Whatever you do, don't open your movie like Mr. Reset and the Society of Turnbuckle & Bone.
The opening just keeps going. Exposition, narration, graphics, mythology, ominous declarations and some supposedly badass rock music all fighting for attention before I've been given a single reason to care about any of it. It's corny almost immediately, and somehow becomes more exhausting the longer it continues.
Great.
We're entering a world where a secret society operates behind professional wrestling, promising wrestlers fame and success while demanding increasingly ugly sacrifices in return. At the center is Mr. Reset, played by the film's writer and director Jedediah Koszewski, while real professional wrestler Vinny Pacifico plays a fictionalized version of himself called Power Punch.
On paper, I'm interested.
I have a special place in my heart for professional wrestling because I used to love it, and I still have a lot of respect for the art form and the sport itself. WWE, indie wrestling, old stuff, new stuff, the ridiculous storytelling, the promos, the characters, the strange mixture of athleticism and theater. Horror and professional wrestling should fit together beautifully because wrestling is already built around masks, alter egos, violence, betrayal, mythology and people dramatically threatening each other under colored lights.
So I really wanted to find something to grab onto here.
Ten minutes in, I was already struggling.
And that's frustrating because there is genuine originality in what Koszewski is attempting. Mr. Reset doesn't look like every other microbudget horror movie. The editing, giant titles, sound effects, graphic inserts, color choices, old-school video game animation and general visual assault give the movie an identity almost immediately.
I just found that identity unbelievably annoying.
Everything is pushed. Every transition wants to announce itself. Every effect wants you to notice the effect. The audio keeps hammering away. The narration keeps explaining. Text keeps appearing. Images are chopped together with the energy of someone terrified you might look away for three seconds.
Eventually I wanted the movie to just put two people in a room and let them talk.
That rarely happens.
The strange thing is that this approach makes perfect sense for professional wrestling. Wrestling promotions have always relied on heightened editing, loud music, dramatic graphics, backstage promos and exaggerated personalities. Mr. Reset clearly understands that language.
The problem is that watching something resembling an indie wrestling promo for a few minutes can be fun.
Watching one for an hour is another matter.
The movie is only about 63 minutes long, which sounds merciful until you're watching it. If I weren't reviewing this, I would have turned it off. Not once either. I had that urge repeatedly, which is impressive for something barely over an hour.
There are portions focused on Power Punch's career and ambitions that should give the movie some emotional grounding, but instead they often feel self-mythologizing. Wrestling is already a business where performers build exaggerated versions of themselves, so there was potentially something interesting in blurring Vinny Pacifico the real wrestler with Power Punch the character.
Instead, much of it plays like the movie wants me to become invested in a career retrospective before I've become invested in the person.
The little video game-inspired animations are fun.
I wish I liked almost anything surrounding them as much.
The larger idea isn't bad. A secret organization promising success in exchange for control over your identity and personal life is almost too perfect for professional wrestling. This is an industry where performers can spend years destroying their bodies, sacrificing relationships, living on the road and chasing a tiny chance that somebody eventually decides they're worth putting on television.
There's a movie in that.
I don't think this is it.
The film keeps explaining its mythology instead of making me feel trapped inside it. Mr. Reset tells us things. Characters tell us things. The soundtrack tells us how intense those things are supposed to be. The editing then tells us again, usually with another graphic or sound effect.
At a certain point, I understood.
Please stop explaining.
The acting doesn't help. Some performances are clearly leaning into professional wrestling's deliberately exaggerated performance style, and I'm willing to meet a movie halfway on that. Wrestling isn't naturalistic acting, nor should it be. The problem is that Mr. Reset doesn't consistently establish where wrestling performance ends and movie performance begins.
Sometimes that awkwardness is probably intentional.
Sometimes it's just awkward.
The narration may have been my breaking point. It has that relentlessly self-important tone where every sentence sounds like it's introducing the final boss of a video game. Combine that with the music, titles and editing and the movie starts feeling less like a story and more like somebody continually showing you something they think is really cool.
That's a dangerous word in filmmaking.
Cool.
The harder you work to convince me something is cool, the less cool it usually becomes.
The camera work has similar problems. There are shots and compositions that are clearly reaching for a stylized, surreal horror aesthetic, and occasionally an image works. But so much visual information is constantly being thrown at you that individual images rarely have time to register.
The movie has style.
Taste is a different question.
That's probably the larger issue I kept coming back to while watching it. Low-budget filmmaking comes with obvious limitations, and I'm usually willing to forgive a lot when somebody is making something with limited money and resources.
But most of what bothered me about Mr. Reset doesn't require more money to fix.
Knowing when to cut away doesn't cost anything.
Knowing when a graphic is unnecessary doesn't cost anything.
Knowing when music should stop doesn't cost anything.
Knowing when you've explained enough doesn't cost anything.
Those are judgment calls.
That's why some modest independent movies can immediately feel more assured than movies made for considerably more money. Resources matter, obviously, but they can't substitute for restraint or knowing which creative impulses are helping the movie and which ones need to be killed.
Mr. Reset rarely kills anything.
Everything gets in.
That also makes the movie's better ideas harder to appreciate. Bobby Fish appearing as the Career Assassin makes sense within this universe. The masked Society itself has potential. Wrestling is full of people reinventing themselves under new names and personas, so the idea of a shadow organization literally "resetting" performers could have been fertile ground for horror.
I wanted the film to slow down long enough to actually explore some of that.
Instead, there's another cut.
Another title.
Another noise.
Another explanation.
Jesus.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that I don't think Mr. Reset and the Society of Turnbuckle & Bone is cynical. Quite the opposite. There seems to be a lot of genuine love for professional wrestling behind it, and Pacifico has spoken publicly about the project combining his interest in wrestling and horror.
I believe that passion is real.
Passion doesn't automatically make the movie good.
There's also something admirable about making something this strange in the first place. Nobody can accuse Mr. Reset of being a generic possession movie, another masked slasher or some interchangeable streaming thriller. Koszewski and company clearly had an idea for what this thing should look and sound like, then committed to it completely.
Unfortunately, commitment can work both ways.
If I love the choice, committing harder makes it better.
If I hate the choice, committing harder means I get to hate it for 63 minutes.
By the end, I felt less like I'd watched a feature than I'd been trapped inside an extremely elaborate wrestling promotional package that refused to end. The mix of horror, wrestling mythology, graphics, animation and surrealism is undeniably its own thing, and I'm sure there will be people who respond to that energy much more than I did.
I wanted to.
I have enough affection for wrestling, and enough respect for what the form can do, that I probably gave the movie more patience than I otherwise would have. It still didn't work for me.
That's probably why I can't bring myself to completely bury it. My affection for wrestling and the genuine originality of the concept buy the movie a little goodwill. I can see the passion. I can see what they're attempting. I'd rather watch somebody fail trying something unusual than watch another completely anonymous horror movie assembled from whatever was popular three years ago.
But unusual and good aren't synonyms.
This is rough. The performances are rough. The narration is rough. The camera work is rough. The screenplay buries potentially interesting ideas under explanations, while the editing and sound design assault almost every quiet moment before it has a chance to exist.
There may be an audience for the particular frequency Mr. Reset and the Society of Turnbuckle & Bone is broadcasting on.
I'm apparently not tuned to it.
For me, this was an hour I wanted back.
2.6/10
Critical Screening was provided a screener of Mr. Reset and the Society of Turnbuckle & Bone for review purposes.