The Steam Experiment

The good:

Kilmer pulls off a fairly believable psychopath, and there are some really great performances from those in the steam room, although they sometimes border on the "over-dramatic" rather than "convincing".

The music is not bad too, always reflective of the mood without becoming too invasive to the action on screen.

The bad:

Firstly, some of the scenes are quite drawn out with no sense of progression. Some of the steam room scenes are difficult to stick with, in particular one excessively long scene towards the end of the film. During this scene I looked at my watch to see how long was left on the viewing time - not a good sign if I was meant to be engrossed in the story.

Secondly, the method which the story unfolds seems fairly underwhelming. It felt as though there was more potential for the plot to thicken, particularly from those in the steam room. The captives also seem to have their own designated "turn" at falling apart/going mad, which is overall quite unconvincing and ultimately predictable.

So in conclusion, there are some good scenes, but this is not a film I will actively recommend to friends.

Let's keep this short and sweet. This movie is a total disaster. The plot makes no sense at all. The acting is dreadful. The writing is appalling. The music is absurd. The production must have been disastrous, as the movie is only 90 minutes long yet there are an enormous amount of padded super-slow-motion scenes. One scene was over FIVE MINUTES LONG, of nothing but actors gurning in slow motion while some pompous over-bearing music droned on. The ending is ridiculous. All in all, a total fail of a movie. I would have rather watched adverts for 90 minutes. The people involved in making this should never be allowed to make another movie again.

Unfortunately, this movie is a fail. Especially unfortunately because Val Kilmer acted awesome. This movie is separated on two parts - first happened in interview room where Kilmer is interrogated by Assante and second happened in the same time in the steam room between six other people. And as much I enjoyed really good Kilmer\Assante scenes as much I disliked steam room. Except cute steam effect and and yellow color of screen all rest there was very predictable for this genre - screaming, yelling and everybody went crazy one by one as usual. Boredom. And Eric Robert unfortunately dissolved among nameless actors there. Combining it with pretty ambiguous plot with very dissatisfying twist plot in the end this movie really hasn't a chance. Val Kilmer couldn't save it.

Like someone else said already; you can't blame the actors for the way this movie turned out. If it says in the script to scream 90% of the time without pretty much any reason, you just do so. Apart from the script, what makes this movie one of the most terrible things I have seen so far, is the way it has been "stapled" together. The director has no clue about how to set an atmosphere, the editor has no clue about how to avoid being extremely annoying. Maybe one acceptable thing in this movie was the music,... but even that seemed to be a bit too random and misplaced.

This movie is so terribly slow in every aspect of the word, that it is extremely hard not to stop it without even waiting to see how it ends. I had to watch it with 4 pauses. Not because it was scary or overwhelming, but because it is simply an annoying and time wasting movie. Avoid it, please. Do yourself a favor and go rent an Uwe Boll movie, even those are better than this, and that says a lot.

I still give this movie 2 stars because I admire the actors for not burning the film before it was released.

Even if I got frustrated with almost all the characters at some points I can't blame it on poor acting. They were acting their parts.

This is a mystery/thriller vehicle with good actors trapped in bad writing.

In the very first minutes of the movie, the main antagonist is honoring his mentor proclaiming how much he is ahead of his time. He's years ahead of his time, no, he's light-years ahead of his time.. After that he goes on about how the protagonist doesn't have the intellectual capacity for his task. It got me thinking.. "light-years" is not a measure of time, it's a measure of distance. Sure maybe the antagonist could be kinda slow but it didn't look like they were going for that in the movie. Sure, you could say that someone is ahead of others by "miles" or something like that but it doesn't really matter to me. I thought it was kinda dumb and that is what I thought of the movie as well. I really like Val Kilmer and I really hate that I so often see him i movies like this.

If this is broadcast on TV and you can't fall to sleep - it's worth the watch. But that's being generous.