One third of the way through the year, and on film number 20, half the amount of films I saw in 2016. To celebrate this milestone, we watched the worst film I've seen in a long while. A film as bad as Zoolander 2, Sausage Party or even... the terrible Fantastic 4 remake.
We decided to see the Belko Experiment, as one member of the cinema club who doesn't like horror films was living the high life in Las Vegas (George) so myself and the other member (Bailey)(and our mate Katie) took the opportunity to see a scary movie (note the name checks - just seeing if they actually read my blog). Bailey and I both loved Get Out, and I really love the adrenaline rush of watching something scary, and laughing at other people (and myself) at the jumpy bits. I wasn't really sure what The Belko Experiment was about, I'd read a sentence about it and it looked like a grim Saw-esque psychological horror. Fine by me.
Turns out it wasn't a gory psychological horror, in fact it was a shambles littered with overkill.
The plot follows offices workers in Colombia, who hear a voice over a tannoy in their block telling them that two workers must be murdered in the next 30 minutes, or else something worse will happen. Ensue panic. The rest of the film is essentially all the characters deciding whether to kill each other or not, trying to gain access to weapons, hiding, trying to escape, and further instruction from the tannoy.
As mentioned, along with this is a lot of gore and violence. Seasoned readers of my blog will realise I often find mindless violence boring and pointless, and I'm not overly shocked by 'TV gore' as it's often really unrealistic. There's a lot of blood, guts and excessive battering of each other; alongside interesting ways of killing each other- think a lift, think sellotape.
A good horror normally is also sexist and often has an underlying romance with a woman who is often sexualised. In this horror, there was an office romance, and although it wasn't overly sexualised (thumbs up) it was dull and dreary and unnecessary; not adding anything to the plot line. Also, humour is sometimes a tool used in psychological horror/thriller type movies (again, see Get Out). In The Belko Experiment there are some cheap attempts at jokes that didn't really work, some obvious comedy about the token stoner character in the film, and essentially nothing funny. Another tool often used in this type of film would be an ambiguous ending to leave you wanting more, or to make you think about the plot days after you watch the movie. This film tried to do that, the ending is designed to make you thing about bigger things, but for me the plot was so half arsed I really wasn't bothered, and it left me wondering what I had done with the last 89 minutes of my life.
Which brings me to my final point. The fact that it was only 89 minutes was the only redeeming factor for this film, I don't know if I could have lasted much longer. Verdict? 3/10, must try harder.
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