Blu-ray Review: The Belko Experiment (2017)

"Insert 'The Corporate world is murder!' pun here."

After enduring the Hollywood blandness that was The Darkness, it makes us happy to see director Greg McClean get back to his bloody roots and make another good flick.

We love his Wolf Creek series, and while The Belko Experiment may be a totally different kind of animal altogether, it's a testament to the man's no holds barred, visceral style.

Good on ya, mate. 

Maybe directing a movie that someone else wrote, especially a talented guy like James Gunn, was the ticket for him.

The Belko Corporation is a wealthy company that offers plenty of perks to its employees: comprehensive salaries; housing; a company car; and a free tracking chip that gets implanted in their head, in case they're kidnapped. That last one is particularly important at the Bogota, Colombia office, because it's common for employees of big companies to be kidnapped for ransom.

 ALSO, THERE'S ROMANCE.

During an ordinary day at Belko, the Colombian national employees are turned away at the gate, leaving only 80 foreign workers (mostly American) in the building. A voice comes across the intercom announcing that in 8 hours, most of them will be dead, and that to have a better chance of survival, the 80 employees must follow the voice's instructions. The first instruction involves the group murdering two of their own in the next half-hour; how they are chosen, or killed, doesn't matter, only that they end up dead in the required time frame. Failure to do so will result in "repercussions."

THESE GUYS LOOK READY.

Thinking it's a joke of some kind, and probably being not very keen to murder any of their co-workers, the employees decide to leave the building, which is promptly sealed off with metal shutters. After a few heads explode, everyone quickly realizes that it's no joke, and they begin to go all Lord of the Flies on each other in a desperate bid for survival.

It ends well for no one.

SOME CORPORATIONS JUST WANT TO WATCH THEIR EMPLOYEES BURN.

You might know where The Belko Experiment is headed early on (I mean it's a movie where co-workers have to kill each other or be killed themselves, so it has to follow a certain narrative path), but the beauty of this movie is that as predictable as it may be, it's equally as bloody and nasty. You'd think that this movie would be funnier, being that it was written by James Gunn (and it does have its witty moments), but if anything it goes to some dark places as per the usual of director Greg McClean.

It's basically a morality play of sorts, asking the question "How far would you go to ensure your own survival?" Could you kill the work friends that you've grown close to over the course of a year? I guess the answer to that question, as horrible as it may be, is yes: you're going before me, sorry. But it's not an easy thing for many of the movie's characters (aside from a few skeevy bastards) to navigate, and that very conundrum plays out in intense fashion.

John Gallagher Jr. is the lead here, but his performance is overshadowed by great supporting turns by his veteran cast mates. Anytime we get to see John C. McGinley on screen is a treat for us. The guy is one of the best character actors out there, and he's particularly good at playing menacing, which he does here brilliantly. Tony Goldwyn makes for an excellent heavy as well, and Adria Arjona was a great heroine.

***BEWARE ENDING SPOILERS***
Our biggest gripe about the movie is that the ending felt a little flat. Sure there's the obligatory set-up for a sequel which was kinda cool, but the reveal of "The Voice", and his explanation as to what the experiment was all about, felt like some half-baked bullshit. There should have been an actual point to the experiment, and not just some lame "we wanted to see what you'd all do" bullshit.
***END SPOILERS***

FEW DO INTENSITY AS WELL AS THIS GUY DOES.

Tons of on-screen bloodshed in this one, where people kill each other in a variety of ways, and dozens of heads explode. It's a brutal spectacle, to say the least.

NOT EVEN THE COFFEE POTS ARE SAFE!

No, because why show some hot Latina girls running around naked or anything?

MUY CALIENTE.

***BEWARE SPOILERS***
As sly as Melonie Diaz was at hiding, and escaping notice throughout the movie, we really expected her to make it... not be shot in the damn head "Departed" style. Gah!
***END SPOILERS***

AND WHY WAS MICHAEL ROOKER'S PART SO DAMN SMALL?

