Saturday 11 June 2016

Ruptured Review: Bane

Country of origin- UK   
Year of release- 2008  
Director- James Eaves           
Stars- Sophia Dawnay, Lisa Devlin, Tina Barnes


The film focuses upon four women who wake up in a strange minimalistic looking prison style room, none of them have any memory of their lives before this room, nor do they know who or where they are. We instantly realise that each of the four women are essentially a standard character, we have the emotional one, the tough one, the sensitive one and of course heroine. The women begin to be subjected to various tests, which are conducted by a heartless and rather overly acted scientist, and his assistants who talk like robots and look like they belong in A Cruel Fucking Nightmare. The tests all seems to revolve around lots of poorly acted scenes of the women freaking out about their ordeal, being interviewed with electrodes on their temples and undergoing various experiments that are neither scary or particularly complex.
It isn’t long (although it feels as though it is) before the women start to be picked off one-by-one by a blood soaked surgeon ripped straight off from Hostel, and eventually the utterly bizarre and shockingly nonsensical reason the women have been brought to this facility is reviled. I won’t spoil the ending for you fine people, although I feel I should as it may deter you from subjecting yourself to this film, but let me assure this films climax is a bigger, more misery soaked let down than finding a blowjob voucher that is just one day out of date.
This film is the cinematic equivalent of black treacle, its dense, sticky and hard to move through. The pacing and story are all over the place, the first two thirds of the film dragged like a dead child jammed in bike spokes, and the final third beats you over the head with so much information that you need a flowchart to keep track. This is mainly the result of the film trying very hard to be original and inventive which has in this case resulted in a disorganised, slightly pretentious shamble’s that drags on for a tortuous 113 minutes. The viewer is intentionally kept in the dark about what the fuck is going on to try and ratchet up the tension, but this approach only works when the plot is fun and interesting to watch, so it’s fair to say that this approach doesn’t work here. The film is also let down by the acting, which could be far better even taking into account the low budget. Generally, the acting fluctuates from poor, to a point where the viewer is throwing their wallet at the TV in a desperate attempt to fund the casts acting lesions.

The film does however have two good features, three including the joy I felt when the end credits rolled. Firstly, the gore and splatter is pretty solid, whenever the odd occasion arises for someone to die we are treated to fountain of practical splatter. The film does however also feature one moment of unforgivably bad CGI towards the end. Secondly, Bane does feature some moments of pleasing editing that actually created a few fleeting scenes that gave me sporadic hope that the film was turning a corner so to speak, however these soon ended, giving way to the normal plod. Overall Bane is just a mess. It's not an interesting watch as it tries to incorporate gory, psychological, supernatural and Sci-fi elements all at the same time, and fails miserably at nearly all of them. I cannot recommend Bane to any of you, it simply isn’t worth it, I am giving this one a 2.5/10, and frankly that’s generous.    
           
 

No comments:

Post a Comment