Customer Reviews

Experiment

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I really liked this film. I first saw it in the UK. It deserved all the awards it picked up. It's shot in drab colour giving it a Gothic feel,and apparently completely on location in Prague (so adding to the Gothic feel). Good cast, great acting, chilling atmosphere to the piece as the story is as blank as the memories of the two leads who open the story. Slowly everything is understood, but there is a painful twist in the tale. Had me thinking about it for days after. Now I own the DVD. Bit of a cult classic, this. Well worth getting. More drama than the sc-fi box it's been put in, but whatver - it's plain entertaining. Don't know what else Dan Turner is directing, but I hope we get more like this...

I got this because I'm a fan of John Hopkins who is an accomplished stage actor in the UK yet to find his place in the larger media. He reminds me of a young Pierce Brosnan and has the looks, charisma and physical agility to be on the short list for the next James Bond. The brief shot of him in the shower was worth the cost.
That said, this movie was a terrible waste of his and others' talent. The story is downright silly and the female lead spends so much of her time panting heavily (no, not for Mr. Hopkins)that I expected her to hyperventilate any minute. The basic premise of the plot, that a young English couple is abducted and brainwashed to carry out an assassination plan, defies credulity. This film is long on atmospherics and short on story.

I bought this DVD for $4 in the junk bin at my local pharmacy. You usually get what you expect from this source & I wasn't disappointed. First the actors (and I'm being liberal here with the term)- John Hopkins does a decent job with the material he's given, but Georgina French. I've never seen her before, but she needs to find some other line of work. She is rigid, totally unconvincing, and occasionally inappropriately comical. This, while playing the role of a pseudo-zombie (now how hard can that be?). Even her topless scene is unappetizing. The plot- there are holes here big enough to accomodate the Titanic before the sinking. A lost, amnestic housewife with martial arts training, knocking out embassy security staff & slicing the throat of bartenders, stumbling around outside in a stuppor, with no cop in sight? Pseudo-zombies that have so little memory left they have a hard time reading, but no difficulty using a Palm-like device to navigate back to the lab? A complicated futuristic experiment carried out off of a pedestrian tunnel, without a lock on the door or guards anywhere? (but then we would have had to incorporate some sense in the script). A frail old man shot twice but still able to stab & instantly kill his robust professional assailant with a 4 inch knife? (never mind he's still able to communicate afterwards). Science fiction is one thing, nonsense another. Blank eyes on everyone except the love subject, another pseudo-zombie? All this effort to kill a government official on a public tour (gee, anyone on this production ever hear of an IED?) What's the point anyway? At the end of the movie I tossed the disk (I wouldn't watch this again if I was the lone man on a 6 month trip to Mars) and looked at the bottom of my shoe to identify the source of the smell suddenly permeating my living room. And someone out there gave this pile of doggie doodoo 5 stars? Are you the director, producer or one of the sorry screenwriters? To think I could have enjoyed a latte instead.......

Experiment (Dan Turner, 2005)

Here's an interesting little flick that could have been really good, a kind of update of The Manchurian Candidate with a much smaller milieu and a cool sci-fi twist, but it loses its way just a few too many times.

Anna (Georgina French in her first film role) wakes up in the middle of the road in what seems to be a nameless Eastern European country (we find out later it's Chechnya), having been dumped out of a van in the opening scene. We soon find out that she is unable to speak, nor to remember anything. Meanwhile, Morgan (John Hopkins, no doubt soon to be a household name; he's in Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland) also wakes up with no memory, but he finds that he has been taken in by a seemingly benevolent old man named Joseph (Bird Feeder's Nick Simons). Joseph discovers a picture Morgan has on him, and written on the back in marker is "MORGAN FIND ANNA." But with no memory, how is he going to do so? And what happened to his memory in the first place?

It's not half bad, really, though some of the acting could have been better (and in at least one case, a whole lot better), and the script keeps teetering on the brink of being too complex for Turner (Big Mistake) to handle. This was his first film, though, and given the amount of potential it had, I'm kind of willing to give him a pass on it. Not at all what it could have been, but intriguing nonetheless, and worth checking out. ** ½

Too many dead end dramatics. Not enough proper lighting when it was necessary to see what was happening on screen.

I never quite understand why a plot is hidden. No explaination as to why things are happening to the characters. The dialog was muffeled and I found the sub-titles were way too small for my old eyes. Not a great combination for keeping up with a difficult storyline. The heavy breathing, panting and gasping for air was constant and very annoying.

In one final burst of action, POOF... the movie was over and done. I'm really not sure what happened. Is there a Part 2?

Arrgh! Please don't bother. Slow... slow... slow until eventually I gave up in disgust and boredom.

While it was an intriguing idea, it just wasn't worth wasting my time on ... I've got better things to do with my life than waste any more of it on bad movies.

Avoid Experiment.