According to the scientific method — which you would have learned in middle school, had you been paying attention — every experiment exists to test the validity of one’s hypothesis. For example:
• “Refrigerating food will extend its life of edibility.”
• “A brick falls faster than a feather.”
• “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
• Or, in the case of The Belko Experiment, “If you lock 80 people inside an office building and tell them to kill, they totally will.”

From director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) and screenwriter James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2), The Belko Experiment proves its hypothesis true, in brutally bloody fashion and with a palpable edge not often seen in mainstream movies.

Some 80 men and women, most of them Americans, work in the high-rise corporate headquarters of Belko Industries in Bogotá, Colombia. Why is the film set in South America? Good question — and one McLean and Gunn do not answer; my suspicion is the foreign setting, coupled with the remote location of the offices, deliberately feeds into the audience’s fear of the unfamiliar “other.” Dorothy was right, you know: There is no place like home, where dozens of people aren’t actively trying to snuff your life, and even if they were, you’d at least know the perfect hidey-hole to sit out the chaos.

It’s tough to tell which startles the Belko workforce more: an intercom message demanding they kill a couple of colleagues within the half-hour or the steel walls that seal them inside a multifloored cage of cubicles. At first, they think the announcement might be a hacker’s prank. (But we know that’s not the case since the voice belongs to Gregg Henry — c’mon, we’ve all seen Body Double!) When the backs of a few heads begin to explode — and the bodies attached instantly slump to the lobby tile in sickening heavy thuds — they know this is no game.

Well, in a manner most most macabre, it absolutely is a game — a Battle Royale among pencil-pushers and number-crunchers. Only one will be left standing, with luck, and it’s exactly who you think it will be, thanks to the movie’s early alignment with that character. Beyond that, however, the lack of marquee names ensures that in this bloodbath, anyone could be taking a dip. One of the Experiment’s strengths is its casting of reliable character actors, including John C. McGinley (Surviving the Game), Tony Goldwyn (2009’s The Last House on the Left), John Gallagher Jr. (Hush), Brent Sexton (TV’s The Killing) and Gunn favored player Michael Rooker (Slither). No one is particularly well-drawn before shit gets real; paying the larger price for that are the few ladies, notably Adria Arjona (TV’s True Detective) and Melonie Diaz (Ghost Team). For the latter’s character, it’s her first day — talk about a flawed onboarding experience!

There is more to The Belko Experiment than just a high concept. As with his underseen 2010 film, Super, Gunn’s screenplay lulls you into its darkly comic world before pivoting into unrelenting violence — a tonal shift so swift and severe, you’re supposed to feel discomfort. Many viewers will check out long before the intended message — admittedly delivered sans subtlety — has time to sink in. Give it a shot! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Things are not going well for Cutlass Aircraft Maiden One. The supersonic transport jet’s media circus of an experiment flight from New York to Paris has been sabotaged; a Third World flu virus has been loosed onboard; and, dammit, who the hell let Bert Convy on this plane?

Welcome, disaster-flick junkies, to SST: Death Flight, a made-for-TV Airport rip-off so blatant that it earned director David Lowell Rich the plum gig of guiding the final Airport sequel, The Concorde … Airport ’79, off the tarmac.

Piloted by testy Capt. Walsh (Robert Reed, TV’s Brady Bunch patriarch), America’s first SST passenger jet flies the friendly skies while breaking the sound barrier. Everyone who’s anyone has secured a seat on the transatlantic flight: the governor, some contest winners, a former pilot who might possibly come in handy (Doug McClure, Satan’s Triangle), a World Health Organization doctor (Brock Peters, Two-Minute Warning) and a busty beauty queen (Misty Rowe, Meatballs Part II) who talks about how she’s been farting all day. Taking the thankless roles of flight attendants are Tina Louise (TV’s Gilligan’s Island) and Billy Crystal (presumably auditioning for TV’s Soap).

