Greg McLean

While there are probably those who would describe Daniel Radcliffe as an actor who has never amounted to much after the Harry Potter franchise, I’ve found his decisions over the past few years to be breathtakingly daring, a risky collection of screw-you titles that could only come from a place of supreme financial security. From Horns to Swiss Army Man and everything in between, Radcliffe has proven himself a gifted performer with a voracious appetite for genre films, becoming something relatively unique in the horror genre: an A-list actor with B-list tastes.

The strict dictionary definition of the word ‘new’ is as follows: “not existing before; made, introduced, or discovered recently or now for the first time.” So in the most literal sense, the trailer for The Belko Experiment that the film’s screenwriter James Gunn posted on his Facebook page last night is indeed new. It includes about fifteen seconds of fresh footage, in which Gunn’s brother Sean (so lovingly referred to as “Marty Espenscheid AKA Kraglin from Guardians AKA Kirk from Gilmore Girls AKA my idiot brother Sean” in the post) sneaks onto the roof of his office building with a couple coworkers for a quick all-natural smoke break. “Did you happen to read what you signed when you started working at this place?” he warns.

Sometimes a movie comes along and gives you something you didn’t even know you wanted. Take The Belko Experiment. I’ve seen movies like Battle Royale and even the fun-in-theory, bad-in-execution Operation: Endgame, but it wasn’t until I first saw the first red band trailer for James Gunn’s upcoming film that I realized exactly what I’d been missing. Those movies delivered on fun fight sequences and gratuitous violence, but they lacked the return of a creeper, sleazy, Ghost-era Tony Goldwyn. Not any more.