Expiration

The story focuses on a group of participants who sign up for a mysterious medical treatment that promises to cure all their ailments. After taking a sedative, they wake up and they are all cured, but like all things in horror films, when something is too good to be true for the characters, it generally is.

The film uses stylish cinematography (The fact that this was shot on a consumer stills camera baffles me) and gritty surveillance footage to weave a tale of strange government testing.

What Alastair Orr and his production team has done here on this budget is nothing short of amazing. This does not look like a film that was made for R500k (That's less than $70K). It looks absolutely amazing. The acting is generally pretty decent, the make-up is great. The script kind of loses itself a bit but the general concept holds strong.

This is not your typical South African film and its great to see filmmakers having the balls, even if they don't have the budget, to do something a little different in a country that only supports crappy Afrikaans films that would be laughed off the international stage.

2011's Expiration, also known as Rancid, is a low budget horror film about a medical test that goes wrong. The participants don't know what the medical test is about, they're just doing it for the money. Instead of a leading role, we have all the perspectives of the participants as they experience the test and start to realize that it is no ordinary one. Brandon Auret and Ingeborg Riedmaier are the best performances in this film, displaying realistic emotion and understanding their own roles and the situation their characters are in.

The film is good to the horror genre and uses claustrophobia and shock value to please the horror film fan, but this film also has realistic characters with pros and cons in order to keep moving the story forward. The characters act realistically to their situation and are forced with obstacles and tasks to survive, revealing their personality inside and their instincts. Alastair Orr did a good job with the small bit of security-camera cinematography in the film, and most of the cinematography in the second half of the film was really good considering their equipment, but the first half's cinematography could of been a bit better, I think.

A good film I recommend that will leave you asking questions in every scene. My only real problem with this movie is that I think the film could of been a bit slower paced so we could of built up more tension to the scary moments. Recommended, overall I'd rate this a 7.1/10. Sorry if the review was too short, but I didn't want to spoil anything...

This is a well made and well acted film though the sound editing almost ruins it. At times it is nigh on impossible to hear what the actors are saying because the music is so loud and playing over the dialogue in far too many scenes.

However, the story is quite well thought out in both premise and execution, the setting obviously helped with the small budget. The actors were very good in their roles even if the story limited any real examination of their characters.

I rated it as a six which may seem high considering the sound problems but I would look forward to seeing any future films from the same writer, director and a few of the actors.

It is excruciatingly slow . The acting , script , directing , photography are all appallingly bad . The extent of the 'special effects' is blood on the character's face .

The actors playing guards can't even handle a gun convincingly . The entire film is very amateurish. It seems as though a bunch of friends were bored on a Sunday afternoon, and on a whim they decided to shoot a film . So, They pooled their pennies together, quickly wrote a script and shot the film in an empty warehouse nearby .The only thing worse than this film , would be Rancid 2 !

5:38:44 Once you see it, you can't unsee it!

Really enjoyable film. I've watched it a couple of times and it's still interesting. Well thought out and well made. You can tell it was made on a shoestring budget from the lack of unnecessary special effects and CGI, but this doesn't take anything from the film. In fact, the gritty realism of the filming adds to the atmosphere and shows what can be done when a studio can't rely on F/X to hold an audience's interest.