A Kooky Scientist Played by Val Kilmer Traps Six Sexy Singles in a Steam Room to Make a Muddled Point About Global Warming in the Delightfully Insane 2009 Thriller The Chaos Experiment
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I broke into film criticism as a twenty-one-year-old college kid by writing about direct-to-video movies and the dregs of theatrical releases for The A.V. Club. Because of my lifelong fixation with failure, I’ve always been fascinated by schlock that skipped the multiplex en route to Blockbuster shelves and Redbox.
Before I was a film critic, I was a video store employee. That’s another reason I gravitate towards direct-to-video obscurities.
I’m talking about movies like the unbelievably stupid 2009 psychological thriller The Chaos Experiment, which I first wrote about for my Dispatches from Direct-to-DVD Purgatory at The A.V. Club.
It’s continued to take up valuable real estate in my brain because it is quite possibly the stupidest movie ever made, and I have seen several stinkers.
The Chaos Experiment asks what would happen if six sexy singles were locked in a steam room where the temperature is 130 degrees? At one hundred and thirty degrees, the lungs melt and the eyes cauterize. And that’s the good part! The rest is quite ugly and grim.
If you answered that these trapped suckers go insane and start killing themselves, or each other, then congratulations, you’re right!
Wow! That is impressive! That’s like making a movie called The Bullet Theory that explores what happens when someone shoots another person in the head at close range. Will they die? You’ll have to see The Bullet Theory to find out. Alternatively, it’s like a b movie called The 55th Floor Experiment that asks what happens to the human body after it falls out of a 55th floor window to the pavement below. Will they die instantly, in a gruesome and gory fashion? I honestly have no idea. I’m not much of a science guy.
When Marlon Brando worked with Val Kilmer on 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, the older actor infected his costar with his madness, penchant for over-acting, and questionable taste in roles.
That helps explain why, only a few years after his big comeback performance in Shane Black’s beloved 2005 directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Kilmer found himself in Grand Rapids, Michigan, playing a twitchy, wild-eyed madman with an unusual scheme to bring attention to global warming in the 2009 stinker The Chaos Experiment, which is also known as The Steam Experiment.
Technically speaking, The Chaos Experiment wasn’t a true direct-to-video movie, as it played for one week on two screens in Grand Rapids and one week in Lansing.
The Chaos Experiment was one of SEVEN movies Kilmer put out in 2009. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is the only one you know, or need to know about, although The Chaos Experiment is so loopy and so kooky that it should at least be on the radar of trash lovers who crave the flamboyantly, ostentaciously awful.
In 2009, Kilmer also voiced KITT, the talking car that thinks it’s better and smarter than you, in a one-season revival of Knight Rider.
In the mid-1990s, Kilmer was in a position to turn down an opportunity to reprise his role as Bruce Wayne/Batman in a sequel to the top-grossing film of 1995, Batman Forever. A decade and a half later, he was apparently in a position where he could not turn down any work, no matter how low-rent or ridiculous.
In The Chaos Experiment, the movie no one will remember Kilmer for, the Top Gun star plays James Pettis, a former college professor who was driven mad when the academic community ignored his cautionary warnings about the imminent dangers of global warming. He was a scientist who eventually went mad.
So the nutty former professor hatches an impressively idiotic scheme. He tricks six sexy singles, three male and three female, into coming to a luxury hotel as part of a promotion by an online dating service that promises them five thousand dollars, massages, fancy dinners, and a shot at true love.
This lures six suckers into a steam room where the doors are locked in a sadistic experiment that is about to play out in very predictable ways.
The framing device finds Kilmer’s wackjob approaching a writer for the Grand Rapids Press with the story of a lifetime and a possible opportunity to save the lives of six people.
Kilmer’s villain says that he considered approaching The New York Times or The Washington Post with his civilization-saving warning about our imminent doom, but instead chose to go with a local paper with a circulation of just over twenty thousand.
He knows that if his Unabomber-style manifesto about how global warming is bad appears on the front page of the Grand Rapids Press, it will reach a dozen-strong audience and make the most negligible impact possible.
Kilmer calls The New York Times “butchers” with just the right note of deranged glee.
The bonkers bad guy’s unusual evening begins with him appealing to the awesome power of a guy working the night shift at a small regional paper. The journalist figures that the situation is beyond his pay grade and areas of expertise, so he brings in Detective Mancini (Armand Assante), a womanizing lawman who wants to wrap things up so he can go to a booty call.
Kilmer and Assante have most of their scenes together. They undoubtedly reminisced about the long-ago era when they made real movies that actual people saw.
The sexy sextet is led by Grant, a former football player and Viagra enthusiast played by Eric Roberts. Yes, Eric Roberts. The actor has never been hotter than he is in The Chaos Experiment, in that the temperature has been cranked up to 130.
Kilmer and Roberts engage in a ferocious battle of overacting. On a scale of one to ten, both men’s acting begins at 10 and goes up to 13 or 14.
Patrick Muldoon costars as Christopher, a nurse, while Quinn Duffy plays Frank, a lady’s man who is the first to go crazy and physically assault one of his fellow hostages.
The Chaos Experiment chronicles what happens when six horny strangers stop being polite and start getting real as they die from heat in a steam room at the behest of a madman.
They go crazy from the heat and begin attacking each other verbally and physically. In my original review, I noted its shameless stealing from the classic Twilight Zone episode “Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” dubbing it “Sweaty, Half-Naked, Hysterical Monsters Are Due On Maple Street—And They’re Us And Our Bottomless Paranoia And Our Capacity To Abuse And Harm Our Fellow Man As Well As The Precious Environment.”
But why did Pettis do it? Because of the environment, of course. Haven’t you been paying attention? He’s still a less crazy and more respectable environmentalist than Elon Musk or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Those guys are NUTS. They belong in straitjackets alongside Kilmer’s kook.
The only tension and suspense in The Chaos Experiment comes from whether our bad guy is acting alone or if he has accomplices.
In the third act, as he gets crazier and more frantic, Roberts’ jock accuses the nurse and one of the women of conspiring against him. It seems like frothing-at-the-mouth insanity, but he turns out to be right. The closing twist is that the nurse is an employee at the mental hospital from which Pettis escaped.
It turns out that he and his girlfriend, another of the ostensible hostages, are behind their patient’s bizarre, unsuccessful stunt.
The Chaos Experiment’s other dubious claim to fame is its unexpected connection to Donald Trump’s rise to power. The film was executive produced by Steve Bannon, the evil ghoul behind Trump’s political career.
Like everything Bannon has ever been involved with, The Chaos Experiment is bad, but at least it’s bad in a fun, cheesy, campy way, and not in a way that results in the election of a dictator and the death of democracy.
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