Reviewed by
Christopher Armstead
Know what was cool about this little horror thriller ‘The Terror Experiment’? The closing credits, that’s what. I’m not trying to be facetious here and say ‘this movie was so bad that the only thing good was when it went off’, even though the movie wasn’t very good, but the closing credit sequence was really sweet. Graphically well designed, clever, inventive, and whoever dreamed them up shows some talent. No sir, I can’t say any of that, at least with a clear conscious, about the eighty minutes that preceded these clever closing credits in this movie, but what can you do?
Cale (Jason London) works I.T. in a big building. His ex-wife Carol (Sarah D’Laine) is some kind of scientist in this big building and wears inappropriately tight pants. Super Suspicious Dude (Dunbar Merill) has entered this building and he’s carrying a cake and a balloon, but there ain’t no damn cake in that box, just evil zombie dust. Or maybe not. I forget. I do know that this dude got on the elevator looking super suspicious, was rude to some hot Asian chick, bypassed the lousy security guard and casually strolled into some lab where they were making the zombie dust. So maybe he was just carrying a bomb designed to set the zombie dust free? Maybe? Regardless, he sets off a bomb, zombie dust is everywhere as the people in the Big Building are under terrorist attack.
Cale, the IT guy, is kind of lucky because the Zombie dust is on the sixth floor, infecting everybody below and he’s on the tenth floor along with a bunch of annoying scared people. Of note there’s security badass Mandy (Alicia Leigh Willis), Dr. Andzarri (Jerry Leggio) the Zombie Dust creator who also serves as this movies ‘exposition guy’, and there’s a tough soldier played by actor Edrick Browne. We mention Mr. Browne because we’ve seen the brother in a quite a few of these low budget, Louisiana based horror films and he’s died horribly in every single one. Will Edrick Browne survive this movie? No he will not. Hope that’s not a spoiler.
While the few survivors inside the building are desperately trying to survive the super strong, crazy fast zombies hunting them, outside we have a virtual murderers row of B-movie actors trying to hold it down. The Police Chief (C. Thomas Howell) wants
answers from the Doctor (David Carradine), who is trying to stop the gung ho fire chief (Lochyn Munro) from rushing in there to free people who are doomed anyway, while everybody is taking orders from the CIA Honk (Judd Nelson) who will just as soon see everyone left in the building die a horrible death.
The main thing Cale must do is save his daughter, who is in the fourth floor Daycare Center, which usually leads to cast members sorrowfully shaking their heads when he wonders about his chances to rescue her. Job number two is to avoid the zombies, which isn’t all that hard since there are so few of them and most of them are dead already. Job number three… make it out of the building before the clock ticks down to triple zero and the post 911 building implosion procedures are enacted. Job Number Four is for you, intrepid audience member… try to stay awake. Good luck with that.
The difficult part for me here personally, is attempting to think of reasons to tell you why ‘The Terror Experiment’ ended up being so awful. Even though I watched it from beginning to end, about a half hour in I think I mentally checked out and stopped registering the necessary stimuli required to form any kind of a halfway decent opinion. I mean you’re trapped in a building full of angry zombies. They do that like every week on ‘The Walking Dead’ but then there’s other stuff going which makes that show go. Here, we are just kind of trapped in a building watching these people freak out, made less entertaining considering the zombie mayhem is almost non-existent. It’s probably not a fair comparison, but if you want to see ‘Trapped in Building with Zombies’ done right… then you probably need to make a quick trip to Virtual France to check out ‘The Horde’.
What we have with ‘The Terrorist Experiment’ is a movie that moves way to slowly for the action filled zombie movie we wanted it to be and is filled to the brim with stock, uninteresting or annoying characters who are being acted by a large number of performers who were mailing it in at best. Except for maybe Alice Leigh Willis who did seem to be giving it her all. The only thing the movie might have going for it, outside of the closing credits we’ve already discussed, was that there as a political slant to the whole thing. I’m thinking it was a FOX News, Smaller Government slant, but at least it was something.
Closing credits being the best part about your movie is never a good thing, but that’s all we all got to give you with regards to ‘The Terror Expieriment’, a movie recommended only for the C. Thomas Howell / Lochlyn Munro completist crowd. We know you’re out there somewhere.
