This week Maddy gives a quick 3-min review of Underworld Blood Wars which is now available on Digital HD from Amazon Video and iTunes and will released on DVD and Blu-ray April 25, 2017.
With the war between lycans and vampires still chugging along, it’s up to death dealer Selene (Kate Beckinsale) to put an end to the conflict. Drawing on a small group of allies, Selene must also fight the lycans new leader, Marius, who wants Selene taken care of, but with the help of the hybrid blood strain, she hopes that she can at least bring peace.
I’m sort of curious why Dreamworks even wanted to pay for the rights to make a Ghost in the Shell movie if they weren’t particularly interested in doing anything with the property they acquired. They seemed interested in making a cyberpunk movie, a cyberpunk movie about a badass lady android with some identity issues. I’m pretty sure you could just make an original one of those, no one owns cyberpunk or androids. If you’re going to pay for a beloved property you could try and tell a story they’ve already told, or at the very least not one that’s just like one they’ve told but much simpler and with a healthy dose of cliche. I don’t understand why you would buy a Japanese franchise and decide that you only want the Japanese-ness to be set dressing. If this was an original property it would be a dull movie with a draggy second act; as Ghost in the Shell it’s a colossal failure.
For the movie adaptation they decided to make Ghost in the Shell an awful lot like Blade II. The Major is the first of her kind and her special forces team needs to take out a mysterious terrorist who turns out to be a failed attempt to create the same thing that The Major is. if you replace “terrorist” with “vampire” and “The Major” with “Blade” that is a perfectly apt description of Blade II. I happen to believe that Blade II is a terribly under-appreciated movie; it isn’t because it has the world’s most compelling plot. In things it does worse than Blade II the bad guy i always talking about having his own neural network and there’s a location with a bunch of what look like religious types plugged in to some machines but they never even attempt to define any of that stuff. It appears to be an artifact from when the plot more closely resembled the animated movie from the 90s and they didn’t want to throw away any of the imagery.
There’s some fantastic visual design in this movie. The city sequences look a little like Blade Runner turned way way up. There are these recurring holographic fish through the advertising in the movie, and there’s a certain sense of high tech whimsy inherent in seeing insubstantial fish float all over the place. There’s a sequence where the robot design becomes absolutely chilling as a robot clearly designed to appear normal and non-threatening becomes less and less tethered to human form as it experiences more and more distress, showing off the horror of inhumanity. I also enjoyed the cloaking device effect when they let it shimmer and fade and much less when it felt like an excuse to not actually film some action sequence or another. It’s also an exceptionally well scored movie if you’re as into this vaguely pulsating cyberpunk-style of music as I am.
None of this is super important though, because the biggest problem with Ghost in the Shell is that it’s profoundly racist. The central plot is all about how to make the next step in human evolution the brains have to be taken out of Japanese people and put in to more perfect robotic bodies, robotic bodies that happen to be Caucasian. Despite taking place in a clearly Asian city (filmed in Hong Kong but seemingly trying to invoke Tokyo) none of the starring roles are played by Asian people. There are two Asians in Section Nine but neither has an incredible number of lines. The evil corporation is seemingly exclusively staffed by white people. It’s like Dreamworks wanted the Japaneseness of the story but didn’t want to use any Japanese people as anything but small parts and set dressing. Asian writing can be in the background, Asian people can be the majority of the extras, but if anyone needs to do a bunch of talking this movie would just prefer if they were white.
Ghost in the Shell would be a bad movie even if it had perfect racial politics, but instead it gets dragged down in to being a dreadful slog of a movie. It’s poorly paced, the action sequences run hot and cold, and there’s just too much unexplained nonsense to let the movie work even at all. This is a movie that will look great on the resume of a visual effects artist and everyone else will spend the rest of their careers trying to gloss over it. Ghost in the Shell is a lousy movie and a repugnant adaptation of a beloved property.
