Experiment is a stupid person's idea of a smart movie for other stupid people.
A man and a woman (John Hopkins and Georgina French) wind up in the Eastern European city of Prague. She gets dumped out the back of a van onto the street. He wakes up floating face down in a river. Neither of them have any memory of who they are or where they came from. The woman can also barely read, speak or think better than a small child. While the woman runs into a friendly baker and a hotel clerk who puts her up in a room, solely because the Almighty Plot Hammer insists on it, the man gets taken in by a bearded geezer named Joseph (Nick Simons). Joseph shows the man a picture that appears to identify the two amnesiacs as Morgan and Anna, then sends Morgan out to find Anna.
Now, if sending a man with no memories out on the streets of Prague to somehow find another person in the random crowds seems a bit odd, you're right. We're quickly shown that Joseph if part of a tiny cabal, hovering around a computer in a basement somewhere and conducting some sort of experiment with Morgan and Anna. The experiment involves devices implanted in Morgan and Anna's heads that don't seem to have any affect on Morgan outside of memory loss, but can cause Anna to experience paranoid hallucinations and provoke her to violence.
We quickly find out that Morgan and Anna are part of a scheme to assassinate a Russian official visiting Prague and then Joseph discovers that the reasons for the assassination are not as noble as he was told, so he tries to save Morgan and Anna. That leads to a bunch of yelling, running around and one of those twist endings you may not see coming but don't care about anyway.
When I call this a stupid person's idea of a smart movie for other stupid people, what I mean is that this is a very basic and straightforward story, yet it seems as though co-writer/director Dan Turner was greatly worried that the audience wouldn't be able to follow his simple plot. So, the film never goes more than a few minutes without explaining what's going on. But as soon as you understand the "what", you can't help but notice that the "how" and the "why of this tale make no sense whatsoever. According to this film, you can perform brain surgery on people without leaving a mark on them or even cutting their hair, people in a strange city with amnesia will never think to go to the police or a hospital, people with the resources to kidnap innocent folk and subject them to mind-control don't have better ways to kill someone than harebrained schemes where 50,000 things could go wrong and that the most effective assassin in the world is a little girl with a small knife.
Georgina French is pretty and is topless in one scene. None of the other actors in this movie do anything of note. The direction of Dan Turner is pedestrian at best and remedial most of the time. This film also looks really cheap and was edited together quite poorly. You know how you're on the phone with someone and you've both finished talking but you're waiting for the other person to end the call, so several seconds pass where neither of you say anything? That's what the end of every scene in Experiment is like. All of the dialog and action will be over, but the camera stays fixed on the situation for another two or three seconds before moving on to the next scene. I know that may not sound like a big deal, but it gets really annoying after about 30 minutes.
Experiment is a bad movie but it isn't even entertainingly bad. It just sort of sits there with nothing better to do. You, however, should find something better to do than watch it.
A man and a woman (John Hopkins and Georgina French) wind up in the Eastern European city of Prague. She gets dumped out the back of a van onto the street. He wakes up floating face down in a river. Neither of them have any memory of who they are or where they came from. The woman can also barely read, speak or think better than a small child. While the woman runs into a friendly baker and a hotel clerk who puts her up in a room, solely because the Almighty Plot Hammer insists on it, the man gets taken in by a bearded geezer named Joseph (Nick Simons). Joseph shows the man a picture that appears to identify the two amnesiacs as Morgan and Anna, then sends Morgan out to find Anna.
Now, if sending a man with no memories out on the streets of Prague to somehow find another person in the random crowds seems a bit odd, you're right. We're quickly shown that Joseph if part of a tiny cabal, hovering around a computer in a basement somewhere and conducting some sort of experiment with Morgan and Anna. The experiment involves devices implanted in Morgan and Anna's heads that don't seem to have any affect on Morgan outside of memory loss, but can cause Anna to experience paranoid hallucinations and provoke her to violence.
We quickly find out that Morgan and Anna are part of a scheme to assassinate a Russian official visiting Prague and then Joseph discovers that the reasons for the assassination are not as noble as he was told, so he tries to save Morgan and Anna. That leads to a bunch of yelling, running around and one of those twist endings you may not see coming but don't care about anyway.
When I call this a stupid person's idea of a smart movie for other stupid people, what I mean is that this is a very basic and straightforward story, yet it seems as though co-writer/director Dan Turner was greatly worried that the audience wouldn't be able to follow his simple plot. So, the film never goes more than a few minutes without explaining what's going on. But as soon as you understand the "what", you can't help but notice that the "how" and the "why of this tale make no sense whatsoever. According to this film, you can perform brain surgery on people without leaving a mark on them or even cutting their hair, people in a strange city with amnesia will never think to go to the police or a hospital, people with the resources to kidnap innocent folk and subject them to mind-control don't have better ways to kill someone than harebrained schemes where 50,000 things could go wrong and that the most effective assassin in the world is a little girl with a small knife.
Georgina French is pretty and is topless in one scene. None of the other actors in this movie do anything of note. The direction of Dan Turner is pedestrian at best and remedial most of the time. This film also looks really cheap and was edited together quite poorly. You know how you're on the phone with someone and you've both finished talking but you're waiting for the other person to end the call, so several seconds pass where neither of you say anything? That's what the end of every scene in Experiment is like. All of the dialog and action will be over, but the camera stays fixed on the situation for another two or three seconds before moving on to the next scene. I know that may not sound like a big deal, but it gets really annoying after about 30 minutes.
Experiment is a bad movie but it isn't even entertainingly bad. It just sort of sits there with nothing better to do. You, however, should find something better to do than watch it.
