Twixt (2011)

Hall Baltimore (Kilmer) is a third rate horror novelist who is on a book tour of his latest novel. The tour takes him to Swann Valley in which the local hardware store doubles for the town's bookstore. He is approached by the crazy Sheriff Bobby LaGrange (Dern) who has an idea for a book and wants Baltimore's help. Eventually Baltimore agrees to meet the Sheriff at the morgue where he is shown the body of a victim of a serial killer who died with s stake in her heart. Baltimore and LaGrange collaborate on the book as the history of the dead girl known as V. (Fanning) is revealed through dreams Baltimore has and dreams that have him talking to Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) himself. This troubled movie tries for a Gothic tone sprinkled with modern elements and pulls neither off. The script is far more confusing and incredibly disjointed. Val Kilmer sleepwalks through the lead role and other fine character actors are wasted in this film that just never connects at any level with the audience. How can one of the great American Directors of all time, Francis Ford Coppola be responsible for this non-scary and weak excuse for a horror film? I don't know but he is. You'll forget it while you're watching it.

Wow. It's hard to believe that Francis Ford Coppola (THE GODFATHER) would put his name to this travesty. It's a shot-on-video, zero budget piece of nonsense featuring a chubby Val Kilmer playing a horror writer who visits a creepy small town to work on his latest novel. While there he encounters the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe (yep), alongside a creepy vampire kid and lots of bizarre townsfolk. Is what's going on all in his head, or is there something more disturbing about the town? As another viewer noted, TWIXT looks like one of those cheap, live-action horror video games made in the 1990s, like PHANTASMAGORIA, except worse. The whole blue-tinted look of the movie is a mess and the storyline is even worse. It seems Coppola made this as an experimental film but the experiment is a complete failure. The only interesting thing is that Joanne Whalley turns up playing Kilmer's ex-wife as an in-joke (she's Kilmer's ex in real life). Kilmer seems embarrassed by the whole thing and rightly so. Bruce Dern cameos as the town sheriff and the reliable Ben Chaplin plays Poe, but for most of the running time we're stuck with one of those annoying Fanning kids. For shame, Coppola...

Coppola's exploration of the writer's process set against a vampire murder mystery evokes 1408, Twin Peaks, and of course the works of Edger Allen Poe. It is Poe's ghost that leads Val Kilmer on his dream world explorations of the underbelly of a small town "where people go to be left alone". In this blue-lit version of the town Kilmer meets Virginia, a porcelain Elle Fanning who may, or may not be the sole survivor of the town's serial killer. Eerie, pulpy and just a little great, Twixt is a modern AIP second feature. Another film demonstrating that film obsession can live through VOD.Also interesting is that the film was made almost entirely on Coppola's own property in the North bay.

The preview looked interesting and seeing Coppolas name behind it seemed to suggest it would be good, but unfortunately it is not the case.By the end of the film I wondered if Coppola wanted to deliberately make a bad movie - there are dream sequences which go on for so long and seem to be where really anything happens. the things occurring when Baltimore is awake seem to often just have no reason to have even been shown - such as when he calls the police station and there is a cut-screen showing the call operator responding to his call and connecting him to the police station - i don't understand why this was even needed to be shown - that and the interactions between hall and his wife. too much just seemed unnecessary or made no sense to the plot at all, and the confusing nature of it all didn't work to raise any questions about possibilities as there was nothing firm to go on in the first placeas mentioned in the review title, i did like the Edgar Allan Poe figure and the visuals of Poe leading Baltimore with his lantern over dangerous ground was interesting - Poe had some interesting things to say. lastly reading in another review that Coppola released this as a 3d film makes me lean more toward thinking he really was deliberately trying to make a confusing, even irritating film