Wake up! Signs borrows HEAVILY from Night of the Living Dead.

Rating: 5/10 (5 August 2002)

I just want to point out one thing here that people are too blind to see--It needs to be made perfectly clear that M. Night Shyamalan borrows heavily from low-budget horror classics that never got the attention they deserved in their day. THE SIXTH SENSE, Shyamalan's breakthrough hit, stole it's entire central conceit (lead character really dead for the entirety of film, unbeknownst to us viewers) from the low-budget Kansas-shot classic CARNIVAL OF SOULS, which had, in turn, borrowed the idea from an old TWILIGHT ZONE episode. Everyone praised SENSE'S "originality" while CARNIVAL got shelved and badly distributed over the years. Now we get SIGNS, which is pushing into religious territory as filtered through Spielbergian fashion Americans love so much.
Come on folks, you have seen this film before. Wake up and look at the SIGNS...Pennsylvania farm house, boarded up, being invaded by scary things in the dark while the terrified inhabitants look for answers by watching TV news broadcasts that come and go... That's the same plot as George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD substituting aliens for zombies, isn't it? Even though Romero was interested in tapping into racism, sexism and human interaction, while Shyamalan is using the crop circles plot to focus on a different kind of interaction (man and God), it still angers me that a high-profile director can do a film like this and get endless applause when they borrow so many ideas from others who got pigeonholed, ignored and ridiculed.
Even though I walked away from this film with a bizarre aftertaste, I'm going to be fair by saying it is subtle, focused, sensitive, well-acted and tense in parts. But it's also time to give George Romero credit for his massive impact on fantasy, sci-fi, horror and suspense films and it's time for people to go back to the original horror classics and understand where the so-called "new and original" ideas present here, and in so many other big-budget blockbusters, stem from.
Score: 5 out of 10.