There’s also a very angry Cutlass engineer (George Maharis, Murder on Flight 502) whom the powers that be turned down for a promotion, so he switches a barrel of Maiden One’s hydraulic fluid for one filled with laundry detergent … and still boards the doomed flight — a pretty stupid move, if you ask me, but that’s how these things roll. Same goes for casting Convy as a heel, as any viewer of the Irwin Allen telepic Hanging by a Thread could tell you. In a scene added for SST’s European theatrical release (and intact on DVD), his curly-headed cad of a character keeps yanking down the spaghetti straps of Rowe’s dress in order to free her breasts and join the mile-high club.

When the effed-with barrel springs a leak, the resulting spill looks like tomato soup. When the plane is shown in flight, it looks like a Matchbox toy being held in frame by the tail. And when SST: Death Flight plays, it does indeed look like an Airport sequel, starting with 99 problems and right down to an overstuffed cast, including Peter Graves, Burgess Meredith, Lorne Greene and Regis Philbin. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

James Ponsoldt’s The Circle is in no shape to exist as either a technological thriller or an Orwellian warning of waning privacy in today’s selfie-obsessed society. The film feels like an unfinished work, a lump of clay half-fashioned into, well, something, yet never placed in the kiln for firing.

Harry Potter graduate Emma Watson centers the picture as Mae Holland — or at least is supposed to, but the ingenue is stunningly miscast and working so far below her fighting class that her naive newcomer to Silicon Valley threatens to float away with any sudden gust. Escaping the number-not-a-name existence of a corporate cubicle farm, Mae lands a customer-support gig at The Circle, clearly a stand-in for both Google and Apple, with American treasure Tom Hanks (Sully) as Eamon Bailey, its ersatz Steve Jobs. With a campus that boasts such amenities as yoga classes, Beck concerts and, um, live improv, The Circle stands as the workplace among every self-aggrandizing millennial, and its gadgets are as omnipresent in their lives as underpants.

Bailey’s latest baby is SeeChange, all-seeing cameras embedded in sleek spheres the size of cat’s-eye marbles; because of their portability and line of camouflaged colors, SeeChange cams are ideal for global “accountability.” Mae becomes something of a cause célèbre when she agrees to wear one and live a life of a broadband-broadcast transparency 24/7 (with three-minute breaks to heed nature’s call). Then Bailey releases software that allows SeeChange users to find anyone anywhere in the world in the matter of minutes — crowd-sourced bounty hunting, if you will. Raise your hand if you think Very Bad Things will come of this.

Indeed, they do — both in the movie and, more to the point, to it. Pardon the pun, but The Circle’s better-watch-out message strikes one as rather square. As shiny as Mae’s environs and Ponsoldt’s film are, its clarion call about good technology’s capacity to serve evil ends is older than the dial-up modem — just ask the prehistoric apes bludgeoned by that newfangled bone — so predictability is hardwired into the plot. Reliable sources tell me Dave Eggers’ same-named 2013 novel (on which the film is based) carried a satiric edge; if so, that has been stripped in the story’s transition from page to screen, and Eggers himself shares the blame, as he shares scripting duties with director Ponsoldt.

In past films — Smashed, The End of the Tour and especially The Spectacular Now — Ponsoldt demonstrated an assured deftness for balancing the alkaline and the acidic, which makes the deafness of tone displayed here all the more worrisome. His knack for guiding great performances in absentia, undeniable talents come off undeniably poor, with Watson lacking the gravitas — or likability — to function as the film’s anchor. As reliable an actor as Hanks is, villainous roles are not his strong suit. (There is a reason Jimmy Stewart avoided them, Tom.)

