WΔZ (2007)

People are voting emotionally.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

A series of deaths have started occurring in New York; Some are being found mutilated while others have an equation wÎ"z = Cov (w,z) = ÃwzVz carved onto their skin. As police investigate they discover each victim was forced to choose between sacrificing their own life or a loved ones' life. W Delta Z tries to be somekind of Saw rip-off and it's really not a very good one, the big names such as Stellan Skarsgård, Melissa George and Tom Hardy can't save the film from begin a huge waste of time but also just a very bland copy of others films like Saw which i mentioned and even Hostel. Definitely a film that was a bit interesting but just lost it as it went on and on. (3/10)

I was hoping for so much more from this. Blair and George are two of my favourite actors, and Skarsgard is always watchable. Sadly the stupid script and lack of direction lets this down.Blair is a tiny, tiny lady and yet here we have her overpowering and manhandling numerous giant (to her) thugs and criminals apparently all on her own. I can't suspend belief to that extent. Also she seems to be some sort of electrical and mechanical whizz.Seeing as we are told very little about Blair's character, I can't say if she has some secret past as a weightlifting nerd. Nor is there adequate explanation about the history between her and the cop. As for George, well she just looks totally out of place, and again we know nothing about her.A few shocking, brutal scenes aside, there is very little substance to this and it fails miserably as a story or piece of entertainment.

It's grim, it's gloomy and morally twisted. The Killing Gene is entertaining in darkest of manners. At times, it feels like a forerunner to Law Abiding Citizen only with more subtlety, but it would be more appropriate to think of The Killing Gene as an indie version of Se7en (we all remember that film right?) The story appears to be set in the city that never sleeps. What we have here is Selma Blair taking on a Jigsaw(Saw series) persona killing her chosen victims using a kind of Milgram's experiment (which I won't describe for obvious reasons). Detective Eddie Argo and his new partner are on the case investigating the appearance of bodies as they start to pop up with an algebraic formula carved on them. Eddie knows something that he is not telling the department, something that may catch up with him before he catches up with the killer.For a good eighty minutes, this killer thriller growls like a lion, angry but stable. It waits to let out its roar until the climax, which turns out to be the film's Achilles heal. I was fairly impressed by the Killing Gene's ability to avoid getting convoluted, but make no mistake, nothing lasts forever. It has a sloppily presented finale, which is stagey, badly acted, and is a lousy pay off for what at the beginning seemed to be an important element. I've always had a sort of liking for Stellan Skaresgard, even though he lacks charisma. His screen presence here while somewhat torpid, is surprisingly compelling. He evokes the persona of a man who is hiding a lot. A cynical person could easily see him as cardboard, but bit by bit, he starts to make more sense. the same cannot be said of Melissa George. Her character is pointless, and seems to have no real place in the script. Selma Blair has no acting ability whatsoever. In some films, she has gotten away with her emo persona, but this may be the worst entry in her resume yet.I'm not sure which part of New York this film is set in, but if I though it was as psychedelic looking as this, I may go just for a photo shoot. the Killing Gene is lit like a comic book, sometimes matching John Carpenter's vision in Escape from New York, only without the street fires and the wrecked cars.The whole thing works. I am not an easy person to creep out, but The Killing Gene occasionally got under my skin. Just imagine what it would do to a squeamish person. If you were in to Saw or Se7en, I think you'll find The Killing Gene a fairly worthy investment of your time, for a rainy night.

I missed the first twenty minutes or so but I gather that what happens is that another semi-psychotic serial killer is loose in New York City. He -- or in this case, she -- seems to have been made to choose between her own life or that of a loved one by some criminal. Now she's out for revenge on everybody with an unsavory past.I came in at the point at which the killer, Selma Blair, has some tattooed rapist shackled to a chair in one of those empty lofts. Equally bound, but festooned with electrodes, his loving grandmother sits a few feet in front of him. The idea is that Blair will torture the rapist until he can stand no more pain and can only make it stop by fingering the switch that will electrocute his trembling Granny.The detective on the case, Stellan Skarsgaard, must have done something terrible too, because before he knows it, he's tied up in the torture chair and his adoring young pal, a black kid from the streets, is in the hot seat.I like Stellan Skarsgaard's work a lot. He's a fine actor, in the minimalist tradition of Gary Cooper and Robert Redford, although his range is greater than theirs. (He goes ape in "Goya's Ghosts.") He can do villains or avuncular figures. The set point for his facial muscles might be described best as "resigned." But this movie -- what I saw of it -- really is an egregious piece of garbage. Skarsgaard isn't bad, and neither is his black street pal. The other players, such as the police chief, are barely competent.Selma Blair's performance is critical and doesn't match the creepy role. She's sullen and slow and a little whiny as she explains patiently why she's not enjoying the torture she's dishing out. I kept waiting for something like, "This hurts me more than it does you." She's beautiful, of course, but her voice is filled with glottal stops and sounds like that of a nice, well-bred young woman from Michigan.But she doesn't torpedo the movie. The script and direction do that.The script gives an enormous amount of screen time to the torture scenes and, man, are they graphic. Blair slumps around in her enervated way and only seems to come to life when she whangs an iron nail under the fingernails of a victim, or shatters their tibias with a heavy metal mallet. The strapped-down victim of her attentions is screaming and covered with blood while the person on the receiving end of the electrodes sweats, shivers, and begs the victim not to give him the juice. At least one other reviewer has described the torture as not prolonged or gratuitous. I guess it's not "prolonged" because the director cuts away at the moment hammer hits nail, but that leaves us with five minutes of foreplay to enjoy, or four minutes of fiveplay.The excremental script aside, the story presents us with one of those grimy urban settings, all ghoulish green, with posters peeling off the sweaty walls and graffiti covering every exposed surface -- as if things weren't sufficiently depressing. The camera alternates between close ups of ugly, perspiring faces, often with drool hanging from their lips, and wobbling instantaneous shots of irrelevant objects or actions. I believe this cliché must have begun with MTV years ago, both having appeared at about the same time. I can understand it on MTV. Here's Elton John playing the piano. What is a director to do -- give us five minutes of just watching Elton John play the piano and sing? No. There must be inserts of his fluttering fingertips, chokers of his open mouth, fireworks on display. But, my God, I wish they'd dump that tendency. We're not all fourteen years old. We can concentrate on a static scene for more than a few seconds.But not even defter camera work would help this movie. What's the target audience? Who enjoys seeing people tortured in extended scenes? It was chilling when Michael Madsen described what he was going to do to the captive police officer in "Reservoir Dogs," but all he did was cut off an ear. It was an agonizing scene but the audience did not have to watch the ear actually being removed, and it didn't last long, and the point was not only to shock the audience but to paint Madsen as the evil sadist he was.This movie invites all of us to become sadists. Yes, enjoy the foreplay. We know the orgasmic pain is coming so we can afford to linger over the repeated thrusts of the narrative. Relief is just around the corner.It stinks. And I despair because we seem to be turning into an entire culture of S&M freaks. Are we really headed towards enshrining torture as the national pastime? How low can we go? Give me lurid sex any day. This meretricious excreta and all those responsible for it belong in the dumps or, better yet, some radioactive waste disposal site.When Blair finally slices open the throat of the blubbering Skarsgaard, the sound track echoes with the slink sound of metal against metal. Ugh.