Well, I wanted to enjoy this single-location thriller, about six people who are trapped in a sauna with ever-increasing heat eventually driving them out of their minds. Unfortunately, the sauna scenes are so poorly shot - in some kind of arty way which looks like vaseline has been smeared over the lens - that it renders the film almost unwatchable.It's a pity, because a decent B-movie cast has been wasted on this one. Val Kilmer is the guy behind everything, and Armand Assante the detective trying to get to the bottom of things. They have lots of talky moments in the interview room which are pretty dull and just included to pad out the running time a little.The stuff in the sauna is better, although as it transpires quite predictable; you can easily guess how the characters will fall apart. The youthful cast members are pretty poor, and the females seem to be included for how they look in and out of bikinis rather than any acting talent. But Eric Roberts holds things together, as always, and Patrick Muldoon (STARSHIP TROOPERS) is a nice surprise too. It's just a pity the execution is so bad on this one.

This is an ineptly made "film" with a nonsensical plot and thinly sketched characters. Val Kilmer plays a deranged scientist who seems to think that the effects of global warming are imminent, and so locks six people in a steam room to prove his point while he also uses them as a bargaining chip to get his "story" published. If that all sounds wacko, it's because it is. Nothing about this makes sense. Val Kilmer is basically portraying a stereotypical conspiracy nut job, but he doesn't even do it that well. And that filmmakers decided to drag global warming into this is even more stupid because it denigrates a serious scientific effort by putting it in the same category with people who believe(d) the world would end in 2012 (and schizophrenic madmen). Aside from him, none of the characters are really given any back story, or any reason to care about them. Armand Assante (as an off-duty cop) does a serviceable job with the material given him and kind of acts as the surrogate for the audience, in a way. He calls out Val Kilmer's character for what he is, and says what everybody in the audience must be thinking about him. Still, it looked like he was sleepwalking through the entire thing. Eric Roberts was the only other actor in this piece of trash that I recognized, but he's given even less to do as one of the six people trapped in a steam room (or are they?). Here is where the writing really lacked. There was no character development to give the audience any reason to care about them, aside from a couple sentences from each stating who they were, where they were from and what they liked/disliked. That's it. After that, it was just them hanging around and slowly going crazy after they find out they can't get out. I just have to say that the film-making here was rather shoddy. The editing was really weird, especially in the steam room scenes. You would have one character speaking, but then it would fade to another while that character was still talking, and replay bits of dialogue. Also, the steam room scenes occur in between scenes of Val Kilmer and Armand Assante and are shown in such a way that it appears that Val Kilmer is either telepathic/omnipotent or he's describing something that already happened, which would directly contradict what he said in the beginning of the movie. Considering that his character is crazy, I guess I could just let it slide but honestly, it's just poor writing, through and through. Val Kilmer's character is basically a Jigsaw wannabe, but only in his head. Even with the mental state of the lead character in question, the appearance of two people (coincidentally, the last two survivors from the steam room) still makes no sense in the context of the story and raises more questions than it answers. Overall, this is a frustratingly bad movie with poor filmic qualities, horrible acting and a story that's too thin and makes no sense. I look forward to never seeing this again.

Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. I asked my neighbor for a movie to borrow. He has been watching the classics like The Shining. He proceeds to give me this piece of crud. I'm kinda mad at him for that. This was literally one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Just a bunch of disjointed scenes of the steam bath and then a dumb looking Kilmer twitching around with some lame horny cop. They just had this one girl take off her top just to show some boobs. No point to the story, no real reason for it, except for having nudity. And what was the point of the experiment anyways? If it got hot people would not just start going completely bonkers and killing each other. They would try to get out. And that rarely happened. No one died from the heat (which Val Kilmer kept harping on...Do you know what happens at 130 deg? Your Lungs melt, your eyes explode.) I knew it was going to be terrible just looking at the cover, and once it started i realized within the intro music. For some reason i watched the whole movie, only to see it end with some dumb ending that tries to have a big twist that makes you think. The only thing it made me do was boo. And I was in my bedroom. Please, save yourself 90 minutes, and never watch this film. boo

This was a truly wretched excuse for a film, which can be watched only with the assistance of a video game or something to keep your mind off of it. You've heard the premise that Bozo has six people locked in a steam room as hostages. However, it becomes clear that there's no actual connection. You'll never find out IF it happened, let alone why.The reactions of the hostages are idiotic even by survival scenario standards. After seeming years of morons emo-ing themselves and one another, one guy gets the notion to rip out the steam pipe. We chuckle as we await the rapid parboiling of the crew in steam from the ruptured pipe, but alas, it doesn't happen. But as soon as he thinks to use the heavy pipe to try to break out, the other hostages kill him for it. Eventually they get the notion to use the pipe to crack the window, great, but only so that they can drop it out of the room. It only gets worse from there. A five year old child would do better at an escape. It would make a good theater of the absurd except it's just too slow and stupid and there's no very good metaphorical point to be made, except that Americans are too darn dumb to worry about global warming, because they won't live that long except if they're lucky enough to be sold into slavery to wealthy PRC businessmen.The one and only redeeming feature of the film is that some of the actors and bare-breasted actresses are fairly pretty; though the director tried his best to make them look drab, greasy, with truly terrible personalities and generally undesirable. Those of us who delighted in Willow and at least admired in Fake Identity won't be dreaming about the Kilmer from this film.