Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Cinema Clips: The Belko Experiment

Posted By on Tue, Mar 21, 2017 at 10:00 AM


If this schlocky horror offering suffers from anything, it’s that it thinks it is deeper and cleverer than it actually is.

Penned by James Gunn, this silly movie pits a bunch of office staff workers against one another after a voice comes over their intercom telling them to start killing each other off, or everybody dies. The building is sealed, the “experiment” is put into motion, and the likes of Tony Goldwyn and John C. McGingley start acting like real, homicidal assholes.

Directed by Greg McLean, the film is fun on a very base level (If you like movies where lots of heads blow up, this one’s for you!). There’s a definite terror involved in not knowing whose head is going to blow up next, and the folks handling the gore factor do a pretty good job. It’s when the big reveal comes at the end, a big reveal that offers absolutely nothing in the surprise category, that the movie loses a few points.

John Gallagher Jr. (10 Cloverfield Lane) is good as the protagonist, a guy who does his darndest to not join in on the inter-office carnage. You could look at this as deep satire, or a resonating meditation on the current state of mind control when it comes to government and employers in an increasingly paranoid society. I like to look at it as a film where brains go flying in a fairly convincing, somewhat entertaining manner.