Reborn - The New Jekyll + Hyde

OK, I bought this pack with three, or four horror films in it. This was one of them. (The Nun, another horrible movie was another)

So, this movie has an alright budget, not too bad acting, but it is just so boring. I mean, almost nothing horror related happens at all. Not that I can remember anyway. There are some kills or something, but it's just not entertaining.

I think it is an attempt at making more of a "serious" movie, not an entertaining one. It's just not good. It will bore you.

I write this review just to warn others. If you are after some entertaining horror, look elsewhere! If you are looking for some kind of bland, sci-fi- thriller-drama thing, give it a try.

This movie has great production values, good acting, a good idea behind the script, and competent crew, yet it fails at being in any way interesting or entertaining. The problem is how the story is told. Rather than go with a straightforward timeline, they mixed present and past and added a voice-over that provides some philosophical musings. The basic story is of course Jeckyl and Hyde: 2 personalities in one person, one good, one bad. The twist here is that the transformation is achieved here by a medical student looking for some breakthrough medication by experimenting with illicit drugs. The main character is established as a good guy only in a few scenes, most of the movie he spends as a bad guy, and he sure gets bad. Some of the scenes would be classified as "torture porn" by some, but in this case the victims are mostly males for some reason. Another sleazy character provides the drugs. Then there's the mandatory loving girl, who's interested in our JH for no reason and goes out of her way to care for him. Another friend gets to be the nice guy who gets bullied. There is not one character to care for. There's some gore and violence, a little bit of nudity of a corpse. Nothing that would make this movie worthwhile. Overall, for a horror movie this is rather tame and lame, slow-going and uninteresting.

Meek medical student Henry 'J' Jekyll (Bryan Fisher) is fed up with coming 'second place in life' and so develops a drug that increases his confidence and sexual attraction but which also unleashes uncontrollable violent tendencies.

I'm in two minds about this modern spin on the classic Robert Louis Stevenson tale: on one hand, it's a competently written, highly polished effort that features solid performances and succeeds in being suitably disturbing at times; on the other, it lacks genuine soul, director Nick Stillwell trying so hard to impress with his technical prowess that he has forgotten that sometimes less is more, and that one true innovation is worth a hundred tried and tested film-making techniques.

It's also good to remember that a couple of likable characters can go a long way (it's hard to empathise with any of this film's shallow, over-privileged, drug-taking douche-bags), and that an overuse of emotional pop songs on the soundtrack makes potentially powerful scenes seem like something out of Dawson's Creek.

Jekyll + Hyde is about a young college student that experiments with drugs and winds up creating a potion that allows him to change his personality and appearance. It also shortens his temper and prompts him to do bad things like kill and torture people. Jekyll isn't much better than Hyde in this remake. This is a pretty close take off on the original plot, but its not mediocre acting. It just didn't come across as a believable story. The plot was good and the dialog was passable, but the execution of the scenes came across as hollow and a little false. There were some entertaining parts and the cinematography was good.

This is not a real review, it should be understood more as a collection of impressions on the film.

Revisitation of one of the most classic horror stories in history, a retelling that aims to be modern, young and captivating but which only manages to be terribly sloppy due to too many plot holes and above all due to a very discontinuous rhythm that undermines attention and involvement of the spectator who then spends more time wondering about the choices of the characters rather than paying attention to the film in general and this is because everything the various characters do is generally made with very little sense.