The Belko Experiment is the other new movie released this weekend – call it major hail-Mary counter-programming to Beauty and the Beast. It’s got a premise that’s devious and sick and could make for a good movie… American workers at an isolated office building (in Bogota, Columbia) are locked in and told they must kill X number of their co-workers in a certain amount of time or double that number will die.
This is a decent grind-house B movie that could have been something interesting. It could have been a dark satirical comedy spoofing office politics or it could have been a legit exploration of what would happen to normal people put into a madhouse, forced to kill. But, instead of having a brain, it just has guts. The movie opts to just be a nihilistic, disgusting, sadistic gore-fest… and often not even in a very interesting way.
I won’t say I was bored, but I will say it was by-the-numbers and kept being almost a fun dark comedy or almost examing the will to live. But if never succeeded and I’m pretty sure it didn’t want to.
So, sure, if you want a good cringey little blood bath of a movie that you watch and hoot and holler at with your friends one Saturday night, it’s a decent, mean little movie. But there’s nothing here for anyone who finds the idea repugnant or just doesn’t want to see a movie where the budget on fake blood exceeded the budget for the cast.
Score: 76