The Terror Experiment is a zombie film somewhat like 28 Days Later with rage-like zombies inside of an office building. Sounds simple enough. Oh, and it takes place on Christmas Eve. Why? you may ask, I don’t know, it doesn’t have any real correlation with plot at all. This movie could take place on any other day of the year and still be plausible, well, more plausible, as you will read later.
I think the characters are where this film really bottoms out. They’re not great. Most of them are just there to further along the plot and don’t create any drama or tension with the rest of the cast. Not only do the characters feel unnecessary, the performances by many of the actors are so stilted and unintentionally goofy that they’re laughable. Watching this movie is like watching an exercise in What would a bunch of stupid people do in a building full of zombies? To answer that, not a whole lot of anything, and there isn’t a lot of interesting conversations either.
There are a few aspects of this film where I really questioned what the director was trying to accomplish. The beginning, for example, has a 90-second sequence that then flashes back to set it up, but we’re brought back to the opening sequence in about 10 minutes anyway. I realize that a lot of films utilize this kind of story telling technique, but it just didn’t work in this movie. If we had just started the film off with everything being normal and then everything got crazy with the zombies I think the start of this film would have fared a lot better.
The effects in the movie are actually not bad. Make-up effects on the zombies look really cool and when the blood and guts get spilled they’re still up to par with other zombie films of today. While the effects might be the overall best part of the movie, it doesn’t make up for everything else.
Originality is last on the list of zombie criteria because it can be the most important. You can have great characters, a great story, and great effects, but if it’s still a rip off of every other zombie movie it’s not going to hold any water. This movie has some pluses and minuses in it’s favor. On the plus side, the setting, inside a federal office building, is a pretty unique concept. It plays out in a manor that’s not exactly cookie cutter either, not for zombie movies at least. But on the negative side it’s kind of like a mash up of 28 Days Later and the first Resident Evil, mostly in terms of plot points and story, but these two things still land it pretty far down on the originality totem pole.
Let’s talk for a minute about the suspension of disbelief. This was a hard thing for me to do while watching this. Not the zombies, I can buy that any time, but things like the office building being open and fully operational on Christmas Eve, or a soldier firing 30 bullets at a zombie from close range and not killing her, or that the guns never run out of bullets, those are the things I don’t buy. Why are the zombies the believable thing out of that entire list? All I can think is that with horror films we already know that weird things will happen, we’ve accepted that by watching the movie; however, we focus in on the more real aspects of the movie because those are the things that we already accept as “not real” in every day life and when those things don’t make sense it damages the whole experience.
The Terror Experiment suffers from a lot of things: cliches surrounded by ludicrous actions with silly characters and a story we’ve seen many times before. It doesn’t hold your attention very well and it certainly will not change anyone’s life.
Rating: 5 out of 10
