BEFORE: I'm getting a late start tonight, since "It" went into overtime and had to be finished the following day - plus I got a chance to go see the Pee-Wee Herman show on Broadway, then went out for a bit of food after. Stephen King week is winding down, but there are still a couple more films that focus on writers and the creative process.
THE PLOT: A writer's fictional alter-ego wants to take over his life...at any price.
AFTER: At first this seems like a typical Jekyll & Hyde story - a writer, Thad Beaumont, who publishes stories under two names (much like a certain Stephen King/Richard Bachman) is suspected in a string of murders - and his alibis don't seem to add up. The simplest explanation would seem to be a split personality (again, not schizophrenia, that's different...) where the dominant entity experiences blackouts, while the "dark" personality commits the crimes.
The trigger seems to be an obsessive fan, who figures out the author's pen-name alter ego, and threatens to expose him. But that seems too easy, too explainable - and the movie then chooses to go in directions that defy all rational logic and sensible explanation.
So the next best theory is, it's got something to do with the tumor/undeveloped fetus that was removed from Beaumont's head when he was a small boy - and sparrows, and a staged funeral, and some cryptic messages...arrgh, what's the connection?
In the end it felt like this was a movie that couldn't decide what it wanted to be - the rules got changed so many times, and each time it pushed the film off on a different vector, which contradicted the ones that had gone before it. By the end I couldn't tell you what was real and what wasn't, what had happened and what hadn't.
Starring Timothy Hutton (last seen in "The Falcon and the Snowman"), Amy Madigan (last seen in "Gone Baby Gone"), Michael Rooker (last seen in "The 6th Day"), Robert Joy (last seen in "Fallen"), and Tom Mardirosian (last seen in "Lady in the Water").
RATING: 4 out of 10 typewriters
SPOOK-O-METER: 5 out of 10 - a couple of gruesome murders, and serial killers are always scary - but not if they're not real, right?
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