Well, it’s about time. For the last twenty-five years or so, we’ve had one animated Batman series after another but to be honest only two are really good: Batman the Animated Series and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. The latter has been slowly coming out on Blu-Ray with season one in 2013 and season two in 2015. This month, we’re getting the third and final season and the good news is that it is as entertaining as remembered.
After increasingly odd interpretations of Batman, Warner Animation decided to go retro and bring back the Batman of the 1960s, who was not afraid to operate in daylight and would partner with just about anyone in a mask as the need arose. Producer James Tucker saw to it that it honored the comic the series took its name from while modernizing it with contemporary characters and characterizations. The result was a delightful thirty minutes for three seasons and now we get the final thirteen installments.
Episodes 53 through 65 continues to have Batman (Diedrich Bader) mix and match heroes and villains, zaniness from emotional intensity and serving up action, laughs, and fine vocal work. Each episode has a teaser bit that as often as note, relates to the main story, allowing for tonal variety. We open with “Joker: The Vile and the Villainous!” as the Clown Prince of Crime (Jeff Bennett) comes to appear in the majority of the story, much to the Caped Crusader’s chagrin. It also shows how deep into the vault they will go for characters as they resurrect the Weeper (Tim Conway) from Bulletman’s exploits in the Golden Age of comics.
Throughout the season we see Batman dealing with Justice League International as Blue Beetle (Will Friedle) continues to grow as a hero and Captain Atom (Brian Bloom) is welcomed to the team.
We jump around Batman’s career as we see him partner once more with Robin (Grey DeLisle) to take down goes including Catwoman (Nika Futterman) and King Tut, as a nod to the 1966 TV series in addition to time travel tales that involve Kamandi,
There are Easter Eggs aplenty and many a reference to elements and stories from the comics themselves such as “Night of the Batmen”, taken from the eponymous comic book version, which was inspired by a story from Batman #177, as an injured Batman watches Aquaman (John DiMaggio), Captain Marvel (Jeff Bennett), Green Arrow (James Arnold Taylor), and Plastic Man (Tom Kenny) don the mantle of the Bat to protect Gotham City from Deadshot (Kenney), Cavalier (Greg Ellis), Babyface, Killer Moth (Corey Burton), and Sportsmaster (Thomas F. Wilson). Another episode was taken from 1976’s DC Superstars Giant #10. Then you have a variation on an old 1950s story as the Batmen of All Nations are confronted by the Jokers of All Nations (I’m genuinely surprised Grant Morrison didn’t come up with this first).
As the series wound down, the penultimate episode pulled out all the stops with four vignettes that focused on the guest stars over the title hero. We have “Adam Strange (Michael T. Weiss) in Worlds War” as Kanjar Ro (Marc Worden) makes his second appearance this season; “Flash (Alan Tudyk) in Double Jeopardy” with appearances by Captain Boomerang (John DiMaggio), Mirror Master (Tom Kenny), and Abra Kadabra (Jeff Bennett); “’Mazing Man (Tom Kenny) in Kitty Catastrophe”, a delightful use of the charming character; and ”The Creature Commandos in The War That Time Forgot” which focuses on a mission to Dinosaur Island and confrontation with the Ultra-Humanite (Jeff Bennett).
The fourth wall is shattered in the final episode when Bat-Mite (Paul Ruebens) pops up and has decided this format is tired and needs to be retired by making the show so awful the Cartoon Network has to cancel it. With Batman, Aquaman (Ted McGinley), and the whole cast endangered, the only one to stop Bat-Mite is…Ambush Bug (Henry Winkler)?
The shows are tremendous fun and if you’ve never experienced them, now’s a good time to find them all.
Animated fare was very slow to integrate, largely because there was a paucity of useful source material to mine from. In the 1990s, that began to change, largely thanks to Milestone Media, a multicultural operation that had a line of comics distributed through DC Comics.
Milestone’s best known character is Static, a young urban teen with a definite modern-day Peter Parker vibe to him. Virgil Hawkins just wanted live his life when he was accidentally exposed to mutagen gas, giving him electromagnetic powers. Donning a self-made outfit, he protected his corner of the ‘Hood as Static.
