Mr. Stitch (1995)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s an intriguing experimental aspect to the first half of Mr. Stitch that makes it feel more interesting than most other direct-to-video 1990s Science Fiction films: we’re in a white room, looking at a protagonist visibly (if implausibly) stitched together from dozens of other people, with a rather impressive make-up job to sell the patchwork effect. Wil Wheaton plays the creature as it tries to understand what it is, and rebels against its creators before they terminate the experiment. Coming from high-concept writer-director-producer Roger Avary, Mr. Stitch looks more ambitious than usual, even if some of the mid-1990s digital special effects are less than convincing. Rutger Hauer plays the mandatory mad scientist leading the project, while Nia Peeples is the just-as-mandatory kind-hearted scientist who helps the protagonist. Unfortunately, the mandatory elements soon overwhelm the unusual approach of the film’s first half, while flashbacks become more numerous, the action moves outside the white cell and we’re back to a far more conventional film. Eventually more bland than bad, Mr. Stitch struggles to have anything interesting to say once it gets going – although seeing Ron Perlman in a supporting role as an earnest, soft-spoken scientist is a fun piece of casting, considering the rest of Perlman’s filmography. Like many, many low-end movies, Mr. Stitch becomes less distinctive the longer it goes on, with contrived yet cliché plotting taking over whatever strengths it may have at first. As a Frankenstein take-off, it’s better than many – but it’s still limited by increasingly convenient screenwriting tricks. Digging into the film’s production history reveals that it was affected by creative differences between Avery and Hauer and a project inception that may or may not have been a pilot for a TV series. Whatever the source of the problems, the result lives on – and it remains disappointing.