Roger Christian

  • The Sender (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2022) While supernatural horror film The Sender dates from the slasher heydays of 1982, there’s something slightly more interesting going on here than a psycho-with-a-knife. Harkening more to the small wave of psi-power thrillers of the late 1970s, it features a young man able to create havoc with his mind—stuck in a psychiatric hospital, and far more troublesome a patient than his initially skeptical doctors can suspect. A few dream sequences blend with reality in weird ways. Much of the film is dull, but there are one or two sequences where director Roger Christian lets loose with the chaotic craziness and the film shows glimpses of what it could have been had it maintained that energy throughout. As it is, The Sender feels uneven—a slow start, an increasingly conventional plot and plenty of missed opportunities often highlighted by intriguing moments. The slightly-more-ambitious directing style works for and against the film in that it helps distinguish it as something more than a cheap thriller, but also slows down the pace of something that would have been more successful as a B-grade genre film. Still, there’s something there that prefigures more oneiric films along the lines of the Nightmare on Elm Street series.

  • Stranded (2013)

    Stranded (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2014)  Oy…  Repeat after me: low-budget Canadian science-fiction movies are rarely good.  Having been burned a few times already, I really should know better by now.  Still, there’s a lower threshold of quality that one expects, and it’s fascinating to see Stranded struggle to even meet that basic level.  The first five minutes are almost promising, as a small crew on a lunar mining base is threatened by a catastrophic meteoroid impact.  Is this a survival story?  Alas, no: Within moments, the lone female character discovers something alien, is impregnated, gives birth to a shape-shifting monster that decides to look like another character and then go on to kill enthusiastically.  Dull stuff, rapidly crashing at the bottom of the list of Alien rip-offs.  Stranded is so bad that I’m actually offended at the impregnation subplot, which throws a charged plot development in the middle of a movie that doesn’t earn or deserve such emotional heavy-lifting.  Beyond the dull characters and repetitive scripting, much of the rest of the movie is just too dull to care about: badly-lit, limply propelled forward, saddled with an Earth-bound epilogue that weakens the result rather than strengthen it, Stranded is just yet another Canadian SF film filmed in a dim warehouse (in no less a film powerhouse than Regina, Saskatchewan) featuring a handful of characters and a monster.  With this, director Roger Christian has actually made a film worse than his own Battlefield Earth, which is praise of an impressive sort.  Poor Christian Slater looks a bit confused here: sure, he’s getting paid, but is it all worth it?  I was sort-of-impressed to see obvious models being used for moon-base shots rather than CGI: Nowadays, it’s the kind of artistic decision that shows a commitment to lack of quality, and speaks for the rest of the film.