The show arrived in 2000 with a bang and became a cause because it not only featured a positive image of a black male, but closely resembled the source material thanks to Milestone co-creators Dwayne McDuffie and Denys Cowan being heavily involved in the show. Static has been back every now and then and the 52 episodes remain well-regarded even today. Thankfully, Warner Archives has released Static Shock: The Complete First Season.
For those unfamiliar, McDuffie started on staff at Marvel, rising to be a writer with a distinct voice. At much the same time, Cowan broke in to DC, training under the last full generation of master editors, allowed to develop his own, gritty style where he blossomed on The Question. Joining them on the production side was producer James Tucker under the guidance of supervising producers Alan Burnett and Scott Jeralds along with executive producers Jean MacCurdy and Sander Schwartz.
The subject matter was certainly different for cartoons as we meet Virgil (Phil LaMarr), who lost his mom to gang violence, being recruited to join one of the gangs that rule Dakota City. When the gas explodes, not only does Virgil gain powers but so do others and they are all dubbed “Bang Babies” whether good or bad. As Static, he tries to do what is right, despite the complications and obstacles. He also pines for her best friend Frieda (Danica McKellar). Thankfully, he has a faithful best friend in Richard “Richie” Osgood Foley/Gear (Jason Marsden), who covers for him and helps make equipment as needed. During the season, he also befriends Daisy Watkins (Crystal Scales), who becomes a confidant.
There are complications aplenty starting at home with his father, Robert Hawkins (Kevin Michael Richardson), who runs the Freeman Community Center and disapproves of the Bang Babies and their antics. This is contrasted by Ivan Evans/Ebon (Gary Sturgis), leader of “The Meta-Breed”.
The show is grounded in ways most other super-hero fare has not been and did not shy away from social issues such as the gangs and gang violence that was there from the beginning. A strong episode in the first season also dealt with racism while another dealt with responsibility after he took a job but had to leave it to save the day, only to be fired. There are ties to the Milestone universe as he comes under the watch of Edwin Alva, from Hardware.
While the animation is occasionally stiff, the storytelling, writing, and soul more than make up for it. The first thirteen episodes, included here with a smattering profile-style extras, allows you to watch the series and its diverse cast grow and mature.
Life is a fine movie. It’s reasonably well-acted, the creature effects are stunning, and the script has enough twists and turns to keep the audience on its toes. Unfortunately, Life is a monster movie set in a confined area in outer space— and while that’s a remarkably specific genre, it contains some titanic movies. Life is a good movie; Alien is a timeless classic. It’s not entirely fair to make Life stand against a movie like that but it was all I could think of while I was watching it. Life begs to be compared to movies it withers against, and while I struggle to say an entire genre/setting is out of bounds, you should probably come with something that makes your movie undeniably special and not just an attempt to be incrementally better than the last horror movie they saw.
There’s a bit of a pacing problem in Life— although one that is kind of unavoidable in a movie like this. Once the monster is on the loose it moves along nicely but it feels like forever until we get to that point. Most of the first hour is gone before anything happens, and if we were building a deep understanding of the characters and their relationships it would feel just fine, but instead it just seems like the movie wants to go over the exposition two or three times. I promise you: I understand that this alien is very strong and very adaptable. That’s literally every science fiction alien that isn’t going for the War of the Worlds twist.
They have made a very scary alien though. They stress (over and over) that the creature is infinitely adaptable, that every cell is a muscle, a brain, and an eye, and it gives them an impressive latitude to make the creature more terrifying every time we see it. It starts as an amorphous blob and gets more and more defined as it gets bigger until it looks an awful lot like the horrifying cross between a dragon and a Rorschach blot. I will say that for a creature that allegedly has vision capacity in every cell it definitely developed a traditional earth-like face and head, but honestly what do I know about Martian zoology?
