Twixt (2011)

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Released in 2011 and Written & directed by Francis Ford Coppola, "Twixt" is a mystery dramedy with elements of horror starring Val Kilmer as Hall Baltimore, a mystery/horror writer with a declining career. On his latest book tour he arrives in a small town and gets caught up in a murder mystery upon meeting the eccentric sheriff, Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern). He meets a quasi-goth girl named V (Elle Fanning) who reminds him of his pubescent daughter. There's also a camp of weirdo goth-kids across the lake and Edgar Allen Poe shows up now and then as a kind of spirit-guide (Ben Chaplin), but what's dream and what's reality? And who murdered the female in the morgue? Alden Ehrenreich is on hand as the leader of the wannabe vampire youths, Flamingo, while Anthony Fusco plays the dubious pastor. Joanne Whalley appears as Baltimore's wife while Bruce A. Miroglio plays the fat bastage deputy. "Twixt" (as in 'betwixt,' between) combines the look of Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992) with the inscrutableness of 2007's "Youth Without Youth" plus a sense of humor. It's a quirky, hermetic mystery flick that leaves you scratching your head, but you strangely find yourself enjoying the ride, for the most part. It's a fun Gothic tale with beautifully haunting cinematography & atmosphere, highlighted by Poe, bell towers, ghosts and bats in the belfry, which bring to mind the horror tales of KD/MF, like 1987's ABIGAIL and 1993's IN THE SHADOWS. The enhanced moonlighting and otherworldly blueish gray tones are awesome. At the same time, "Twixt" is about the creative process as we observe the desperation of a writer with a splash of actual talent scraping the bottom of the barrel, often under the influence of sundry intoxicants. Will he come up with a best seller? Will he solve the murder mystery? Will he come to terms with his ghosts of the past and his inner demons, so to speak, specters and demons that arise from his guilt over what happened to his daughter? A lot of the movie is an internal dialogue with the writer's own ghosts and literary influences. Poe and Charles Baudelaire (a notorious substance abuser) are referenced, with the former intermittently appearing, but only when Baltimore is under the influence, or dreaming. Did the abuse and murder of the children happen as shown? Or did Poe and the vampire incarnation of his own daughter serve as muses to the writer as he works his way through creating a story that turns his career around? Coppola leaves it up to you to decide what is real and what is imagination, but the answers are there if you want to mine 'em. Francis got the story from a dream he had while staying in Istanbul. This sets-up the criticism that Coppola's dream is the audience's nightmare. While "Twixt" leaves too many threads dangling, the parts are all there; they just needed sewn together more effectively. Then again, Francis likely wanted the viewer to leave with questions to ponder. See below for insights. The film runs 88 minutes and was shot at Kelseyville and the Clear Lake area of Northern California. GRADE: B- (6.5/10)MISC. INSIGHTS ***SPOILER ALERT*** (Don't read further unless you've watched the movie)A lot of what happens in the town was the author working out his story. Most of it isn't real. The sheriff and deputy are real, as are their deaths at the end, not to mention Baltimore's wife. The sheriff really wanted to write with him. The movie shows what Baltimore experienced as he journeys through his creative process. His book is completed by the end, selling 30,000 copies.The bell tower keeps 7 different times, a representation of when Baltimore wasn't able to go on a trip with his daughter, as he set the clock with the wrong time, so the alarm didn't go off. And his daughter died on the trip. So "time" in the novel for him is useless and naturally the antagonist. Even V says keeping track of time "here" is pointless, which is why she missed his book signing. A big part of the movie is Hall's loss of his daughter. Time is the 'villain.' By not dealing with the tragic accident Baltimore is figuratively keeping his daughter undead. He's fighting time somehow. The age of his daughter when she died is also pertinent. She was betwixt a child and a teenager. And Hall was perhaps between deadlines and going on tours, thus missing out on some of her late childhood/early adolescence ("I thought they would be small boats... children's boats...") The vampire kids represent the strange changes children go through as they enter their teens – the music they like, how they dress, etc. – as they start developing a disposition of their own. It seems so weird to their parents who suddenly find themselves "on the outside looking in." Sheriff LaGrange represents the older generation thinking "Bah, these kids today!" The psycho pastor slays the kids to keep them from "becoming vampires," that is, becoming teenagers who will lose their innocence as they make many mistakes learning to decide for themselves. Flamingo is akin to the Pied Piper; he "gets away" at the end because he'll always be around: There will always be a teenage sense of rebellion, regardless of the clothes it wears.If my comments sound like several dubiously-linking threads its because the movie leaves you with this impression.

