The Belko Experiment

War Gent Belko

The Belko Experiment
USA 2016 Directed by Greg McLean
UK cinema release print.

You know, I’ve probably had to overuse the expression “does what it says on the tin” rather a lot in my reviews over the last few months but, with regard to this film and the way it’s being marketed, it definitely is the “go to” phrase for this particular concoction. When I first saw the trailer for this a month or two ago, it looked like nothing less than a full on remake of the famous Japanese adaptation Battle Royale... with, perhaps, just a smidgeon of Cabin In The Woods thrown in for good measure. Battle Royale has the plot of one high school class taken away by the government every year for a live, televised event which see the kids fitted with exploding collars and then forced to kill each other within a specific time so the last person standing can be ‘the winner’. The Belko Experiment is exactly the same plot but, in this case, it’s adults who are working in an office building in Columbia who are part of the bloody carnage and the motivation, at least as it’s presented here, is slightly different in terms of why this ‘game’ is happening.

The film stars John Gallagher Jr. as main protagonist Mike Milch (who I recognised from 10 Cloverfield Lane, reviewed here). It's he who first realises that the trackers the company fits it’s employees with, inside their heads in case they are kidnapped, are actually tiny bombs planted in their skulls to detonate anyone who doesn’t play by the rules of the game. This is the equivalent of the exploding collars from Battle Royale and, of course, it’s used by the writer to establish the rules of the game in no uncertain terms pretty soon into the proceedings. Milch is joined by some pretty convincing actors and they all do their thing in the quite claustrophobic setting of the office building, which has been sealed up with metal to prevent anyone from escaping.

The film is not the kind of film I would associate with the writer, James Gunn, who directed the two Guardians Of The Galaxy movies... it’s a lot more sadistic and horror driven than that. It’s not an actual horror film but it is an intensely driven action thriller and the use of gory violence elevates the grimness of the scenario quite effectively at some points. It would be true to say that it’s not nearly as grotesquely bloody as many modern horror movies out there these days but, at the same time, it is quite edgy and certainly uses the visual syntax of horror to maintain a similar effect. The tension in the suspense scenes is quite high and the whole exercise has a certain amount of dread and, alas, a predictable inevitability about just where everything is going to be heading for the end of the movie.

About that ending... I’m not going to reveal anything here but I will say that I wasn’t expecting much in the way of actual hard answers as to the reason this carnage is going on. Sure, you do get some generic ones and there is, I suppose, a partial sense of closure at the end of the movie. That being said, the final shot of the film, which is a slow pull back looking at... something... very much sets this movie up to be only the first part in a franchise of Belko movies, to be sure. It’s in no way subtle and the very last line of the movie, spoken just before the credits roll, makes it very certain that if this film is successful then the studios will be able to start churning out the sequels.

That being said, despite its predictability, The Belko Experiment is a well made, somewhat entertaining (although also pretty mean spirited in its lack of morality and general unpleasantness) thriller which even has a nice line of musical jokes in the songs used in the soundtrack. The opening title song, for instance, kick starts the ‘fun’ with a series of foreign language covers which, if you know the English lyrics, provide a throwaway commentary on the action and intent of the film from the start. So that’s all good.

Wow... so this is one of my shortest reviews since my first year of writing them on this blog but I really don’t have much more to say about this movie, I’m afraid. If you are into the spectacle of violent cinema where people’s bodies are there to be penetrated by slow or fast moving objects as flesh is sliced and diced in ostentatious splashes of crimson, then The Belko Experiment is probably your kind of thing. If, however, you’re not into films where the characters are set up to be slaughtered in a mass celebration of violent bloodletting without, it has to be said, all that much criticism or judgement of such behaviour in the way in which the film is shot or in the issues it raises, then it’s probably something you should maybe approach with a little more caution. It’s not personally something I’d be that happy to watch again (unlike, for example, Battle Royale) but I do believe there’s a certain audience who will love this one and it's really not badly put together. Bon Appétit.

The Darkness

Five Little Indians

The Darkness
2016 USA Directed by Greg McLean
UK cinema release print.

Okay. Yeah... kinda liked this one.

