Movies
‘The Steam Experiment’ Will Burn You Alive
This evening we caught wind of new indie film in production entitled The Steam Experiment, which was written by Rob Malkani. Now filming in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the film stars Val Kilmer, Armand Assante, Eric Roberts, Megan Brown and Patrick Muldoon and is ready to turn up the heat, read on to see the synopsis.
Things are heating up for Val Kilmer, Armand Assante, Eric Roberts, Megan Brown and Patrick Muldoon in the indie suspense thriller “The Steam Experiment.”
The feature, revolving around six people trapped and terrorized in an urban Turkish bathhouse, marks a return to directing for its Cinepro Pictures producer Philippe Martinez.
Kilmer plays a former university professor who overheats his hostages to prove that humans will devolve into chaos under the pressures of global warming. He tells a detective (Assante) that their location will be revealed if his hypothesis is printed as the local paper’s front-page headline.
The six potential victims are a former pro football player (Roberts), a former actress (Brown), a nurse (Muldoon), a waitress (Eve Mauro), a restaurateur (Quinn Duffy) and a writer (Cordelia Reynolds). As temperatures rise, the desperate detainees fight for survival.
Rob Malkani (“Day Zero”) wrote the original screenplay. Karinne Behr, Luc Campeau, Neil Steinberg, Steelbridge Finance, Rob Malkani, Stephen Bannon and Trevor Drinkwater are executive producing.
The film is set in Grand Rapids, Mich., and recently began principal photography in the city.
“It will be an interesting journey into the darkness of human nature when confronted with a crisis situation,” Martinez said.
The helmer, who owns the financially troubled (and now inactive) Bauer Martinez Studios and its library, worked with Assante as co-writer and director of the 2003 drama “Citizen Verdict.” He took on the same roles in the 2004 Jean-Claude Van Damme action thriller “Wake of Death.”
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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