DOPPELGANGER – I’m indebted to Dem for digging up this strange Drew Barrymore flick, which I’d never even heard of until its Cult Labs debut. It’s a hard one to pin down alright – how many movies pitch as De Palma clones, veer off into drifty neon LA half-dreams, then mutate into KNB fx body melt bonanzas? I haven’t come across all that many. Barrymore plays a troubled heiress type who lands in Tinseltown and shacks up with a struggling writer. Most of the preamble juggles mismatched roomie quirks with a psychotic undercurrent involving Drew’s ‘other half’ – her crazed, stalkerish double. Is she really being pursued by her doppelganger, or is she just a bit highly strung? There’s definite rhyme and reason in there and it more or less computes by the end, but the non-stop procession of mild oddity makes for such a crazy quilt. Watch as Drew takes a shower of blood and after ten minutes wonder aloud whether you dreamt it (you didn’t!). Look on as Drew does a sexy dance surrounded by a roomful of total nineties LA pricks, has a nosebleed, then freaks out at a PTSD-inspired murder apparition that resembles a computer-generated kid’s tv gore hologram. Ponder why every five minutes a mysteriously Bava-lit scene pops out of nowhere to liven things up with zingy colours, then realise it’s because Drew’s garden sports a ridiculous glowing water feature. Above all, ask yourself why you should always turn to a sex phoneline manager for advice about the paranormal. Oh yeah, then at the end a woman transforms into a worm that knocks out two stop motion skeletons! Cool! Aesthetics are all over the shop, a veil of TV movie-esque sound palette and direct-to-video nineties sheen that parts to reveal tilted angles, long shadows and wonky neo-noirism. The muscles will knot in your face as you strain to piece it all together. Is this some grand vision or a desperate cock up? An arch parody or a load of shit that someone threw into a blender, thinking they’d get a movie? I don’t want to know. I can’t imagine that this was very well regarded at the time and I’m pretty sure that these days most will find that they can’t make it through without a smirk here and there, but no-one can really rule out whether this was the film David Lynch had in mind when he made ‘Mulholland Drive’. Am I joking? A hypnotic time capsule that piles slick artifice atop transcendental bafflement and taunts you with its many secrets. It’s ace. I’m in the queue if they ever do a blu ray.
RESURRECTION – Staying with the nineties, when movies about bible-fixated serial killers were all the rage, ‘Resurrection’ features Highlander guy as a cop on the trail of a murderer who loves to quote the Psalms. I’m not decrying Lambert as an actor, but he totally hams it whenever he tries to express any heightened feeling – you could imagine his face in slow motion as he does a long, drawn out “Noooooo….” ‘Resurrection’ is very of its time. The constant raininess, the sallow lighting, the air of portent as we drift through grotty rooms and corridors, all point to some very obvious influences. It has its quirks, though. The killer possesses a vibe that makes me think of some kind of weird crossover between Steve Buscemi and Klaus Kinski. The splatter is fairly demure in that nineties manner, though not always – there’s a really nasty hindquarter leg amputation in a filthy warehouse, and the central image of a rotting ‘FrankenChrist’ in a room full of TV monitors is quite bracing. Silliness goofs in and out of focus with bits like the impromptu rooftop baby juggling at the end. Ultimately, it’s a familiar trek down a path well-trodden, with some nice diversions and gnarly detours to make up for the occasional sense of “aren’t all films from its day somehow a bit like this?”. It’s no ‘8 ½’, nor even a ‘Se7en’, but when it works it’s a good solid six.
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