Expiration (2012)

Wow! Such a good movie.

Crappy film

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

RANCID is a tiny budget indie thriller from South Africa. The plot has tinges of science ficiton here and there and involves four people who sign up for medical experiments but get more than they bargained for. It's an old story with the usual setting of a remote installation with little in the way of set-up or explanation, just a great deal of characters creeping around in the dark. I found it all quite dull.

2011's Expiration, also known as Rancid, is a low budget horror film about a medical test that goes wrong. The participants don't know what the medical test is about, they're just doing it for the money. Instead of a leading role, we have all the perspectives of the participants as they experience the test and start to realize that it is no ordinary one. Brandon Auret and Ingeborg Riedmaier are the best performances in this film, displaying realistic emotion and understanding their own roles and the situation their characters are in.The film is good to the horror genre and uses claustrophobia and shock value to please the horror film fan, but this film also has realistic characters with pros and cons in order to keep moving the story forward. The characters act realistically to their situation and are forced with obstacles and tasks to survive, revealing their personality inside and their instincts. Alastair Orr did a good job with the small bit of security-camera cinematography in the film, and most of the cinematography in the second half of the film was really good considering their equipment, but the first half's cinematography could of been a bit better, I think.A good film I recommend that will leave you asking questions in every scene. My only real problem with this movie is that I think the film could of been a bit slower paced so we could of built up more tension to the scary moments. Recommended, overall I'd rate this a 7.1/10. Sorry if the review was too short, but I didn't want to spoil anything...

I did a small amount of research into this film before watching to make sure I wasn't wasting my time and found a lot of positive comments about it. I do understand it was made on a tight budget. At first I was engaged and interested but quickly began to lose interest. Firstly, the time stamp on the CCTV footage was always the same. I found that extremely distracting and something that should have been picked up and corrected.Then there was the mistreatment of one of the 'participants' near the start. Something that could skew their results of the experiment. The scientist in me was dubious that the company would go to that much expense and then employ such incompetent security.There was no explanation of why some of the previous 'participants' were still roaming around the test area in an unstable and dangerous state. There were perfect opportunities to do so using the voice over CCTV footage. I could think of several ways to cover this.The pacing slowed way the hell down when it was supposed to be ramping up. They characters seemed to run around in a circle. There was no progression. They never tried to plan and act to move the plot along.There were a few other glaring inconsistencies that had nothing to do with budget - more to do with poor scripting. The less money you have the cleverer you need to be with the dialogue.Acting was pretty good, as was wardrobe and equipment (no plastic guns). The zombies were very believable and make-up was excellent.Give it a bash if you're bored. It gets a 'could have been better' from me.

To me this film has the feel of a computer game and I found it really entertaining. It feels kind of like Half Life meets Resident Evil mashed up a bit with 28 Days later and maybe a smattering of Cube!For it's ridiculously low budget this movie is done incredibly well and is awfully good fun. The cast is small, the set sparse but the ideas are interesting and provide enough mystery and momentum to push a plot along for a couple of hours without any trouble at all.It takes a real creative mind to figure out a away to make something happen with so little money even on just a technical level alone it's impressive for this reason. The antagonists are gooey, gross and generally unpleasant. There is suspense, gore and an attempt at an intelligent back story. You could really do a lot of worse than giving this a go if you are a horror or sci-fi fan, just go for it and have a giggle.