Flasz On Film

Look, horror has always offered sanctuary to gimmicks, provided room and board and even facilitated formation of cultural trends of varying quality. From found footage and fake documentaries to the recent nascent of “Screenlife” chillers like Host and Unfriended, genre filmmakers have always bravely sought out new formal avenues in which to express themselves and to offer the viewer something refreshing and novel.  

Such is the ambition of Transmission. Written and directed by Michael Hurst, this movie is an attempt to hybridize the philosophies of found footage horror with those of a faux documentary, a genre spoof and a Screenlife film to form something that probably hasn’t been done before. It imagines a scenario in which someone was channel surfing in the middle of the night, and as they were flicking between channels, the snippets of different programmes would seemingly randomly add up to tell a cohesive story of its own.  

Thus, Transmission jolts between a news coverage from a hostage crisis, a documentary about a weird filmmaker who once made a lost cursed film, a science-fiction movie that looks eerily like a straight-to-SyFy knock-off of Event Horizon and a bunch of little inserts sprinkled here and there for colour. And what I believe this movie is supposed to cohesively add up to is a metatextual multidimensional narrative about how a cursed movie was made, how it was supposedly a channelled message from “the void”, how it affected people in the ‘real’ world of the film and how it may also affect you, the viewer through the avatar of that channel-surfing entity.  

There’s no dancing around it – Transmission doesn’t work. At all. I fully appreciate the ambition baked into the gimmick, at least principally, but something tells me this notion of a channel-surfing horror movie is unlikely to take substantial hold within the culture. And if it does, I shall happily pull a Herzog and eat my own shoe after slow cooking it with rosemary and thyme for sixteen hours. However, for the time being, I shall remain sceptical.  

First of all, I just have to point out that any successful deployment of a gimmick – especially a brand new one whose provenance is yet to be established – relies heavily on the filmmakers’ adherence to the reality established by said gimmick. Therefore, I can only imagine that if there was a cardinal rule of a “channel-surfing horror”, then it should at least reflect the logic and philosophy of what channel surfing entails. I am old enough to remember what it was like to lie there on a sofa and flick between channels in the middle of the night, hoping to find anything worth stopping over for a while. And the entire idea of surfing through channels is that you flick and flick and flick and flick until – and I can’t stress this enough – UNTIL you find something worth looking at. You don’t stop over for twenty-five seconds to watch a documentary about a cursed filmmaker only to hop off right before something interesting is revealed. Only a sociopath would do that. Unless, of course, we assume the entity flicking through channels on our behalf is a deranged individual, but at this point I would probably stand accused of reading into this movie way deeper than it is remotely acceptable, let alone recommended.  

Now, it is technically possible that a multitude of interesting programmes would play at the same time, which would necessitate flipping between them and maintaining awareness of what’s happening on all of them. However, at this point you stop surfing and you begin making targeted switches between channels, perhaps without using the channel up and down functions on your remote. Which means you wouldn’t see any more inserts after you find out there are four channels of interest to you. And while I’m here, I might as well draw attention to the simple fact that no man (I weirdly assume the channel-surfing person is a man for the purpose of this complaint) would just skim over a flash of made-for-TV softcore porn. In fact, this little inside joke is what throws any semblance of realism out the window long before Transmission even begins to make some kind of narrative sense. But I digress.  

What matters in here is the simple fact that (1) the gimmick doesn’t hold water and (2) it just does not work in service of generating a compelling narrative. In fact, it effectively undermines itself every thirty seconds or so by flipping over elsewhere while keeping its own fingers crossed that the big gamble of having the viewer see emerging patterns and ensconce themselves within them would pay off and keep everyone nice and securely fastened to the edge of their seat. It doesn’t.  

Instead, as I was watching Transmission, I was secretly hoping that my frustrated experience with this movie would be remedied by way of somebody finally deciding what they want to watch, because in isolation it would have been more fun to watch that cursed Event Horizon knock-off, or that documentary about the occult-obsessed filmmaker. Or even that news programme about a hostage crisis. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be and I was forced to sit there – almost Malcolm McDowell-style – while a bona fide psychopath was trying to channel surf without necessarily knowing how to do it correctly.  

Thus, Transmission ended up a complete and utter failure. It proposed a novel gimmick only to refuse to adhere to even the basic logic thereof, it suggested a narrative that only in principle looked intriguing enough to give it its day in court and only occasionally it allowed itself enough slack to indulge in flippant self-awareness, for instance by quoting verbatim from The Terminator… which I wished I was watching instead of this. In fact, despite its brevity – Transmission takes only seventy-four minutes to run its course, which is enough time to test my patience anyway – this movie is best avoided in favour of rewatching Event Horizon, from which it seems to take occasional inspiration. Or Prince of Darkness. And if you’re after a meta-cursed-movie-movie that is really worth watching, just check out Censor.  

But Transmission? Let’s just say that some elevator pitches should never leave the elevator and cannot live up to how they sound when delivered by an excited filmmaker sky high on their ideation skills. This is not fun enough and not schlocky enough to excuse its many issues. No bueno.