Human nature took over, of course, and after 6 days of quickly escalating torture the experiment was aborted. They were to remain in this state for 14 days whilst they were studied by unseen scientists and psychologists. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a ‘failed’ experiment that enlisted a number of male volunteers to participate in a prison simulation experience where half the group would become guards and the other half prisoners. The original 2001 German film is one of my favorite movies of all time, but I’m the one horror fan in the world who doesn’t actually mind remakes / reboots / re-imaginings, so I was actually looking forward to see how Hollywood could reinterpret this brilliant premise. In the end this isn’t action packed or gory enough to really warrant a cinema release in our current horror climate, and it’s hardly a must-see film, but it’s certainly an effective and well-made little thriller that is worth checking out and is a real gem in the straight-to-DVD horror market. But the final few seconds do resonate as the credits pull up. The film lags a little in places despite it’s brief run time of 96 minutes, and the ending reveal, whilst satisfying enough, is hardly the startling or exciting revelation that these films hinge upon to leave you as affected as possible. Liebesman’s directing is crisp, confident, sleek and is backed up by a startlingly powerful score from Brian Tyler ( Darkness Falls, The Expendables, Fast & Furious) that creates an immediate atmosphere from the opening shots, and continues to impress whenever it is employed. Things are also helped by an amiable cast including Clea DuVall ( The Faculty), Shea Whigham ( Tigerland, Splinter), Peter Stormare ( The Big Lebowski) and Chloe Sevigny, who all give some of their career-best performances.
Sure, it may not be as scary as it could have been but it’s a far more surprising and interesting movie, which is a rare thing to find these days in horror. Here, however (through a simple interesting set up that I don’t want to give away) they manage to build the tension all the more effectively because of it. Normally, I would chastise a horror / thriller film for pulling up the curtain and allowing you the time to judge and understand the perpetrators, as it simply dissolves the fear. But Liebesman and screenwriters Gus Krieger and Ann Peacock really manage to pull an affecting and intriguing movie out of this tired premise, partly by leaving the purpose of the test ambiguous up until the final reel, but mainly because unlike most of these movies, you get to spend at least a third of the movie alongside the people running the show.
The killing room movie cast series#
The entire film revolves around four civilians who opt into a psychological research study only to have the rug pulled out from under them in a brutal turn of events that leaves them stuck in a small room with a clock counting down and instructions to answer a series of simple questions with the promise that only one of them will leave alive. The Killing Room is his first to go directly to video shelves, and whilst it’s far better than I had suspected it would be, it’s not difficult to see why. It’s the latest from Jonathan Liebesman, who has previously given us the bland but promising Darkness Falls, the slick but horrific Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and the brilliant The Ring spin-off Rings. But since they both share the theme of a somewhat forced and twisted social experiment with civilians stuck in a room and they both came out in the same month largely unnoticed by the general public – I thought I’d sit down one night and watch them back-to-back and then pit them against each other to see if either are worthy of your attention.įirst up was this surprisingly well-made and taut thriller. Likewise, it’d be more obvious to judge The Killing Room against its more immediate kin such as Unknown, The Chaos Experiment, Breathing Room etc. It would be easy to compare The Experiment to its predecessor, Das Experiment, but no prizes there for guessing the winner.
It’s joined here by The Experiment, a remake of the German film based on the true story of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. In the past month a new film in this vein shuffled onto DVD / Blu-ray shelves: The Killing Room. Sure, it’s a genre that’s been present for decades (with Cube being one of the most ingenious interpretations) but it’s hard to get away from this sub-genre these days. Ever since runaway horror sensation Saw twisted its way onto our cinema screens and inadvertently sullied the subsequent decade of horror by urging on an unseemly wave of torture porn, we’ve been inundated with a barrage of ‘people-wake-up-in-a-room’ horror films, most of which have crept out straight to DVD.
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