This is more or less a STV clone of Saw. Six people are tricked into a
sealed steam room on the pretext that it's part of a love connection
program. As the heat intensifies, we get to see how far their
psychological deterioration will progress. There is also a framing story
in which a mad professor says he will let the six people out of that room
if a local newspaper publishes his theories on global warming.
The dramatic tension, if you want to call it that, originally seems to
center around the survival of those in the steam room, but as time goes
on, we learn that things are not as they originally appeared to be. Our
interest switches to unraveling the story's mysteries: Who is the mad
scientist? Is he more scientist, or more mad? Does he have confederates we
are not told about? When does the steam room incident actually take place?
Does the steam room situation really occur, or are we simply watching one
of his delusions? After we debate these matters in our heads for 90
minutes, there is an ambiguous twist ending which renders all of our
previous conclusions false, or at least uncertain. In the previous
sentence, one might substitute the word "confusing" for "ambiguous," if
one were so inclined.
The cast is quite strong for a STV cheapie. In fact, it would have been
close to an A-list cast if the film had been made in the 1980s. Val Kilmer
is the mad professor. Armand Assante is the detective questioning him.
Eric Roberts is one of the six human lobsters. Given that all three of
those men have turned in excellent performances in real movies, one would
have to say that the cast is the film's strength.
Everything else is the film's weakness.
(Except the nudity.)
Sidebar: Eric Roberts is now up to 109 IMDb acting credits. He is only
53 years old, and 92 of those credits have come in the past 15 years, so
he could pass 200 acting credits by age 68. How large is that number in
context? Gerard Depardieu has 153 credits at age 60. He has amassed 45 of
those in the past eight years, so assuming the same rate for another eight
years, he will also have about 200 credits at age 68. In other words, Eric
Roberts is in about as many projects as Depardieu. That's about the same
as saying somebody is as good a hitter as Ted Williams.
