Le double maléfique

The good? Acting by the "Nice Guy" writer, Newbern, is great. Drew Barrymore's sultry little dances and always seductive scenes. Plot twist will probably surprise you. The bad? Early in Drew's career...look to Ever After and Wedding Singer if you want better acting. Special Effects are stuff I could do with enough silly-putty and Jell-O mix. The ugly? A lot of the plot isn't needed. Could have been wrapped up in a TV show slot, and it indeed felt rushed at the end with a "bad-guy explains his whole evil plot" sequence.

It's good for a laugh, and good to waste some time, but don't be too critical of it. It's more of a confusing B-Movie trying to be a REAL movie than anything.

During the opening credits, we see an aroused Drew Barrymore squirming around with an unidentified man. She appears to be enjoying a very pleasant sexual experience, but is later haunted by this memory. Next, Drew Barrymore visits an unidentified woman and stabs her after bleeding from the nose and showing webbed fingers. The story really gets started when Barrymore (as Holly Gooding) arrives in Los Angeles to answer a "roommate wanted" ad placed by cute young writer George Newbern (as Patrick Highsmith). He wears a hat to bed, but Mr. Newbern is not balding...

Also in town is a Barrymore twin she calls her "Doppelganger"...

Newbern first sees the second Barrymore at a café with ex-girlfriend Leslie Hope (as Elizabeth). Then, she disappears. Dennis Christopher has fun as a mad doctor with Hell to pay and Sally Kellerman is a reformed nun. Newbern doesn't know what to think, and neither will you. There is a lesson here - if a beautiful young woman arrives to be your roommate, there will be a catch. Cheers to Avi Nesher and the crew for finding and re-decorating what looks like my old Los Angeles apartment. The curtains, tea kettle and dish drainer went with the place. The TV never worked.

***** Doppelganger (4/24/93) Avi Nesher ~ Drew Barrymore, George Newbern, Leslie Hope, Dennis Christopher

This movie holds your interest and keeps you wondering, up until an ending which will make cry out "Oh boy!". It's so gruesome and far-fetched and off-base that it's positively ludicrous. On the plus side, Drew Barrymore burns up the screen with a much steamier performance than the one she gave in "Poison Ivy", and the "good guys" are unusually likable (in an unforced way) for a horror film. (**)

Here we have a movie which fails in pretty much every way it is possible for a movie to fail. Terrible script, lousy acting, amateurish directing, laughable special effects...it's just an utterly awful movie. Not to mention the fact that when you get to the end you'll realize the whole thing doesn't make a lick of sense. After spending the whole movie wondering what in the world is going on here when things are finally explained you realize the story has been built on a foundation which is ludicrously impossible. In one of those hideous "villain explains the whole movie" sequences we are told that our villain has done something which quite simply can't be done and which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Oh, and after that we see that there also appears to be some kind of jell-o monster involved. I'm sure Drew Barrymore would very much like to pretend this movie never happened. If for some ungodly reason you are ever tempted to sit down and watch this movie may I suggest instead taking that time to bang your head against a wall for 104 minutes. That would prove to be a much more pleasurable experience than sitting through this garbage.

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