SILENT WARNINGS

Oregon. In the wheat fields adjacent to the farm of the eccentric Joe Vossimer, strange circles mysteriously materialize and Joe himself seems to have learned of an alien invasion, but death befalls him before he can communicate his discovery. Layne, Joe's cousin and sole heir, heads to the farm with his college friends to put it in order for sale. But after the apparent tranquility of the first night, some circles begin to materialize in the wheat and some people disappear into thin air. After the success of the fantasy-horror film Signs, directed by M. Night Shyamalan in 2002, the following year, Warnings  Omens of Death was produced quietly, directly for the home video market, which is nothing more than a bland and colorless copy of Shyamalan's beautiful film. Warnings is composed of two visibly distinct parts that result in a very serious qualitative degeneration of the overall product: in the first 40 minutes, excluding the stupid prologue featuring the always bad Stephen Baldwin, the narrative proceeds in the most classic of ways, managing to create some decent scenes of suspense; then everything collapses with a second part that is barely bearable. Initially, the story follows a group of young city students, stereotyped to the maximum, dealing with the discomforts of the countryside and the lack of daily comforts: pseudo-sympathetic skits, a few easy scares, a scene that's a bit osè to keep the attention up, and even a successful scare sequence. Then, when the real foray into fantasy-horror begins, it falls into unintentional ridicule, putting on scenes of unique ugliness and embarrassment, all because of the desire to show too much. The film in question, like most direct-to-video releases, had a very limited budget, so it would have been sensible not to show too much; instead, director Christian McIntire (already the author of the terrible Python and Lost Voyage) decides to show everything but really everything, from the ridiculous aliens that seem to have come straight out of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, to the laser beams, to the blue lights used by the aliens to teleport, all realized with computer graphics that are at best poor. Moreover, in addition to being unintentionally ridiculous and too noisy, the second part of the film is too rushed and even edited in a rather pedestrian manner; in short, a real disaster! In the cast, in addition to the aforementioned Stephen Baldwin, A.J. Buckley (Desert Vampires) appears as Layne and Billy Zane (Titanic, The Rider of Evil) as the sheriff. In short, Warnings can be considered the bad copy of Signs, proving to be a useless and poorly made film. The diligent first part does little to save the film from the abyss of bad home video productions. Avoid.