Considering how long we have to get to the action it’s borderline outrageous that the characters never feel like more than rough sketches. We have the brash American, the stalwart business-like Russian commander, the British scientist who can’t see past the academic worth of the discovery, the Japanese man torn between the responsibilities of his job and his newborn daughter, the medic who has set the record for longest time in space and sees his home as being in orbit and not on the planet, and the quarantine officer with questionable allegiances. That’s all the character anyone in this movie shows. It’s not like there aren’t good actors here, but there’s no depth to play. We’re at the climax of the film and none of the decisions seem based on information that wasn’t in the first 20 minutes. No one grows and no one changes except from living person to alien food.
If you just want to be scared in a movie theater for an hour and 45 minutes, then there’s honestly nothing wrong with Life, it’s got a great sense of tension and some original creature and effects work. In the last month or so we’ve seen Get Out and Kong: Skull Island release and both are in the same general zone, and both blow Life out of the water. Get Out is a smarter, more chilling intimate character piece and Kong is vastly superior at pumping out big spectacle. There’s no space for Life in this cinematic climate and honesty, with the exception of just being dumped in the doldrum months I can’t imagine a time when Life would stand out. It’s a fantastic movie to discover some random evening on HBO and a mediocre use of one’s time in a theater.
Lost amid the hubbub over the animated series based on the traditional DC Comics was The Zeta Project, a fun spinoff from Warner Animation’s first original creation, Batman Beyond. Thanks to Warner Archives the two season series, spanning 2001-2002, is being released on DVD.
The series is focused on Zeta (Diedrich Bader), formally known as Infiltration Unit Zeta, a synthoid, who works for the NSA. The machine was introduced in the season two Batman Beyond episode “Zeta,” written by Robert Goodman, who developed the spinoff.
He violates his programming when he is asked to kill an innocent and goes on the run, vowing never to kill again. Of course, the NSA wants him back and sends a team, led by the clichéd obsessive, Agent James Bennett (the well-cast Kurtwood Smith), convinced Brother’s Day, the terrorists reprogrammed the agency’s machine. He’s often accompanied by the arrogant Agent West (Michael Rosenbaum). Only Agent Lee (Lauren Tom) considers Zeta may be telling the truth. Exasperated, she will eventually leave the NSA at the end of the first season and is replaced by Agent Rush (Erika Alexander, later Dominique Jennings).
Thankfully, Zeta has 15-year-old runaway, Rosalie “Ro” Rowan (Julie Nathanson) to help him navigate the civilian world and find Dr. Eli Selig, his creator and the one person who can prove his innocence.
Being in the near future of Batman Beyond, everything is high tech, glossy, and interesting to look at. The episodes explore different settings and locales, and you can always count on an explosive action as Zeta uses his holography to disguise himself. After disposing of the weapons he was left with non-lethal tools including handheld welding lasers and extensible limbs.
Unlike its host series, Zeta was definitely aimed at a younger audience so the characters were flatter and the action more frenetic. As a result, it never found the same enthusiastic crowd, even after a dramatic shift in look and tone began with the two-part “Wired” during season two. It might have been too late which is one reason why the show ended after two seasons and it’s taken this long to collect the second season at all.
The series ended without a conclusion so Zeta is still on the run with Dr. Selig seemingly killed. He did make two appearances on BB, “Shadows” and “Countdown”, both of which originally aired on the same day and are included as bonuses in the two-disc Season One set.
J.K. Rowling did a superb job creating her magical universe, populating it worldwide with schools, wizards, prisons, creatures, and muggles aplenty. She also gave her world a rich history and then has been mining it with spinoff works of varying lengths and media. One of the more popular has been Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, taking a reference book mentioned in her Harry Potter novels and telling the story of how Newt Scamander managed to pen such a fascinating work.
Warner Bros, seeking ways to continue to profit from the film series, optioned the title and has created a trilogy with Rowling taking her turn as screenwriter for director David Yates, who directed four of the eight films. He did a far more immersive and coherent job on last year’s Legend of Tarzan.
