The Belko Experiment (2016)

The office drones of the US company Belko Industries working in an office block rather far outside of Bogotá in Colombia are looking forward to another boring day doing the sort of vaguely defined human resources work whose use the people actually involved can barely comprehend. Their day begins rather peculiar, though, for there’s a new, heavily armed troop of guards securing the place, turning away all non-American employees at the gate for “security reasons”.

Once the work day has actually started, a voice over the building’s intercom calmly demands of the employees to kill two among their number, or more of them will be killed instead. What sounds like a sick joke becomes rather more disturbing when the building is completely sealed off from the outside by automated metal shutters. And that’s before our protagonists learn that the tracking devices implanted into their necks to dissuade the local gangs from kidnappings are actually explosives built to make a nasty mess out of one’s head.

Not surprisingly, panic and general human shittiness ensues, with people generally tending to one of two factions: one, let’s call them the ones with souls, kinda-sorta lead by Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr.) want to try and find some way to escape or seek help. The other group, very much dominated by the company’s local ex-military COO Barry (Tony Goldwyn), is set to break into the security guard’s armoury and decide whom to murder to satisfy the disembodied voice very, very quickly. Barry does the expected mumbling about hard choices all men in power begin when it is time to sacrifice others for their interests, so everything is set up for a bit of a massacre, or “just another day at the office”, like we called it in one of my former places of employ.

Watching The Belko Experiment, one might start speculating that its writer James Gunn has developed a bit of a hankering for the more drastic films he made before he started working for Marvel on the (decidedly beloved by me, as well as millions) Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Directed by Australian Greg McLean in his usually efficient and effective manner, The Belko Experiment is a film with an angry, gory streak, full of the kind of black humour I find difficult not to read as a product of frustration with the world and the people inhabiting it right now.

In its bloody, fast and furious way, McLean’s film is really rather fun, as bizarre as that sounds as a description of a film in which nearly eighty people die in exceedingly bloody ways, quite a few of them deftly drawn as human beings by Gunn’s script and a bunch of talented actors. Even the characters that are outright psychopaths or sociopaths (including a memorably intense and brutal performance by John C. McGinley) have reasons – well, excuses, if we’re being honest – for what they do, so there’s a feeling of actual stakes to the action and the carnage.


In spirit, The Belko Experiment reminds me of certain violently satiric and angry movies produced by Roger Corman in the late 70s and early 80s (Death Race 2000 certainly comes to mind), despite its decided lack of camp appeal. There’s a comparable degree of honest anger and frustration under the artfully polished surface, at least, that makes the film more effective than many comparable movies about people locked in somewhere having to play sadistic games, as well as a rather clear-eyed idea of how fascism works in practice.

The Darkness (2016)

On a visit to the Grand Canyon autistic-to-keep-the- plot-“mysterious”-for-longer youngest of the Taylor family Michael (David Mazouz) picks up some nice little stones which unfortunately free some animal-themed evil spirits once incarcerated by the Anasazi. This sort of thing is really bound for giving a family trouble. So, soon after they come home, the Taylors – also including mother Bronny (Radha Mitchell), father Peter (Kevin Bacon) and sister Stephanie (Lucy Fry) – have to fight off random paranormal phenomena as well as suffer through equally random attacks of Lifetime movie-style melodrama done very badly.

Praise be to The Darkness’s director Greg McLean for making a mainstream horror movie not fixated on jump scares. Alas, that’s the only thing the film has going for it, for everything else here put together forms a practically archetypal concoction of all that is wrong with contemporary mainstream horror - and nothing of what’s right with it.

Worst offender is the terribly sloppy writing. The script keeps things so vague I honestly couldn’t even tell you if the dysfunction presented in the Taylors (of course the usual foursome, because we don’t want to get creative by having a family of three or five) is supposed to be caused by the evil spirits hitchhiking their way from the Grand Canyon (Anasazi spirit prisoner security is kind of lacking, I have to say), if it is made worse by it, or if the writers just put some random family melodrama in here to pad out the running time. The film does throw in a few half sentences suggesting it’s all the spirits’ fault in one of its moments of exposition but there’s nothing in what’s actually shown on screen which would bolster that idea. It probably doesn’t matter anyhow, for the perfunctory checklist style way the film treats plot lines like the daughter’s bulimia makes these parts of the plot pointless in any case. And no, of course The Darkness does put zero effort into establishing any kind of baseline of dysfunction for anyone involved so the audience can't put what’s happening during the course of the film into the context of how the family members usually act, leading to a film whose characters have emotions that just come and go randomly for no particular reason apart from their convenience for the plot (such as it is).

Which, come to think of it, is the same feeling I get from the supernatural scenes as well: random crap that lacks any coherence and weight – what’s a “theme”? – and is only in the movie because the three screenwriters didn’t have anything as avantgardistic as a plan what the film is supposed to be and do apart from providing a best of (but worse) of every damn cliché about haunted families you’ve seen in a horror movie in the last ten years. The whole mess of the script also includes sure signs of total disinterest by everyone involved like repeating exposition about its random core haunting two and a half times (to help out those in the audience with a damaged short term memory, one supposes), and a finale that is about as much a culmination of everything the characters experienced and learned before as I am an alien invader from Yuggoth.

The whole of The Darkness feels terribly underdeveloped, not like a proper finished movie made by seasoned professionals, but like the first draft of something that might have become a decent if unspectacular horror movie if anyone had cared enough about it (or its suffering audience) to put the work in.

In short: Rogue (2007)

A tourist river tour in the Australian Outback lead by Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell) goes pear-shaped when the boatload of tourists (among them non-adventurous travel writer Michael Vartan) follows a distress flair right into the territory of a Big Damn Crocodile.

Said crocodile is quite happy about having so many tasty looking snacks in jaw-reach and goes to work, leaving the soon boatless group stranded on a river bank and struggling for survival.

Rogue was directed by Greg Mclean whose previous film Wolf Creek was one in the seemingly endless chain of spam in a cabin films, although a nearly good one of that sub-genre if not for a certain disregard for the basics of logic and a tendency to lovingly hang onto a little too much of the "generic" part of the word "genre".

In a sense, Rogue shares this problem. The film is hitting every expected beat in the sort of survival story its telling, from the asshat locals to the woman willing to die if only her daughter can be saved etc etc. Much to my surprise I wasn't as annoyed about this as I was when watching Wolf Creek, mostly thanks to Mcleans very fine sense of timing and pacing combined with a real determination to not let the movie be slogged down by too much soap operatics.

The grand finale is especially tense, gifting the viewer with the best fight between Man and Damn Big Crocodile I've ever seen. It's just too bad the "Man" here has to be male. I see no good reason for making Michael Vartan's travel writer (you know, a guy without any survival experience) the final hero of the peace when Radha Mitchell's tour guide is supposed to have actual Outback experience - except for a nearly neurotic need to fulfill the "generic" part again.

Still, this is a very entertaining movie and I am now officially waiting for Mclean's future features (possibly even with some of this "subverting expectations" stuff one hears so much about nowadays?).

 

Technorati-Tags: australian movies,in short,radha mitchell,greg mclean,michael vartan,horror,survival