Francis Coppola comes nearly full circle in his career with this embarrassing, juvenile horror pastiche, analogous to porn-parody in its mainstream pastiche of the genre. After breaking into show biz with soft porn, he first garnered attention 50 years ago with "Dementia 13" for Roger Corman, and unlike Corman's classic Poe adaptations of that era, Coppola's Poe pastiche here is terrible.Main failing is a complete lack of self-awareness, which often besets artists full of themselves. As indicated in the dreadful "Making of" short subject directed by his grand-daughter Gia, Francis is caught up in the craft of filmmaking, including dabbling with that ever-trendy (and pointless) gimmick 3-D, oblivious to the silliness of his script and the lousy scenes printed. Clearly living in the past of his successes, married with an ill-advised affinity for independent (and amateurish) modern filmmaking, he seems to lack the necessary self- criticism that helped him fashion classic work 40 years back.Similarly, his lead Val Kilmer is also a has-been, content with underplaying most scenes and overacting crucial emotional ones, when not indulging in idiotic impressions (the Kevin Spacey syndrome), as when egged on by Coppola to "do Mark Twain". Apparently both star and director expect to earn brownie points for not caring one whit whether they make fools of themselves.Early in the film I sensed a promising return to a type of fantasy and horror that once gave birth to the seminal classic "Lemora" starring Rainbeaux Smith, beloved by connoisseurs if not the general public. Its director Richard Blackburn was a one-hit wonder, or perhaps less since this was not a hit but more of a cult classic.But to paraphrase Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, as applied not to Dan Quayle in the political arena, but to leading lady Elle Fanning, "You're no Rainbeaux Smith". A talented young actress, Fanning is a dead space on screen here in the crucial part of the mysterious undead girl who lures Val into the story. Besides soft porn roots, Coppola in the '80s was famously a hanger-on to the Adult industry, attending annual AVN awards dinners and hob-nobbing with sexy XXX starlets. Had he chosen porn rather than horror for this 2011 backsliding exercise, he could have cast the perfect young beauty Elsa Jean or even fulfilled by dream of giving current jail-bait superstar Piper Perri a chance to show her acting chops in Elle's role.Storyline of has-been, bargain-basement Stephen King horror writer Val (character name: Hall) ordered by his publisher to come up with a "bulletproof" ending for his new novel, or else, it was sad to see how perfunctory and dissatisfying an ending triple-threat Coppola concocted for this movie. The tongue-in-cheek performances (especially by Bruce Dern as sheriff and transparent bad guy, another Corman graduate) and series of stupid scenes included a rather lame in-joke of Val's nasty and venal wife played by his real wife Joanne Whalley (ex hyphenate Kilmer in her stage name). I would have preferred Nastassja Kinski doing a snake dance. Similarly, the handling of the red-herring goth cult of youngsters dangled for us was pure cliché and even less believable than such filler as presented in '60s softcore movies.The acid test for this junker is how it would have been greeted had it not borne the prestigious Coppola name in its credits. Perhaps critics and audiences would have felt sorry for an unknown filmmaker breaking in with a failed but technically adept genre piece. But for an all-time great wasting his time and intelligence on such crap -unforgivable.

The plot is a complete mess, I'll just get that out there immediately. At times its slow, other times silly, but it is always incoherent. Characters talk in metaphors without the audience being privy to them until ten minutes later or about technical subjects that seem irrelevant to the central plot. I still don't quite know what set up the clock tower scene myself. But I still can't bring myself to hate this movie.The reason being that so much care went into every other aspect. The art direction is first class, the ghostly dream world with its bluish gray with sharp red and yellow accents is down right beautiful. The setting is great, each location is recognizable and interesting from the vampire camp ground to the sheriff's bird house cluttered home. And in spite of having nowhere to go, so much care was put into the characters. The ghostly pallor of the dead girl drives home what she is long before the writing with just enough color to give her a somber beauty. And while the plot leaves much to be desired, the writing is excellent. The characters were written with such life in their dialogue and the narration perfectly balances being informative and entertaining. Character tropes like the drunk writer and the lazy deputy are used well, the drunken writer and the lazy deputy feel fresh where a lesser writer would make them cliché and tired.The flaw of the film was the way it handled the theme. Coppola got so caught up in his theme that the story comes off as an afterthought. As result, it takes great leaps in the hopes that you share his mindset when he is writing it. The mind set of a writer which is not a particularly common thought process. There is so much good I can't help but like the movie on some level, it just feels like that good doesn't go anywhere.And I would read the hell out of The Vampire Executioner.

A writer in a declining career arrives in a small town as part of his book tour and gets caught up in a murder mystery involving a young girl. That night in a dream, he is approached by a mysterious ghost. He's unsure of her connection to the murder in the town, but is grateful for the story being handed to him. He is led to the truth of the story, surprised to find that the ending has more to do with his own life than he could ever have anticipated....If you expect a comeback of sorts from Coppola, stay away, it's not in the same league of any if his greats, this was more of an experiment for him in editing, that went a bit awry.But saying that, its a strange little film that harks of Twin Peaks merged with The Company Of Wolves, If written by Stephen King. In fact, there are lots of elements that are familiar in the narrative.A sleepy town has a secret uncovered, when a writer comes to town, it's been done before, and had me thinking of Misery, The Shining, and Secret Window.But the story isn't really the important part of the film ironically, it's the cinematography and the wonderful, boozy dream sequences Kilmer has that makes this the curious piece that it is.Its a predictable enough story, fused with bizarre but brilliant things, Poe popping up every now and again, and the brilliant inclusion of Whalley as Kilmer's long suffering wife.So all in all, its nothing brilliant, amazing to look at, and very bizarre, but homaging Stephen King a little too much.