Crew
Director/Screenplay – James Eaves, Producers – James Eaves & Laura Eaves, Photography – John Raggett, Music – Ronnie Doyle, Additional Music – Striking Media Music, Creature Effects – Harold Gasnier & Beverley Webb, Production Design – Harold Gasnier. Production Company – Amber Pictures/Eaves-Eaves Productions.
Cast
Sophia Dawnay (Katherine), Lisa Devlin (Jane), Tina Barnes (Natasha), Sylvia Robson (Elaine), Daniel Jordan (Dr Murdock), Jonathan Sidgwick (Handsome Man)
Plot
Four girls come around locked up in a facility. They have amnesia and know nothing about who they are except for their names printed on wrist badges. The girls are then taken away for experiments by a doctor and probed with questions. Jane wakes to find that Elaine has had her kidney removed and numbers left tattooed on her body. Others begin to vanish in a similar manner. They try to understand the arcane purpose behind the experiments.
Bane was the fourth film from British director James Eaves. Eaves first appeared with Sanitarium (2001), Hellbreeder (2004) and the modest The Witches Hammer (2007). Eaves made assorted episodes of the horror anthologies Bordello Death Tales (2009), Battlefield Death Tales (2012) and 60 Seconds to Die (2016), before returning to feature films with Neighbours from Hell (2016), You Might Get Lost (2021) and The Apocalypse Box (2024).
Bane should not be confused with the DC Comics super-villain Bane, memorably incarnated by Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises (2012) a few years after this. Instead, what we have here is an Imprisonment Thriller. It is an intriguing set-up where four girls suffering from Amnesia are brought in and subjected to a series of experiments whose purpose remains opaque. Even more mysterious things occur as various of the girls are returned with organs missing and numbers cut into their skin before they are killed. There soon becomes a WTF bizarreness to the proceedings like when we see the two scientists sitting beside one of the bodies while something with writhing tentacles stands over it just out of frame.
It also feels that a lot of these proceedings are overlong and dragged out, hinting at mystery without actually progressing anywhere. There are flashback scenes that drag on and on. Eventually, the film does arrive at an explanation for what is going on. Although even then it is an explanation that doesn’t fully give answers as to why people are removing organs or leave numbers cut into the skin of the people afterwards.
Trailer here