The resulting film has grossed over $800 million worldwide so the gamble seems to have paid off and yet, the film adaptation was surprisingly lacking in charm and, well, magic.
Wisely, the story is set in America so we can see a different attitude and approach to magic as Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) has come to the States in search of more magical beasties to preserve. He has the misfortune to arrive as 1926 New York City is under attack and magic exposed to the No-Maj populace. Fanning the flames is Mary Lou Barebone (Samantha Morton), peddling the New Salem Philanthropic Society. The overly complicated plot also has a search going on for dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald and schisms within the Magical Congress of the United States of America, allowing its director Percival Graves (Colin Farrell) to conduct some extracurricular work of his own.
Coming to Newt’s aid is disgraced Aurora Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), her sister Queenie (Alison Sudol), and would-be baker Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), a non-maj. The Queenie-Jacob relationship is the film’s real heart and soul and I wish there was far more of that rather than sound and fury signifying how large their budget was for CGI. Everything is loud and overly prolonged without necessarily advancing character or story.
Visually, this is a dreary version of Jazz Age Manhattan which was flying high just prior to the 1929 Stock Market Crash. There are dark clouds and somber tones permeating the film, all the more to contrast with the realm where Scamander has been housing his finds, preserving them from a magical community that misunderstands and mistrusts them.
Frankly, the film, out now for home video consumption from Warner Home Video, is a messy disappointment, missing the essential elements that made the host series a cultural event. It looks good, is very well cast, and has some nice moments, but too little is explained, and there is little genuine emotion found in the overall story. Newt comes across as a brave bumbler, far from heroic, and is remarkably uninteresting compared with Jacob or even Tina.
The film is available in all the usual formats and combo packs with the Blu-ray’s high definition transfer superb enough to make every sparkle shine. The audio is a good match so families watching at home will be entertained by the light show.
The disc offers up over an hour’s worth of extras that feel more perfunctory than special. We start with Before Harry Potter: A New Era of Magic Begins (15:31), focusing on Rowling’s process; Characters (24:19), split into five featurettes (The Magizoologist, The Goldstein Sisters, The New Salemers, The No-Maj Baker, The President and the Auror) complete with actor interviews; Creatures (20:59), divided into seven featurettes (Bowtruckle, Demiguise, Erumpent, Niffler, Occamy, Thunderbird); Design (34:33), spotlighting each location (Shaping the World of Fantastic Beasts, New York City, MACUSA, Newt’s Magical Case, The Shaw Banquet, The Blind Pig); and finally eleven Deleted Scenes (14:33), none of which would have improved the film’s messy feel.
I grew up on Broadway musicals. Once upon a time when going to see a show on Broadway didn’t cost you your mortgage plus the life of your first-born, my mom and dad were avid theatergoers. They saw the original production of South Pacific with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, the original production of Camelot with Richard Burton and Julie Andrews and Robert Goulet, and the original production of The King and I with Gertrude Lawrence and a then little-known Yul Brynner.
When they were still dating they went into town to see Oklahoma! Over the years they saw Carousel, and Brigadoon, and Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady, and Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof, and Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, and the original West Side Story with Carol Lawrence and Larry Kert. My father fell asleep at Cats and my mother said she had a hard time staying awake herself.
Our stereo console was filled with “original Broadway cast” albums from all those shows and more – well, not Cats. When I was kid I would put on an album of, say, South Pacific and pretend I was Mary Martin washing that man out of my hair – oh, and I still do that in the shower some times:
“When a man don’t understand you, When you fly on separate beams,
“Waste no time, Make a change,
“Ride that man right off your range. Rub him out of your roll call,
“And drum him out of your dreams.”
Yes, I am singing as I type.
My brother and I would put on West Side Story and dance around the living room, jumping on and off the chairs and the tables and sofas and getting into a lot of trouble. Later on, my mom often took Glenn and I into town to see revivals of these shows and others. In 1966 my father was laid up with a really bad ankle sprain, so I was privileged to go with my mom to see the one and only Ethel Merman in the revival of Annie Get Your Gun at Lincoln Center.
