After being implicated in a murder, a young woman flees New York City and moves to Los Angeles, where she rents a room from a writer. They begin an affair, but it seems she's been followed by a homicidal duplicate of herself.
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Best movie of this year hands down!
Undescribable Perfection
Best movie ever!
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Doppelganger has its moments, but they are few and far between.Essentially, this is a grade B blend of pop-psych thriller, ghost story and horror. Drew Barrymore plays a young woman who is haunted by the demons of her past (most of her family has been murdered and she was, in at least one case, the prime suspect), or does she just have a really bad case of multiple personality disorder? George Newbern is her new room mate, and most of the action centers on him.Newbern's character is pretty sympathetic, and both he and Barrymore do decent work (though not exactly good). The mediocre to (at times) totally horrendous script and the unimpressive directing seem to have combined to sink the rest of the performances into oblivion. Leslie Hope's character is memorable, but so irritating that you will want to forget her.The plot eventually disintegrates into a bifurcated (one story arc is psychological realism, the other is supernatural horror) outlandish climax which is so badly conceived, acted and photographed that it effectively counteracts most of what value the film had achieved previously.Overall, the film has the feel of what might expect to be the result of M. Knight Shamalyan's first undergraduate film class. The acting and script for the two leads are just good enough to make you care a little about them - at least until the film derails utterly and completely.My recommendation - send your doppelganger, but avoid a first-person encounter.
When two writers make a screenplay of a horror version of Breakfast At Tiffany's, you know something is going to go right. Drew Barrymore, Patrick Highsmith, Leslie Hope, and Sally Kellerman are excellent actors. The FBI agent was a terrible actor. The scenes where Patrick looked Holly up and down like some sort of objectifier, those was just weird. Drew Barrymore is very hot. Intimate Strangers, where Sally Kellerman worked, was a great part. The weird gummy worm was just weird. Nathan was a very handsome cat. But what was that scene where Patrick followed Holly into a cesspool and Mr. Gooding attacked him? And the scene with Dr. Wallace? What was he doing fumbling around in there? And not every male has a female, as Sally Kellerman stated. And when Patrick and Elizabeth saw Drew outside of Victor's, that was weird.
I got the DVD very cheap and I'm a total Drewbie, and thats probably the only constellation where this movie could ever interest anyone.An early Drew movie, she's looking great, and she gets a quite lot of really cute scenes of her, like a shower scene, a sexy dance scene, quite a number of sexy outfits etc. She does never show the friendly charm we know from her more recent movies.The movie itself is pretty average or sub-average, and much more looking like being made for the TV than one for the cinema. There is no real horror or tension built up and the dialogs are often cheesy.The most interesting part is probably the end because I honestly don't understand it. But maybe there is nothing to understand about it anyway. But at least you don't get the end you would be expecting, and it also comes much sooner than one would have expected.Overall I think this movie is exclusively for Drewbies.
Drew Barrymore is an actress that has gone through bad periods, not only in her career, but in her personal life too. After being a prodigy child actress she descended into obscurity with mediocre films of low quality. While she has recovered from that dark past, this movie stays as a reminder of Drew Barrymore's worst days.The movie starts with an interesting premise, very reminiscent to Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain"; with a plot dealing with multiple personality disorder that sets the story for a horror/thriller. Barrymore stars as Holly Gooding, a young woman who is trying to make a new life in California after a traumatic event of her past in which apparently her other personality killed her mother.Suddenly, her past returns to haunt her as her evil personality is back in her life willing to ruin her new found peace and her new found love. In the middle of the chaos his new boyfriend, Patrick Highsmith (George Newbern), will try to help Holly to face the demons of her past.Unlike De Palma's underrated thriller, "Doppelganger" is for the most part a mediocre film that not only never fulfills it's purpose, it also concludes in one of the worst endings of movie history. While Barrymore is definitely not at her best, she manages to keep her dignity with an above average performance. The rest of the cast however range from mediocre to painfully bad over-the-top performances, although Leslie Hope manages to be among the best of them.The script is full of clichés and De Palma's influence is quite obvious. While the movie tries to be original by making literary references in almost every line, the dialogs are dull and the wooden acting certainly doesn't do any good. It has a fair share of nudity and for strange reasons, and excessive use of special effects.The make-up effects are done by the outstanding KNB and are really among the few good things in the movie. However, the bizarre over-use of the effects in the totally out of context ending decreases the impact of KNB's work and makes cheesy what in a different movie would be amazing.The fact that this is a B-Movie is no excuse for it's low quality, as with a better and more coherent script this could had been an interesting movie. Sadly, all we have here is a mediocre film that gets worse every second. Worthy for Barrymore's beauty. 3/10