Bane

It's discouraging that a listless film like Bane got solid festival play. The film is easily the most meandering, pointless horror movie I've seen in a long time. The filmmakers deserve kudos for managing to screw up an intriguing concept, which involves a bunch of women waking up in a test facility with no memory of how they got there. The viewer is intentionally kept in the dark about what the heck is going on, presumably to help ratchet up the tension, but the approach only works when the plot - what's actually happening - is fun and interesting to watch. Instead, we get scene after poorly acted scene of the women freaking out about their ordeal, being interviewed with electrodes on their temples, undergoing various torturous experiments that are neither scary nor particularly intricate, and being stalked by a robed figure that the producers aped from Hostel. Sound intriguing? Believe me it's not. The film also suffers from taking place (mostly) in a visually dull environment comprised of austere corridors, all of which are lit the exact same way. It gets very tiresome, very fast. Avoid.

"Who are you?" "I don't know who I am.." Four young women wake up in a (very flimsy looking) prison cell and they are all suffering with memory loss, not even knowing their own names. They are subjected to horrific experiments. Until now this had been sat in my DVD pile for years, I finally watched it, was it worth the wait? Sadly not. Looking at the sleeve I wrongly assumed it would be another torture horror movie like "Saw" or "Hostel" but in fact it is a very low budget British film that combines horror with science fiction and prison escape. Young director James Eaves introduces the film, he states that it was made on a tiny budget and shot on digital. The best thing about Bane is it's strong gore and violence. The acting is generally alright and the women look nice in their tight light green T-shirts, however Daniel Jordan as the evil Dr Murdoch is terrible. The ludicrous plot features an evil alien, human in shape but with weird tentacles, behind these human experiments, it is all very unconvincing and confusing. Then there's the 108 minutes running time (DVD), it is WAY too long, It's a shame as I felt that Bane could have been a lot better but as it stands it's only worth seeing for the gore (you may want to hit the FFWD button).

One of my favourite genres is horror. This movie is extremely poor, badly written, awful to watch. Avoid it all all costs, truly !!

The film opens with four women waking up in a room, they have no memory of their lives before nor do they know where they are. The women show "character" immediately - there's the emotional one, the tough one, the sensitive one and the heroine. The women are subjected to various tests, which are conducted by a callous scientist and his assistants who talk like robots and look like they belong rather to a street rave. The action is like slime - sticky and drags on forever. The last quarter of the film, however, sees a change of pace and the viewer is poured over with information that literally comes out of the blue and quite frankly makes no sense.

The whole feel of "Bane" is bizarre - it tried to be too original and ended up making a mess out of itself. It's not a least bit interesting to watch either, it tries to be gory, psychological and supernatural all at the same time and fails miserably in all genres.

This was like a train wreck in that I felt compelled to watch it to the end... That being said your best bet is to not even start. The movie made very little sense even after the explanation which was at the very end. The gore part was not. The horror part was not and I could go on. The only positive thing I might say is that the actress Sophia Dawny did a pretty good job and was convincing as a woman who was terrified yet started to grow strength as the movie progressed. The woman supposedly had their memories wiped but she had flash backs but they were confusing. They could have handled them the flash backs in a different way although not sure what. There were so many unanswered questions that my head spun.Don't waste your money buying it or your time if it ever comes onto TV.