Fréchette’s tie-faced vigilante pastiche has VHS charm in flashes, but stretched across 99 minutes it’s a one-note joke that quickly wears thin.
Rémi Fréchette’s Tie Man has the right ingredients for a cult pulp revival: a 1990s gothic-art deco cityscape, a disfigured vigilante with a handful of ties fused to his face, and a grieving policewoman (Catherine Beauchemin) who teams up with him to take down slick crime boss Franz DeMann (Peter Seaborne). What began as a French TV series has been expanded into a 99-minute feature, pitched between Darkman and Troma.
Fréchette’s affection for 1990s VHS culture drives the film. He has spoken of wanting to mimic the dubbed American action imports that were staples in Québec, and the feature doubles down on that affectation: deliberately awkward dialogue, stiff cadences, and a pastiche of post-synced bravado. The approach is sincere, even nostalgic, and it locates the film within a psychotronic lineage and the world of early 90s gothic superheroes like The Crow or the Tim Burton Batman movies.
But what works as a five-minute gag is stretched here across 99 minutes. Once you’ve absorbed the joke – the tie mask, the fake-dub rhythms, the pulpy detective and mad scientist archetypes – there is little escalation. Scenes fall into a sketch-like pattern, with humour and menace circling the same groove. What should feel anarchic instead becomes plodding.
Jérémie Earp commits gamely to Tie Man’s stitched-leather menace, and Catherine Beauchemin is a steady presence as Marjolaine, the high-kicking cop who joins his crusade. Yet both are flattened by the insistence on bad-dubbing affectation, their performances pitched at parody rather than propulsion. The pacing, perhaps inherited from the original TV-series format, stalls repeatedly, giving the film the odd rhythm of stitched-together episodes.
There are moments where the film hints at the spirited camp it wants to be, but too often it lands as a noir-ish, bargain-bin version of this year’s The Toxic Avenger remake – and I didn’t much like The Toxic Avenger to begin with.
If you’re steeped in psychotronic B-cinema, or VHS kitsch, there’s occasional enjoyment: enough mood, enough style, enough of a DIY spirit. But Tie Man feels less like a fully developed feature than an extended homage that never finds a new edge.
Tie Man played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX
Whitlock&Pope 