By Travis Johnson
There’s no word of an Australian release date for locked box horror flick The Belko Experiment as yet, but we’re fairly confident we’ll be seeing it in cinemas in the not too distant future. For one thing, Wolf Creek mastermind, Greg McLean, is calling the shots on this one, so there’s some home ground advantage right there. For another, it’s written and produced by Guardians of the Galaxy and Super director, James Gunn, who can pretty much do no wrong in our eyes. Odds of a big screen outing hereabouts are good.
Set in steamy Bogota, Colombia at a facility owned and operated by the enigmatic Belko Corporation, The Belko Experiment sees a bunch of American office drones – John Gallagher Jr., Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Josh Brener as Keith McLure, Michael Rooker, David Del Rio, Stephen Blackehart, Rusty Schwimmer, Sean Gunn, Abraham Benrubi, et al – locked in the building and urged by a mysterious voice on the PA to kill a number of their fellow workers – or else suffer. Hard choices and horrible mutilations ensue.
It’s a solid conceit for a thriller and perhaps not the most original, but the joy in this sort of thing is in the execution – and the executions. Expect The Belko Experiment in, at a guess, the first quarter of 2017.