So it’s safe to say that I grew up on Broadway musicals. And love them. I have more Broadway soundtracks on my iTunes playlist than anything else – perhaps not cool, but fuck you and your Beyonce and Adele. One of my proudest and happiest moments and one that I will remember on my deathbed is when I played Peter Pan in Peter Pan at Camp Monroe. I have also played Ado Annie in Oklahoma and every single female role in Fiddler on the Roof except for Golde (Tevye’s wife, for those not in the know). I was Miss Mazeppa, bumping with my trumpet and in full Roman centurion regalia, in Gypsy.
So it’s safe to say that I grew up on Broadway musicals. And that it has continued into adulthood and to the present day. I became mesmerized by Hugh Jackman long before he was Wolverine when John and I went to see him as Curly in a revival of Oklahoma. And I became familiar with Melissa Benoist and Grant Gustin and Darren Criss long before any of them put on a superhero costume through my allegiance to Glee. And I knew Jesse L. Martin as Tom Collins from Rent, not to mention Victor Garber from Godspell, Sweeney Todd, and the 1990 revival of Damn Yankees.
And of course I knew John Barrowman from his days as Captain Jack on Doctor Who. But I never watched Smash, so I never caught on that Jeremy Jordan could sing and dance until last week…
…which was, of course, the crossover musical episode of The Flash called “Duet.”
It was wonderful.
It started in the epilogue of Supergirl on Monday night, in which Darren Criss pops up as the Music Meister, who does “something” to Kara which places her in a seemingly coma and then pops off to find the “fastest man alive.” Meanwhile, Kara wakes to find herself in a nightclub in what looks like the 1940s, dressed in a gorgeous gold beaded gown with a man telling her that she is the last-minute opening act. She steps through the curtains, and finds herself standing in front of a microphone and an audience. She opens her mouth and…to be continued.
And on The Flash the next night…
A young Barry Allen is watching Singin’ in the Rain with his mother, who is, uh, singing the praises of the musical. Then, in present time, Barry is watching Singin’ in the Rain and other classic musicals to soothe his tormented soul over his breakup with Iris. “Everything is better in song,” he says to Cisco, with whom he has moved in as a temporary(?) roommate.
Called to S.T.A.R. Labs because of a breach in the multiverse, they find Mon-El carrying a still-comatose Kara and J’onn Jonzz, who have come to Barry’s Earth because of the Music Meister’s claim to be looking for the Flash. The villain shows up, puts Barry into the same coma-like state as Kara, and suddenly Barry finds himself in the same nightclub as his Kryptonian friend… and she is up on stage, singing “Moon River.” (One of my favorites – from the not-musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly sings the lovely ballad, composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, while sitting on her fire escape and accompanying herself with a guitar.)
After Kara finishes her performance, the Music Meister pops in and tells them what’s going on – they are actually living this scenario psychically, or “in their own minds,” while their bodies lay undisturbed and inanimate in S.T.A.R. labs. Why the musical setting? Because both are deeply connected to the genre – Barry through his mom, and Kara through her love of The Wizard of Oz. They both must follow the plot of this mind-blowing musical to its end to recover and get back to the real world. Except: “If you die in here, you die out there.”
The episode is full of remarkable performances. Perhaps, at least for me, the best was the beautiful rendition of “More I Cannot Wish You” from Guys and Dolls sung by Jesse, Victor, and John. Grant’s interpretation of “Running Home to You” is heartbreaking and glorious. “Super Friend” is a treat to watch, with Grant and Melissa singing and hoofing and having a joyous time. Jeremy, Darren, John, and Carlos (Valdes) swing to “Put a Little Love in Your Heart.” And Melissa’s “Moon River” is, just, well, I just have to sing along…
“You dream maker, you heartbreaker,
“Wherever you’re going, I’m going your way.”
