Twixt - a bad, stupid bad movie

 

At the end of Twixt it’s revealed that everything was just a story that the main character was writing. Now some people reading this might be angry that I spoiled the ending. You shouldn’t be. I saved you time. I had to spoil this because it’s stupid, lazy bullshit that’s sums up the entire movie. It’s nonsense on the same level of ‘it was all a dream’, the sort of bastard storytelling that kids get beaten out of them in grade school. If you pull that crap in a novel, you’ll be laughed at so hard you’ll lose your literacy skills. It’s inexcusable.

And it’s particularly inexcusable here in Twixt, a subpar tepid 'horror' flick, especially so considering the director it came from – Francis Ford Coppola. The man should know better. He should also have crafted a better movie, because this one is terrible. Bland, boring and dull, with subpar acting and filmmaking and a thin layer of pretention spread over its nothing story – Twixt is a bad movie made by a once great director.

I don’t have pictures because I only rented the movie (thank god) so I’ve added pictures from other, better Coppola movies.

The cat in this scene from the beginning of The Godfather must be high as shit on catnip, since it keeps rubbing itself lovingly on Marlon Brando

Horror novelist Hall Baltimore (played by Val Kilmer) is struggling. He made his fame writing witchcraft-themed horror stories, but since then his popularity has vanished and while he’s expected to churn out more witchcraft-based stories he finds it immeasurably dull. The final insult-to-injury is the humiliating book signing he attends in a small town – he’s set up at the back of a tool shop and nobody knows or cares who he is.

He’s approached by town Sheriff LaGrange, a wannabe writer who wants to collaborate with Hall on a book about vampires regarding a series of unsolved murders in town. LaGrange, eager to sell his idea to Hall, takes him to the morgue to show him the body of a dead girl with an iron pole impaled through her chest – the latest murder by a local serial killer.

That night Hall has a strange dream where he meets a mysterious young girl named V who claims to be a vampire. She tours him through the town and tells him about the mysterious history of many of its landmarks, including an abandoned hotel Edgar Allen Poe once visited, a clock tower with seven faces which tell different times, an orphanage with a dark past and the riverside camp where a bunch of goth teenagers thought to be Satanists hang out.

Waking from the dream, Hall becomes convinced that he needs to write a book about the place. Thus he stays, determined to return to his dreams and find inspiration while also looking into the murder. What follows is a series of scenes and dream sequences where Val Kilmer tries to write his book and attempts to solve the murder and uncover the secrets of the town.

Smell, Napalm, Morning, Surfing, Blah Blah Blah

Val Kilmer is a strange actor because the quality of his acting is entirely dependent on the size and scope of his role. He’s excellent as Doc Holliday in Tombstone, and his minor support roles in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans were great. In all these roles he played second or third fiddle to other, better actors and he shone through (Doc Holliday steals every scene from Kurt Russel in Tombstone).

It’s when you give him a whole movie where you realise how little of a shit he gives. He was a boring Batman, and as Hall he’s even more boring. He doesn’t act so much as he stands around reading his lines. A scene where he’s meant to have writer’s block involves him sitting there with a blank expression on his face, which is the same exact expression he uses when he’s investigating a haunted clock tower, viewing a corpse or digging up a coffin in a dream.

The rest of the cast? They appear occasionally (most of the film is just Kilmer), but none are memorable and some don’t even have names. The only two recurring characters are V and the Sheriff, and the former does nothing other than talk about her backstory while the latter acts kooky but isn’t involved much. The rest are mostly there for single scenes, never doing anything and mostly being their costume (the leader of the goth kids looks like a goth and has no other characteristics). 