The Darkness is one of those entertainments that you can add to the recent list of horror films which are not absolutely great movies or classics of the genre but, at the same time, are skilled enough with the clichés and shorthand of their archetype to be able to deliver an enjoyable and competent addition to the list of similar films being made. Where The Darkness really wins some respect from me is with the addition of the Native American demons and their hostile attempt to return from the dimension that they were trapped in many years ago by their own people. Don’t quite remember that kind of mythology being tapped before (although I’m sure somebody must have already covered it at some point).

The film starts off with Peter and Bonny, played as well as you would expect by Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell, and their two children, on a vacation with their friends near the Grand Canyon. The youngest of the two, the boy, is autistic and, when he’s left alone for a minute by his sister who’s supposed to be watching him, he falls through into a cavern and finds five pebbles inscribed with icons and which he removes from their specific, ritualistic place in the cave, taking them home in his ruck sack. This, of course, opens the household up to various ‘haunting’ phenomena, which the boy is usually blamed for, as this has allowed the all powerful demons something to anchor themselves onto, so they can begin to free themselves from the confines of their prison. Of course, because the boy Michael (played by Gotham’s young Bruce Wayne, David Mazouz), is autistic, he can see what ‘the sky people’ are doing and even tries to help them for most of the picture.

It’s nothing particularly special as a movie, for sure, but it does have that mythological edge to it in the Indian legend. In terms of the story and the eventual ‘final solution’ of the movie, it does at least stick with the rules and back story it sets up for itself... something which some horror movies seem to have trouble doing, these days, for some reason. So I was pretty glad when we had some follow through on this stuff beyond the point of... this is how the spooky, sinister force came to be here and now we’re just going to do our own thing with it, without referring to the origins again.

The film is fairly well shot and, though it doesn’t exactly go nuts on the intensity of the scares along the way, it does get quite suspenseful at some points in the movie. The use of black dirt handprints as a signature that a ghostly and demonic presence is at work is used quite well a lot of the time and these are used to build tension throughout as they are manifested in various places, including being imprinted on a couple of the characters themselves, when they face their supernatural opposition.

The performances in this are all pretty good, too. Bacon is always cool, as is Radha Mitchell... who really needs to get more lead roles. David Mazouz is very good as the autistic son and his character’s sister, Stephanie, played by Lucy Fry, also does well at portraying an angry and troubled teenager. It was nice seeing Paul Reiser back on the big screen, playing an even bigger and annoying idiot than he did in ALIENS but it was the character of his wife who I really sat up and took note of. She’s not in it that much but it was nice seeing the beautiful Ming-Na Wen, aka Agent May from Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD on the big screen. We need more of her in Hollywoodland too, me thinks.

So not much more to say about this one except we have another nice touch in the fact that the person (or people) who the family go to in order to fight back against their supernatural threat are actually of some help in this case (as those kinds of ‘Van Helsing’ figures were in the Insidious series too, I guess)... although, at the end of the day, any salvation in the final act comes from a different avenue. In fact that, for me, was the one weak point of the film... in the last ten minutes I was at a place where I started thinking... “Oh, really. They’re going to do that, now?” However, it does at least fit in with the stuff we know about the antagonist demons from their back story so, I wasn’t too upset by the place the ending went to. Although, it did feel a little anti-climactic, if truth be told.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say on this one. The score by Johnny Klimek was pretty good and perhaps just a little more subtle and less ‘stinger led’ than a lot of modern horrors have been. I’d probably buy the score if it was available but... so far, there seems to be nothing released on CD for this one. Maybe we’ll get something released later, though, if the film does well enough at the box office?

So there you have it. A pretty short review and, for some reason, I don’t have much to say about this one. If you’re into horror movies then you probably won’t be blown away by The Darkness but it’s certainly well put together and good enough to go on your ‘to watch’ list, I would have thought. If you’re not that used to horror movies then this will probably scare you enough into watching some more of them... or avoiding them. Not sure which but it is fairly effective in certain sequences, at any rate. Not one I’d go out of my way for but certainly worth spending a little time with, I think. So maybe give this one a go.