“Two drifters, off to see the world.
“There’s such a lot of world to see. We’re after the same rainbow’s end,”
Musicals are life. And while we weren’t exactly caught up on both Supergirl and The Flash (though we’re told we really need to do that), we couldn’t miss the SuperFlash crossover event. Especially not with Broadway talents like Darren Criss, Jeremy Jordan, John Barrowman, Jesse L. Martin, Victor Garber and Glee alums Melissa Benoist & Grant Gustin!
Thing is, Maddy knew a little something about the Music Meister’s first appearance (played by Neil Patrick Harris, who also beat Darren Criss to the punch at playing Hedwig) on Batman: The Brave and the Bold, so we couldn’t help but compare the two musical episodes.
Could this CW musical event stacked with all our favorites be better than an animated episode featuring Black Canary singing about her love for Batman? Watch the video & find out.
I saw two different kinds of ads for The Belko Experiment before it came out. There were ads that were pitching it as a more or less straight up horror movie, and then there were ads that were selling it as a kind of comedy-horror hybrid. It used a quote from an early review saying it was “Office Spacemeets Battle Royale” and while that’s a fine thing for a critic to say in a review as a shorthand to explain the movie, as an advertisement it’s completely inadequate. The Belko Experiment isn’t funny and 99% of the time doesn’t even seem to be trying to be funny. It’s more like Battle Royale meets a tall building or Battle Royale meets Die Hard if you want to just completely ignore anything that made Die Hard a good movie and just want to focus on the general aesthetic of the sets.
The titular experiment in Belko is: they seal an office building up and demand that the inhabitants kill each other in escalating quotas. If you’ve ever seen any movie before, you can probably get from here to the end of the story. There’s an everyman main character, a love interest, an antagonistic coworker, a friend coworker, a boss, and a bunch of nameless drones (allegedly 75 other office workers, but I would be absolutely floored if they had 80 actors in this movie). The beats are all telegraphed, and there are no surprises bigger than something you knew was going to happen happening a few moments before you expected it. This is a shockingly mundane affair for a movie with so much bloodshed. There’s supposed to be some grand moral conflict here but it never gets off the ground; at best it’s like having the movie read you the Cliff’s Notes of Lord of the Flies.
I’m a bit of a baby when it comes to horror movies, so when I tell you that The Belko Experiment didn’t scare me at all I want you to understand what a low bar that was to limbo under. Perhaps I’ve just been too desensitized to violence over the year but sudden violence is all this film has— and while I don’t love looking at gore, it isn’t inherently scary. There’s very little tension events just sort of smoothly follow each other. There’s no doubt in the outcome (although I suppose I never watch a slasher movie expecting the killer to win, those can still be scary) and so the audience is left watching the movie go from scene to scene checking off boxes until the finale can start. The marketing for this film couldn’t wait to tell you that this was a James Gunn script, but left out that it was one from seven years ago that he didn’t think was strong enough to make on his own. The Belko Experiment needed two more drafts and a compelling antagonist to be even close to a competent horror movie.
The real shame is that John C. McGinley gets a stunning star turn in a movie that no one will remember in five years. I doubt anyone who has really paid attention to his career is surprised that McGinley has the chops to steal a movie from a cast full of TV actors and marginal film stars, but he runs away with every scene he’s in. He’s given a wide berth and no specific tethers to any sort of reality after the first ten minutes. He’s the closest this movie has to the Joker— which is to say not particularly close, but a shining star compared to the dull surroundings.
The Belko Experiment is a Blumhouse film, and I think that explains a lot of what’s wrong with it. It’s clearly made on a shoestring budget, and it very clearly doesn’t have the passionate backing of a big studio behind it. What I don’t get is how this movie got put in to theaters instead of straight to digital. This is an okay movie for $5 on iTunes or as part of Netflix or however the other Blumhouse movies get out there. Nothing about The Belko Experiment feels like it has the polish of a feature film except the name James Gunn in the opening credits.