Gary Oldman Dracula, from a movie actually about vampires

Half the movie is dedicated to slow, dull dream sequences. That’s where everything happens. They’re shot in black and white, with occasional splashes of colour (like some red on V). Sometimes Hall wanders around the town. Sometimes he talks to V about how she was molested by a priest, who then murdered a bunch of children while she ran away (more stupid spoilers, but whatever - none of it happened anyway). Hall hangs out with Edgar Allen Poe a few times who talks about the importance of endings (which is silly due to Twixt’s final cop-out) and helps him get over the death of his daughter. The whole ‘Hall’s daughter died and he feels responsible’ thing is an example of the incredibly loose narrative threads that are rife in the film – it’s hinted to maybe once, and then the film suddenly decides it’s really important, only to drop it completely afterwards. Same with the mystery of the clock tower and solving the murder and all of this other crap.

As a result of the constant dream sequences, we also get a whole lot of scenes of Hall lying in bed, falling asleep or getting knocked out so he can have a dream sequence. They happen a lot, to an almost laughable degree.

The film is billed as horror but good luck finding any thrills or chills. Nothing frightening, atmospheric or creepy happens and there's no gore. The things that do occur are boring clichés. There's a scene where Hall and a few others use a Ouija board to talk to spirits which is so tame and lame that it's almost a parody of other films that use Ouija boards, only Twixt takes it seriously. The 'vampire' angle adds nothing to the film at all, features into none of the plot and is only mentioned once or twice.

 

Keanu Reeves could potentially use his wooden acting to kill Vampires

Twixt is a bad movie and confusingly so. I mean that in the sense that it’s confusing that it’s as bad as it is. Francis Ford Coppola has made three excellent movies that are worthy of being deemed classics – the first two Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now. How he could go from them to direct something as bland, as dull, as bad as this is astounding. Now granted he’s directed his share of crappy movies (‘Jack’, in which Robin Williams plays a thirteen year old boy with the body of Robin Williams), but this just takes the cake. It smacks of disinterest and a lack of effort. Nobody seemed to give a shit in any aspect of the film.

It’s also a visually dull film, which is astounding considering Coppola’s previous pedigree. ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, for all its faults (and there are many), was visually vibrant and interesting. Twixt is visually bland and uninteresting. The black and white (with an occasional bit of colour) dream sequences are more drab than artistic, and have no meaning whatsoever.  

There's no caption here. I'm done.

The ending twist, that it was all a story Hall was writing, is preceded by a stupid ‘shock’ scene (the dead girl in the morgue is V, Hall pulls the iron pole out, she comes back to life as a vampire and attacks him). Then you switch to him in his editor's office with the manuscript, and the editor praising the ending (no sane editor would praise that ending). It was all a story, and not even a good one. It also leaves a lot of questions as to whether anything actually happened – did Hall even go to the small town? Not that it matters at all. Nothing matters. The only thing anybody will take from this is disappointment.

Attack the Gas Station

 

As far as descriptive titles go, it’s a pretty apt one for this oddball South Korean comedy. Four bored, disillusioned youths attack and rob a gas station, trashing the place, terrorising the employees and making away with some cash. A few days later, they get bored again and rob the same gas station. This time the manager hides the money, so the four take the employees hostage and take over the gas station, pumping gas for customers and pocketing the money.

What follows is an strange night where they beat up a bunch of people, take a lot of hostages, force the hostages to fight each other, pump gas, antagonise customers, order Chinese take-out, antagonise the Chinese delivery man, antagonise the police and smash up the gas station a few more times. By the end a full-on street brawl has erupted between gangsters, angry take-out drivers and the police.

Underneath all of this are brief snippets of the main four that show reasons for their disillusionment. These segments give a little insight into the personalities of the main four, which helps because there isn’t much to most of the characters. The movie has fun with its premise, and is fairly entertaining for what it is, but it’s lacking that certain something to lift it up.

 

It’s not really about anything. Barring the central premise of ‘guys take over gas station, hijinks ensue’, there isn’t really anything of a plot structure. There is a gradual sense of progression as the night goes on, but otherwise it’s a series of fairly humorous events slightly linked until the morning where it ends. That ending itself is sort of shrug worthy, though the end credits give snippets of what happened to each character afterwards.

