playing Dungeons & Dragons and drooling over illustrations of female warriors in chainmail bikinis, but the ‘adults’ for whom this film is apparently intended are entitled to expect a hell of a lot more than that. The themes are indeed dark – corruption, oppression, war – but they’re not explored in depth. The episodic nature of the film prevents that, as each separate vignette essentially starts the story over again with another hero trying to topple the bad guy. If it’s too violent and explicit for kids, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s “adult”.

The animation itself is, frankly, a bit iffy. I remember that grand old curmudgeon of film critics Leslie Halliwell lamenting the fact that the rotoscoping in Lord of the Rings denied the animated characters their full richness. That’s true here too: often the background paintings are breathtaking while the characters in the foreground are lumpen and unconvincing. The voice acting is good, though, with quite a cast: Richard E Grant, Lucy Lawless, who of course has fantasy experience of her own, Joe Manganiello, who I understand is one of the most active D&D players in Hollywood, plus Betty Gabriel from Westworld, and Patton Oswalt. It’s worth a look for fantasy fans, but doesn’t offer much to the casual moviegoer. Daniel King ★★ ★★★

Grainy footage of a mysterious masked figure making electronic sounds