Review of The Belko Experiment (2017) by Matt C — 16 Mar 2017

Movies like The Belko Experiment have one job, and that's to be entertaining. No one goes into something like this expecting high art, but they should at least expect something that's fun. Even if something like this flounders, it can get by on ironically redeeming qualities, right? Well, apparently not.

This is a movie that's just a ball of nothing. It's so tragically underwritten in every respect and when you pair that with the straight-to-DVD production values and acting, it makes for a chore to sit through.

The direction is so overwrought in its handling of gore and violence that it isn't even trashily fun, but unpleasant and ugly, and even at 88 minutes, the experience is as dull and soul-crushing as purposelessly working an office job with no end in sight.

Written by James Gunn and directed by Greg McLean (who actually has a filmography of straight-to-DVD horror movies and last year's widely panned The Darkness), the film follows an office of American workers in a Colombian branch of the Belko Corporation.

One day, a mysterious voice comes on their intercom system commanding that two people be killed or else even more people will die, and the situation quickly escalates into mass hysteria as the windows get covered by metal sheets and employees start dropping like flies.

I won't spoil what else happens, but rest assured it's all exactly what you'd expect, even the "twist" ending. The concept is a blank canvas in that it could operate as a satire on corporate culture, a pitch black comedy, or a contained thriller driven by characters.

The movie seems to dip its toes in all of the above, but none of them work at all because the movie does absolutely nothing with its premise. The script seems to be missing an entire first act or any sort of care in terms of tension or stakes, and since all of these characters are interchangeable pawns simply there to be slaughtered in uncreative ways.

It's an example of the type of writing that gives the horror genre a bad name, reinforcing the idea that movies like these can't serve any purpose other than to exploit some audience members' enjoyment out of watching suffering, and it can't even get that right.

Take a movie like the Evil Dead reboot. That movie is gory as hell, and probably gorier than this one. However, it also had genuine scares and found ways to wring positive reactions out of a pretty tired horror subgenre.

It was able to make the extreme violence darkly funny at times while retaining the inherent disgust of it. What McLean and Gunn do with The Belko Experiment is just a crew with some actors to spare and fake gore to toss around a set.

It's choppily edited and once it gives up on even trying to create any sort of suspense or clever set pieces, it just falls back on stabbings and shootings in a way equivalent to a failed stand-up comic relying on blue humor for the sake of getting as much as a groan from some lonely drunk person sitting at the bar in the back.

The Belko Experiment feels increasingly cynical and lazy, and the rule of thumb that the filmmakers' disinterest in their creation is directly proportional to audience boredom is reinforced here. The few people in the audience with me were either asleep, on their phones, or talking, and I really didn't mind.

It part of the movie has an overwhelming "that's it?" quality about it, the ending is a colossal shrug combined with a middle finger to the audience. 2.5/10, horrendous, D-, leagues below average, etc.