No actor is worse than Ellar Coltrane (the boy of Boyhood), whose childhood pal of Mae’s cannot deliver even the simplest dialogue (“Bye”) with authenticity. No actor is luckier than John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), who is given nothing of value to do — one of the movie’s many introduced-then-discarded elements. And no actor suffers more embarrassment than Karen Gillan (In a Valley of Violence), whose Circle-exec character is under such immense stress that she appears increasingly pale ’n’ frail, bringing to mind An American Werewolf in London’s ghoulish running gag of an ever-decomposing Griffin Dunne; too bad Ponsoldt and Eggers are not aiming for laughs, but paranoia … and missing by a cringeworthy mile. —Rod Lott

Whereas the Manson Family’s murder spree registered as terrifyingly true in the nonfiction best seller Helter Skelter, the out-of-date dramatization Wolves at the Door is merely a welter — by definition, a confused mess. For a motion picture that barely cracks the one-hour mark, to be so mired is no mean feat.

On Aug. 9, 1969, five people were slain brutally at the L.A. home of director Roman Polanski. In depicting the events of that instantly infamous night as a horror-thriller, the polished Wolves reeks of bad taste. Characters are based on the real-life victims — most notably, pregnant sex-bomb actress Sharon Tate (Katie Cassidy, Taken), coffee heiress Abigail Folger (Elizabeth Henstridge, TV’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), celebrity hairstylist Jay Sebring (Miles Fisher, Final Destination 5) — but minus last names, as if the omission makes all the difference in respectful distancing.

As the good guys and girls move about the Cielo Drive home like fish swimming cluelessly in a barrel, we glimpse the menacing visages and ominous stares of Manson’s minions outside as they pass windows and mirrors. The evil doll of Annabelle, director John R. Leonetti’s previous spook show, possessed more personality than these cardboard-cutout criminals who have been retrofitted with the Stock Movie Villain’s uncanny ability to be hiding in all places at all times.

Beyond exploitation of subject, the most problematic element among Wolves at the Door’s litany of them is that it offers no point, nor has reason to exist. Post-dinner, Sharon and her party enter the house to end the evening; the killers invade and slaughter them one by one; the end. No closure, no comeuppance, no courtroom drama. Leonetti does conclude his film with black-and-white footage of the real Charles Manson uttering one of his wackadoo phrases that perenially make him the least popular person in the room — specifically, the one where the parole board sees fit to hold its hearings. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

As far as I have surmised, Arnold Schwarzenegger does three things really well:
1. Be an unstoppable killing machine (either human or cyborg).
2. Poke fun at himself.
3. Secretly impregnate the help.

Unfortunately, only two of those relate to onscreen activity, and neither is required of him by the demands of Aftermath. Instead, the dramatic thriller finds the one-time box-office champ in Maggie mode: dour, dreary and even depressing.

In Aftermath, the near-septuagenarian Schwarzenegger portrays Roman, a blue-collar family man anxiously awaiting the return of his wife and daughter on an overseas flight. When he arrives at the airport to pick them up, he is greeted not with the joy of a reunion, but the tragic news that an accident has occurred: the midair collision of two descending planes, one of which carried his loved ones. Blame is placed on white-collar family man Jake (Scoot McNairy, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), illogically the only air traffic controller on duty at the time, although technically, faulty equipment is the real culprit.

But every tragedy needs a villain’s face, and Roman is intent on hunting Jake down to confront him and demand the apology he has received from no one. Meanwhile, the weight of reality bears heavily on Jake’s shoulders, threatening to tear his family asunder as well. (Perennial Taken victim Maggie Grace hits some nice, understated notes as his wife.)

Having successfully directed one Expendable through a more serious ringer before (Jason Statham in Blitz), Elliott Lester faces an uphill battle with Arnold in Aftermath. Schwarzenegger simply hasn’t the acting chops to pull off this kind of high-stakes drama, and his discomfort with trying appears more evident the thinner the material gets. McNairy is reliable as ever, but underserved by a script (from Javier Gullón, 2013’s unconventional Enemy) that keeps its thrills as separated as bookends and fills in all the minutes between with the maudlin processes of a grief-recovery workbook.

When our two leads finally meet toward the film’s conclusion, you may wish Schwarzenegger needn’t have bothered with knocking on the door, when the simple blast of a bazooka would have done just fine 30 years ago. That is the loss I feel. —Rod Lott