A great movie, and a welcomed return to form for Greg McClean, The Belko Experiment is one that may not break much new ground, but the familiar motions that it does go through are exciting, intense, and all kinds of nasty.

It's easily worthy of your rental dollars.

B+

The Belko Experiment is available on VOD now.

Adria Arjona y Melonie Diaz y Mikalea Hoover son hotties ardientes.

VOD Review: Get Out (2017)

"White girls of the world ain't nothin but trouble."

As a white dude, I can't pretend to know what it's like for the average black man to navigate the waters of modern day America on a daily basis. I'm not a bleeding heart liberal who thinks that injustice is around every corner, or that sky is falling because of evil white people who want to oppress everyone who isn't in the Aryan club, but things ain't easy for lots of people these days, and I mean black, white, gay, straight, and especially poor people. Everyone has got their real life Horror stories, and some are definitely worse than others.

I do know that even though I'm white, I don't trust many rich white people because they're shady as fuck.

I also know that Jordan Peele has crafted a debut film that is a deft and poignant (and entertaining) look into the issue of race, and it scared the living hell out of me.

It's really impossible to breakdown this movie and its plot twists without ruining it for anyone who hasn't seen it, so I'll keep it short and sweet. And vague.

Chris is a black dude with a hot white girlfriend. They're in love, an they've reached the point in their relationship where she wants him to meet her parents. He's nervous about the idea, not only because it's intimidating as hell to meet a girl's parents for the first time, but because she hasn't told them he's black, and with them being rich and white and all, he's afraid they're going to be on some Guess Who's Coming to Dinner type of shit.

"CALL US SALT-N-PEPA ONE MORE TIME."

Her parents seem nice enough, although they make shit awkward by talking about how they voted for Obama, how Black Mammy was the best character on Scream Queens, and how they're down with O.P.P., trying to sound hip and accepting. The family also has a black groundskeeper and housekeeper who come off like Pod People with their creepy fake smiles and rehearsed words, and even Chris's best friend Rod tells him that he should get the hell out of there before he ends up being a sex slave because that's what white people do. Chris loves his girl though, and even if she's the only normal person there besides him, he can take it for her.

Then things begin to get even stranger, and eventually become downright deadly.

And that's all we're saying about that.

THESE MOTHERFUCKERS RIGHT HERE...

Get Out is a terrifying, funny as hell Thriller that also has something serious to say. Horror has always a genre that has contained plenty of subversive (and flat-out) social commentary, but here the message is so deftly delivered that it feels more weighty than most. Jordan Peele's script is air-tight, full of impending doom, and it says something about how awkward, and downright deadly it can be to be a black man in today's society. It's all very subtly done, and I never once felt like I was being preached to, and thank God for that.

And Peele gives us a finale that goes in, and it gets bloody as hell.

What more can we really ask for? (Gratuitous nudity, but we digress.)

Daniel Kaluuya may not be familiar to the American Audience at large, but we've been fans of his since he starred in a short-lived UK TV show called The Fades back in 2011. The Kid can act, and he takes the ball and runs with it here, playing a likeable "Final Guy" that you just can't help rooting for. Even more impressive was Lil Rel Howrey as Rod, who had us laughing our asses off every time he spoke. Bradley Whitford and Katherine Keener made for perfect villains (that's not much of a spoiler), and Keener especially, who is no stranger to playing dark and evil; if you want to see her at her terrifying best, check out An American Crime.

And of course there's Allison Williams who plays the loving girlfriend with such perfect ambiguity that you're never sure what she's all about. She impressed, with some truly great scenes towards the end.

OH DEER GOD...

It's 2016, and it's high time that when a black man tells you "Oh hell no, you need to get the fuck out of there!" that we listen to them. No matter what you're doing, no matter how good you think you got it, no matter how safe you think you are, heed the damn advice and get your ass moving.

GET OUT! GET OUT NOW!

WTF was with the Froot Loops, man?

THAT"S SYMBOLISM RIGHT THERE.

Shit pops off at then end and gets all kinds of bloody, but until then, it's definitely a psychological ride.

