Tim Rozon

  • Terror Train (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) I’m not sure anyone was really asking for a remake of the Canadian slasher “classic” Terror Train, but producers have their own mercenary motives and so now we have another updated piece of Can-Con ready for looping cable-TV showings. (I’m not kidding—the credits reveal that the film was partially financed by Canadian cable-TV channel Crave.)  The ludicrous premise of the original remains intact, as a bunch of college-age students (plus a magician and a few train workers) board a non-stop train on New Year’s Eve and then suffer through both a magic show and a psychotic killer stabbing everyone unlucky enough to be alone. There’s a logic to it all, of course, as suggested by the non-railway prologue, and a logic that does change from the original to borrow from one of the most famous slashers of all time. But you’re not really watching Terror Train for the plot, right? If you’re a gore-hound, you’re really interested in the escalating kills. If you’re slightly less of a horror fan, you may get to enjoy the atmosphere of a train on a long nighttime trip with everyone getting slaughtered inside. For those with good memories of the original, there isn’t much to see here—there have been updates to bring the setting forward by forty years (most notably ditching the idea of an all-white cast, although cell phones are not allowed for plot reasons), the patter is more contemporary and Jamie Lee Curtis has been replaced by the rather more attractive Robyn Alomar, while Canadian comedy icon Mary Walsh gets a decidedly non-comic role as the train conductor. Elsewhere in the cast, I rather liked Nadine Bhabha as a helpful train employee, while Tim Rozon has a nicely rumpled edge as the magician (although he can’t quite displace the fact that David Copperfield played the original character). Otherwise, this remade Terror Train is very much a low-budget slasher lightly updated. The gore didn’t strike me as extreme (always a plus), but there’s no hiding that it’s still a slasher. Saying that I didn’t hate it is actually praise from me in that genre, but I won’t try to pretend it’s much more than an easy casual cash-in with no ulterior ambitions. Amazingly enough, there’s a Terror Train 2 already on the schedule, which tells you much about the true intentions of this one.

  • Merry Swissmas (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) If you feel that I’m spending a lot of time justifying why I choose to watch some Christmas films, you’re not wrong—it doesn’t take a lot of perfunctory made-for-TV holiday movies to figure out that they’re made to be alike. Plotting is irrelevant, casting is usually a non-factor, production values are low and everything has the awkward, barely cinematic atmosphere of something done quick and cheap. So: what is it that distinguishes Merry Swissmas from others of the same ilk? Well, Jodie Sweetin stars in it, and she was one of the facets of Fuller House I liked best. So why not? It’s not as if those films are meant to be demanding after all. But star power only takes you so far, and Merry Swissmas’s clunky attempts to iterate on the usual formula aren’t any better. The big difference in plotting, as much as I can tell, is that our usual big-city career professional heroine goes back “home” not to a small American town, but to the inn that her mother manages in the Swiss Alps. But this international fillip aside (complete with “Swiss Christmas traditions” that may or may not be wildly exaggerated), there’s not a lot of difference here. Of course, she’ll meet an eligible bachelor and it’s not a minute’s worth of contemplation about whether she wants to slow down her jet-setting lifestyle that changes much. The “Swiss” atmosphere is made of stock footage and French-Canadian Laurentians locations dressed up in pseudo-European style. The rest of it isn’t much better—there’s a kid to cheer up, past wrongs to right, miscommunications to clarify and everything leads to a Christmas climax. Sweetin isn’t particularly good and neither is co-star Tim Rozon, but their performances barely matter in a film that would rather give you an overdose of Christmas clichés than build anything that could stand on its own. Fortunately, Christmas movies life Merry Swissmas fail gracefully: they may not be good, but they’re hard to hate. On the other hand, they do lead viewers to become selective about the ones they choose to watch.