FrightFest review – Enhanced

My notes on Enhanced

This wintery, action-heavy, rather solemn Canadian science fiction picture has a lot in common with mini-franchises like the Scanners and Universal Soldier sagas – it goes with glowing electric eyes and blue CGI glows to indicate superpowers, but dresses everyone in flat, drab black and wool hats to dowdy them down to the point when no one would think of calling them comic book characters.

A team of government/military mutant hunters track down escapees from a super-soldier program – categorised Bravo, Charlie, etc, though you know that ‘there are no Alphas’ statement is setting something up – but hero-type guy George (George Tchortov) finds that the latest target being attractive young girl mechanic Anna (Alanna Bale) rather than the bearded stuntmen he usually hunts makes him question the orders handed down by his military superior officer (Adrian Holmes).

Complicating the situation is that the Enhanced are also being hunted down by one of their own, an energy-vampire serial killer – is it the exposition-gabbling bearded hypoglycemic science type Eli (Michael J. Delaney) or the cool Asian mystery man/rescuer David (Chris Mark)?  Or could it be – well, no it couldn’t, because this doesn’t run to too many external characters, except for some brainwashed Betas who go into action with glowing red control devices hung round their necks after the painstick-wielding regular grunts are put down by an extradimensional super-being who sneers at our entire universe.

Director James Mark (Kill Order), who also co-scripted with Matthew Nayman and Peter Van Horne, handles the many fight scenes well, though it feels a little like a stuntman’s showreel rather than a feature.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.