I was unfortunate enough to catch a screening of Experiment at the Phoenix Film Festival, although I'll be honored to be the first on IMDb to warn you all of what you'd be getting into if you were to see it.

A woman named Anna (Georgina French) wakes up in the middle of the street in Prague (where I'm assuming it was shot for cost reasons - first bad sign) without knowledge of her identity or even what language she speaks. Somewhere else in the city, a man named Morgan (John Hopkins) does the same. It all appears to be part of an experiment involving Stefan (Andrew Byron - utterly awful, in case I don't get to him later in the review) and Joseph (Nick Simons).

The writing is simply awful, and the film has an awkward, shifty pace that ruins the mystery before it even has a chance to start. Some of the concepts here aren't completely bad - Anna and Morgan struggle with learning their own language in a completely foreign country, although the dialog and performances amount to confused stuttering that drags already unnecessary scenes out. There's an air of cheapness about the whole thing - the leaders of the experiment literally run the project out of somebody's basement (ridiculous when we learn how high up it goes), and in one hilarious moment, an attempted rapist gets up and walks out of the room after being knocked down by Anna. Very nonchalantly.

When the actual plot is revealed in the last half-hour, the film starts to move - too late for those who wisely walked out, although they weren't missing much. Somehow the story shifts to an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister, which has nothing to do with the events that inevitably take place, and only seems to have been added to make the movie seem more epic and important. Instead, it's stupid and kind of funny. There's a predictable twist ending that brings absolutely no closure to the whole mess, and you're left with 90 wasted minutes. Don't let me forget to mention that the film had no lighting. Not low lighting for atmosphere, not dim lighting, but no lighting. At all. It's almost as if the filmmakers wanted to put you to sleep.

If I have anything good to say, David Gant was pleasantly over the top as the mastermind behind the whole project, there's a nice pair of breasts, and the theme that is revealed in about the last fifteen minutes of the movie in a tossed-off manner of the fallacies of love & trust was pretty neat and I'd like to see it implemented in a good movie next time.

Boo.