There is a sense of escalation and recurring events. The four of them continue to piss off a lot of different people, often with direct consequences of each other. They constantly antagonise a Chinese delivery man, causing him to form a posse of angry delivery men. Most events lead into each other directly, giving the escalation a sense of meaning. Otherwise the focus is mostly on the characters, which is odd because they are all pretty basic really.

The four attacking youths are the film’s heroes, and while it’s mostly a comedic light-hearted affair and played for laughs, some of the stuff they do is concerning and dangerous. They take two people hostage and lock them in a car boot, where they remain completely forgotten for the rest of the movie (to the point where it’s an honest question as to whether anybody will find them). They instigate two car accidents, beat a lot of people up and do some other pretty sketchy and dangerous stuff. While their anger and disillusionment is given some brief outlining, it’s a pretty thin reason for us to take their side as they terrorise the gas station.

 

No Mark, the leader, is odd. He spends a lot of the movie basically being a villain. He’s the most serious of the group, constantly threatening and assaulting the manager. He’s the most calm and collected of the group, but also responsible for the more illegal plans and ideas. His backstory might be a culturally specific one – he has the stigma of being an orphan. Honestly it’s sort of hard to really get behind him, he’s played straight so he comes across as a villain more than anything for the most part.

Mad Dog, the dumbest of the group, is fun. He carries around a wooden beam that he constantly makes use of. His job for most of the film is handling the ‘hostages’, which often involves making them lie down with their heads on the ground. He’s probably the most fun character, as his hijinks tend to be less malevolent and more juvenile, and underneath it he has a weird sense of justice.

Paint is the least involved and interesting of the four. He’s a painter/artist whose dreams and talents are trashed by his angry traditional father who considers his creativity pointless. He does some painting I guess, but he leaves the smallest impression of the group. There are side characters that get more attention than he does.

Rockstar is the most aggressive by far, often the first to violence. He spends a lot of the movie angry and annoyed at the lack of good music, forcing some of the hostages to sing for him, leading into a random music number (a lot of these Asian movies tend to do the ‘random music number’ thing). 

The gas station’s manager can’t help but antagonise the four, leading to further conflict. He constantly talks back, constantly riles them up and also constantly pays for it. It gets to the point where you wonder why he doesn’t just get with the program and keep his mouth shut, but I guess in a South Korean context it might make sense – he’s an adult and being talked down to and disrespected by a bunch of youths.

The rest of the characters are vaguely defined. Asides from the constantly-suffering gas station manager, there’s three employees, only one of which has any sort of defining features (he sort of develops a little bit of Stockholm syndrome and confidence when, forced to fight his school bullies, he actually wins). The majority of the ‘characters’ are the random people who turn up at the gas station, from lazy police officers to music producers and allsorts. None really have much of an impact.

Oddly not a single character emerges as the focal point. Not even any of the main four, with the film spreading its attention thinly amongst them. You learn very little about anybody, and nobody changes or grows as a person.  

 

This is going to sound really weird, and bear with me for this, but the movie feels a bit like a Korean teenage douchebag version of Clerks. While they are largely completely different films in almost every single aspect, they both have a similar sort of feel. It’s about disillusioned, aimless youths confused about the world, themselves and where to go with their lives, largely avoiding these questions through shenanigans. It’s also just a bunch of random, humorous things happening in place of a plot. Much like Clerks, it’s also about the everyday oddness of working in a mundane environment and the sorts of people who patronise those places. Weird, angry people tend to turn up at the gas station, while the four tend to harass them and take their money.

It’s also has some culturally specific themes, regarding South Korea culture, where cultural differences come into play. What I assume to be a Korean phonetic word game is played by two of the characters with zero explanation, while certain quirks seem Korea-specific. The filmmaking is fine, with occasional stylistic edits. The movie almost completely takes place in and around the gas station, rarely venturing outside of its confines.  

 

Attack the Gas Station pretty much does what it says on the tin. A gas station gets attacked, there’s some humour and a little action thrown in. It’s fairly entertaining but it also never really ascends to anything particularly special.