The Steam Experiment

The above review is so stupid that I feel compelled to write one, through a basic sense of justice. This is not a great film. It's not a good film, in the sense that you'd never own it. But it's worth a watch - I was interested from the opening to the end - boring patches, yes, but never boring in the way that kills the movie. They were short as patches go, the flick recovered.

In short, if there's something you like doing, do it. But there's often nothing - and this flick is worth your time then :)

And Val - Val is awesome. Val is good movie in this OK movie. He should lose some weight - the parts would come.

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.

I rent DVD's to pass the time on airplanes. Sadly, staring out at the clouds would have been better entertainment than this. I am not the best movie critic....I don't want to have to go back to college to figure out what a movie is about. In this Chaos, I didn't know if I was watching a psycho describe an event in real time, a past event, or a delusion that was only in his mind. This reminds me of Jacob's Ladder.....you never really knew what you were watching. The slow motion scenes in the spa were disjointed, and painfully slow to get through. If there was any sense at all of hot, sweaty panic, it was lost with the switching back to a particularly unappealing Val Kilmer sitting at an empty table staring into space. Finally, the ending was exactly the sort of finish I hate. You can guess and make presumptions, but you really have absolutely no idea what you just watched.

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.

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.