The Steam Experiment

The story unfolds as a mentally ill professor (Val Kilmer) confesses to a newspaperman and later a detective, that he's holding a group of men and women hostage in a steam room; they were lured there with the offer of a dating service, and now the hot steam will slowly kill them by dissolving their lungs if the professor's theories about global warming are not printed in the paper. We're not entirely sure if these victims are being held, if they're already dead, or if Val Kilmer's character is merely delusional; unfortunately, in confusing our understanding of reality and the passage of time, the film altogether removes us from the feeling of suspense. Presumably the intent is to show how social constraints and civilized behavior will collapse into chaos under pressure, since the victims all become infantile and turn on each other in flashbacks. In this case however the pressure seems pretty damn mild - the victims are sweating in a steam room from the very beginning, so all they can really do is sweat more. We add a little more steam, and they pant. Now they look tired. They make tortured faces at each other, quietly lamenting a lack of iced tea. But since the scenes are intercut with police interviews outside, we lose the feeling of claustrophobia, and the conflict between the victims seems inexplicable; it's implied they've already been compromised by their own neuroses but we haven't seen enough of these characters to mark their descent - all we see are silly histrionics. Just as annoying, the film relies on the stereotype of Italian-Americans as insensitive mobster-types; roughly sketched in the cretinoid detective, this crystallizes completely when an imprisoned restaurateur instantly transforms to a misogynistic brute, calling each woman a 'b*tch" and just attacking someone. He tries to escape by smashing the locked door and you'd think this action would be welcome, but for unknown reasons it causes violence among them. One scene jumps out as especially bizarre. We hear the operatic strains of 'comrades being slain on the battlefield' music as the victims simply look at each other in desperation for more than five full minutes, in slow-motion. At the end of this montage, one woman just stands up and cuts her own throat with a shard of glass. She could no longer endure the agony of waiting in the sauna. The conclusion attempts to outline some relationship that Kilmer has with another mad, diabolical doctor as an accomplice. I'm not sure why, and I'll abstain from offering any interpretation of this conclusion, since it struck me as utterly nonsensical.

Even if I got frustrated with almost all the characters at some points I can't blame it on poor acting. They were acting their parts. This is a mystery/thriller vehicle with good actors trapped in bad writing. In the very first minutes of the movie, the main antagonist is honoring his mentor proclaiming how much he is ahead of his time. He's years ahead of his time, no, he's light-years ahead of his time.. After that he goes on about how the protagonist doesn't have the intellectual capacity for his task. It got me thinking.. "light-years" is not a measure of time, it's a measure of distance. Sure maybe the antagonist could be kinda slow but it didn't look like they were going for that in the movie. Sure, you could say that someone is ahead of others by "miles" or something like that but it doesn't really matter to me. I thought it was kinda dumb and that is what I thought of the movie as well. I really like Val Kilmer and I really hate that I so often see him i movies like this. If this is broadcast on TV and you can't fall to sleep - it's worth the watch. But that's being generous.

Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. I asked my neighbor for a movie to borrow. He has been watching the classics like The Shining. He proceeds to give me this piece of crud. I'm kinda mad at him for that. This was literally one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Just a bunch of disjointed scenes of the steam bath and then a dumb looking Kilmer twitching around with some lame horny cop. They just had this one girl take off her top just to show some *. No point to the story, no real reason for it, except for having nudity. And what was the point of the experiment anyways? If it got hot people would not just start going completely bonkers and killing each other. They would try to get out. And that rarely happened. No one died from the heat (which Val Kilmer kept harping on...Do you know what happens at 130 deg? Your Lungs melt, your eyes explode.) I knew it was going to be terrible just looking at the cover, and once it started i realized within the intro music. For some reason i watched the whole movie, only to see it end with some dumb ending that tries to have a big twist that makes you think. The only thing it made me do was boo. And I was in my bedroom. Please, save yourself 90 minutes, and never watch this film. boo

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.

Unfortunately, this movie is a fail. Especially unfortunately because Val Kilmer acted awesome. This movie is separated on two parts - first happened in interview room where Kilmer is interrogated by Assante and second happened in the same time in the steam room between six other people. And as much I enjoyed really good Kilmer\Assante scenes as much I disliked steam room. Except cute steam effect and and yellow color of screen all rest there was very predictable for this genre - screaming, yelling and everybody went crazy one by one as usual. Boredom. And Eric Robert unfortunately dissolved among nameless actors there. Combining it with pretty ambiguous plot with very dissatisfying twist plot in the end this movie really hasn't a chance. Val Kilmer couldn't save it.

I am very tolerant of bad movies - particularly when I'm home sick, watching them for free on Hulu - but this thing is so irredeemably awful, I stopped watching halfway through. Val Kilmer, Armand Assante, and Eric Roberts do their best (although their performances are all oddly mannered in this film), but the material is just not act-able. The rest of the cast is sub-par at best, and they are all constantly either over-acting like mad or staring numbly into the distance. But the absolute worst performance is that of the actress playing Jesse. Wow. Do yourself a huge favor, and don't watch this thing, even for free. Your time is more valuable than this dreck.

Most bad movies at least have something going for them, something that makes you want to sit through them, even though you know they're rubbish. It's a rare film that is so thoroughly messed up in every department that it's literally unwatchable. That, plus the frankly bizarre premise, gives this thing some novelty value, if nothing else. The premise is probably the best thing about it. Think Saw crossed with An Inconvenient Truth, with gratuitous nudity and gratuitous sweaty Eric Roberts. With a plot like that, it could have been a camp classic, but unfortunately everyone took it very seriously, for some reason, almost as though they really thought that this movie would carry a serious message about global warming. Val Kilmer, above all, is VERY, VERY SERIOUS. He mumbles and stumbles his way through an embarrassing performance, but he's still the best member of a dire cast of non-actors and mugging over-actors. The quality of the camera-work suggests that someone just learned how to use the special features on Windows Movie Maker, and the dialogue seems to have been written by someone who has never heard English spoken before. It's a challenge to sit through this deeply silly, but deeply self-serious movie. Really, you've got much better things to do with your time.

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.

Also known as THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT, this scramble for survival flick just doesn't really hit the spot. Val Kilmer no less; when is he going to make another good movie? Kilmer plays a scientist that may have been around too many chemicals or just over compensating for his book learning. He goes to a local paper wanting the next morning's headline and his expose on global warning featured. To prove he knows what he's talking about, the deranged doc admits to holding six people hostage in a renovated hotel steam room and the heat will gradually keep rising. He wants to prove that humanity will snap under such pressures of global warning. Detective Mancini(Armand Assante)tries to beat the clock and free the hostages. Six sweaty half naked people don't have much patience when the fear and paranoia begins to boil over. Also in the cast: Eric Roberts, Megan Brown, Eve Mauro, Quinn Duffy, Patrick Muldoon and Cordelia Reynolds.

I wonder what made Val Kilmer chose to star in this film. Money? Well, could be. Is it because he wanted to try something new in his acting? Not a bad assumption. But certainly not because he thought that this film is even worth acting for ! He stars as a delusional, deranged person who barged into a newspaper office and met the editor-in-chief and asked him to put his story on the front page. He said that he's got six people locked up in a steam room at a Turkish bath, and prepared it as a proof that in 2012 people will die due to global warming. Come on, talk about originality ! Is it real, or just his imagination ? Well, don't hold your breath, because even if you've watched it until the end of the film, you'd never get a definite answer. Assumptions, yes maybe you can guess, but in not getting a definite answer is rather annoying. I won't rate this film as I don't think I can give stars to justify this film.