Double Trouble: Dead Ringer & Dead Ringers

We discovered something strange when researching movies to write up for this theme, the movies Dead Ringer and Dead Ringers are both movies about twins.

Dead Ringer: A callous and wealthy woman is impulsively murdered by her working class identical twin sister who assumes her dead sisters identity. The twins in Dead Ringer are exquisitely played by Betty Davis. The movie was basically a remake of the Mexican film La Orta which was about a twin killing her sibling and assuming her identity. And when I dug deeper into the research on this one, I found there was yet another layer in this movie turkduckin. Davis played her own twin one more time in A Stolen Life, yet another remake of a foreign film where a twin dies, but this time the death is accidental but, as the title suggests, the identity appropriation is again intentional.

Dead Ringers: This movie made me leery of twins for a good year, it's a truly unnerving Cronenberg character study. Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists that succumb to a barbiturate addiction. This movie is truly effective, but I never want to see it again. The worst part about this movie is that it's loosely based on the lives of Stewart and Cyril Marcus and a highly fictionalized novel of the same subjects called Twins.

Double Trouble: Big Business

Remember when Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin stared in a movie as two sets of twins switched at birth? If you said no, you might be in good company because I couldn't even find a trailer for this film on Youtube...



The plot unfolds something like this: A rich couple from the city are passing through a small town when suddenly the wife, pregnant with twins, goes into labor. At the same time a local couple, also pregnant with twins, are in the same hospital. An elderly nurse mixes up the babies, and no one is ever the wiser. That is, until the country twins suddenly have to stop the city twins from selling off one of their many companies. That's when hilarity ensues. (Or according to Roger Ebert when it should have ensued...)

Fun facts: Aside from finding almost nothing on this movie (outside of it having a convoluted plot) while researching this gem, I did stumble across someone claiming this movie was originally written for Barbra Streisand and Goldie Hawn. But more importantly, I discovered this movie features a very young Seth Green!

Double Trouble: Double Impact

Jean-Claude Van Damme will show up more times in this theme than you think, trust us. But this classic is the first instance of Van Damme playing his double.

   

The movie: Twin brothers Chad and Alex are separated as infants when their parents are murdered and 25 years later they are re-united to avenge their parents' death. Chad is the kinder simpler twin, Alex is the high rolling, rough around the edges twin, both are Jean-Claude Van Damme.


Our ranking for a JCVD twin movie: This is JCVD's first movie playing his double, but it's not the best. It's pretty hokey and slow moving, but it also features Bolo Yeung in it so it's not all bad!

Double Trouble: Crank & Crank: High Voltage

If you haven't seen the Crank movies, you're missing out on the most wonderfully ludicrous action franchise committed to film. In the first Crank, Chev Chelios is poisoned and has to recruit his "doctor" (Dwight Yoakam) to help him stay alive long enough to kill the man responsible for poisoning him. Chev must keep his heart rate up, getting himself into more ramped up and impossible situations at every turn. The second Crank movie picks up where the last one ended (literally) but this time to stay alive, Chev has to keep a consistent charge in a battery pack that's keeping his heart beating, and of course, he gets into even more ludicrous situations while doing so. In addition to being as ridiculous as possible, these movies have pretty strong continuity (seeing as they happen congruently and in pretty real time), so it might surprise you to know that both movies co-star Efren Ramirez, even though his character in the first installment dies.


Crank: Kaylo (Efren Ramirez) is recruited by Chev to find people with information on the men responsible for poisoning him. Kaylo ends up being kidnapped by those men, who later kill him.

Crank: High Voltage: While on the look out for the men responsible for his new situation, Chev runs into Venus, who turns out to be Kaylo's twin brother. Chev explains to Venus that the men he's after were responsible for Kaylo's death, and Venus joins forces with him to avenge his brother.










Efren & Carlos Ramirez: Even though Efren's real life identical twin is an actor, Efren played his own twin in both of these movies. (Though it seems Carlos made uncredited appearances in both.)

We seriously love these movies: If you love over the top action flicks and you haven't seen these movies, put them at the top of your list like yesterday. Even giving away the plot points above, we didn't spoil a thing. In fact, I could tell you the end of Crank and it wouldn't spoil one second of High Voltage.




Bonus character-dies-and-twin-is-revealed-in-the-sequel movies: City Slicers & City Slickers 2. At the end of the first movie Curly (Jack Palance) dies, but Palance comes back in the sequel to play Curly's identical-but-before-unmentioned twin, Duke Washburn.

   

First Clue: July's Screening

Clue #1: The theme for July's screening: Double Trouble. This month we cover actors playing their own twins.

Tape Freaks Presents: July's Mystery Movie! at the Trylon microcinema, Wednesday, July 6th@  7:00pm, only $5!

Purchase advance ticket here.

No One Speaks the Same Language: The Last American Virgin

I made a reference about oranges appearing out of nowhere in the description of the theme this month, and you might be wondering what the hell I was talking about. Well, I was talking about The Last American Virgin.

We've never seen this film, but in Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films someone mentions this movie. Apparently there's a character who pays for his girlfriend's abortion and then bringing her a bag of oranges and a Christmas tree as some sort of consolation gift. The person recounting that scene guessed the oranges' significance lied in some Palestinian tradition that didn't bear significance in our culture, but it could have just as easily been director Boaz Davidson's interpretation of American Christmas traditions. We might never know why (no one in Electric Boogaloo says definitively, and I can't find any answers on the interwebs) but that's part of the charm that comes from making art through these kinds of filters; sometimes stuff happens that captures the audiences' imagination, and you'll never know if it was intentionally provocative.