From IndieWire: While ’90s American cinema tends to play up the legacies of auteur superpowers like Tarantino and PTA, Larry Fessenden deserves just as much appreciation. Ever since his 1995 breakout “Habit,” Fessenden has combined a scrappy New York filmmaking aesthetic with genuine frights, and “Depraved” is a welcome return to those roots. A tense, dramatic retelling of “Frankenstein” with modern-day concerns, the movie stars David Call as a surgeon and Iraq war vet roped into performing experiments on a corpse to bring it back to life. When he’s successful, the monster (played by a lanky, corpse-like Alex Breaux) develops a natural curiosity about the world around him, even as he grows cynical about the people teaching him what to do. At once an indictment of technology and the quest to control the natural order, “Depraved” makes the case that Fessenden should really make movies more often, because these troubled times benefit from his spooky voice.
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