THIS DEER HAS SEEN SOME SHIT.

Nothing naked here, folks.

WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE AND GET NAKED.

Anything Rod said.

"I'm TS -Mutherfuckin'- A, we handle shit."

And the whole Jeffrey Dahmer bit. Shit had us rolling.

THIS DUDE"S GOT JOKES.

Jordan Peele's directorial debut is an impressive one, as he's managed to mix social commentary with Horror in a very special way. Get Out has struck quite a nerve with audiences at large, raking in nearly $200 million at the Box Office, and earning a crazy 99% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes, and it absolutely deserves that level of success.

Rent it now, or buy it when it hits Blu-ray in 2 weeks, but see it you must.

A

Get Out is available now on VOD, and is still in some theaters.

Allison Williams is a pretty little snowflake in this one.

VOD Review: Rupture (2017)

"This movie made me rupture."

I watched Rupture a couple of months back, and I've been sitting on this review ever since then, mainly because I wasn't sure I actually wanted to review it.

I do that sometimes; watch a flick and then have no desire to review it. It takes a lot of time to put a review together, and sometimes I just don't want do it after a flick has let me down. We've done 978 on thus site reviews so far, and if I had to guess, we've probably watched almost as many flicks that we haven't reviewed. There's only so much time in a day, and I hate wasting it on something that I'm not "feeling."

That's the issue with Rupture: It was a good looking movie, a twisted movie, and it had some truly WTF moments throughout, but at the end it just left me feeling flat.

So why am I finally messing with it now? Not sure. I'm flighty like that.

After being abducted from a desolate stretch of road, a woman named Renee is taken to a dingy warehouse where she's strapped to a metal table by a group of odd people who wear goggles with telescopic lenses, and subjected to a series of physical and mental tortures which are somehow supposed to make her "rupture."

"YOU HAVE LOVELY SKIN."

What in the hell does that mean? Well I've seen the movie and I'm still not quite sure, but it involves spiders, and odd liquid that's shot into people's veins, and Michael Chiklis doing his best pod person imitation.

IT ALSO INVOLVES DUCT TAPE. THE SHINY KIND, BECAUSE THAT MAKES THINGS SCARIER.

Rupture was a competent enough movie that just didn't go anywhere.

It's pretty intense. what with Noomi Rapace climbing through air vents to escape her captors and what not (and I won't lie, anything with spiders crawling on people gives me the willies in a big way), but it takes forever for us to learn anything about what's even going on, and when we do find out what the point of everything is, it's like well what's the point of that?

"The point is to get her to rupture, dummy."
"Yeah but why why are they trying to get her to rupture, whatever the hell that is?"
"Because they can."

Honestly, they're using fear to get people to "rupture" and "evolve" into beings who have no fear, but why? Are they aliens or monsters trying to take over the world, one ruptured person at a time? Are they just starting a club, and they really want some new members?

With a premise like that (as odd as it is), and with a cast that includes Noomi, Michael Chiklis, Peter Stormare and Kerry Bishe, you'd expect things to be captivating and well-played at least, even if nothing really has a point or makes any sense.

But no, that is not the case here.

LIKE US, NOOMI IS TRAPPED IN A GLASS CAGE OF WTF.

Aside from some facial disfiguration and a bunch of crawling spiders, this one is plenty disturbing, but not very bloody at all.

THIS MOVIE WAS TOUGH TO GET THROUGH, JUST LIKE THAT VENT WAS FOR HER.

Nope.

NOW HAD SHE BEEN CRAWLING AROUND NAKED... NO, STILL WOULDN'T HAVE WORKED.

With a cast this solid, and being that it was helmed by a guy who has made a great movie like Secretary, I have to wonder why Rupture ended up being so bland and forgettable. It plods along, not doing much of anything until it finally reveals its game plan that makes little sense, and worse, didn't make us care at all.

A great idea and a talented cast squandered, that's what Rupture is.

D+

Rupture is available now on VOD.

Not even Noomi and Kerry could save this one.