A man shares a psychic link with his siamese twin brother who he thought perished in a fire but has actually become a serial killer in Berlin, Germany (don't ya hate it when that happens?). This is kind of an interesting movie, not good necessarily but interesting. Basically its a latter-day Italian giallo except that it is a German co-production with American actors, it has a slightly bigger budget than usual, and it was apparently not post-synced. It was also made at a time when big-budget Hollywood films were actually beginning to imitate Italian gialli instead of just the reverse. In fact, the two films it borrows most liberally from--Brian DePalma's "Sisters" and the John Carpenter-scripted "Eyes of Laura Mars"--were themselves very heavily influenced by gialli making this film a kind of trans-Atlantic cinematic feedback.
The acting is very good. Michael Moriarity plays dual roles as the protagonist and his psychopathic brother. Cameron Mitchell has a pretty decent cameo as an aging prize fighter. Penelope Milford is also pretty good. The script has Milford and all the other women in this movie generously shedding their clothes, even though doing so often requires their characters to be unbelievably stupid. One woman goes to bed with the identical twin of a man who she has just watched beat her elderly father to death, even though she really only has his own word that he is in fact the twin. Milford herself basically lets the homicidal brother rape her in an ill-conceived effort to save her unfaithful boyfriend from a murder charge. The ending might be an interesting attempt to explore the same psychological and metaphysical ground touched on in "Sisters" or the later David Cronenberg movie "Dead Ringers", or it could be just another sorry excuse to show Milford naked--hard to tell with these kind of movies. An interesting film though, especially for Michael Moriarty and/or giallo fans.
The acting is very good. Michael Moriarity plays dual roles as the protagonist and his psychopathic brother. Cameron Mitchell has a pretty decent cameo as an aging prize fighter. Penelope Milford is also pretty good. The script has Milford and all the other women in this movie generously shedding their clothes, even though doing so often requires their characters to be unbelievably stupid. One woman goes to bed with the identical twin of a man who she has just watched beat her elderly father to death, even though she really only has his own word that he is in fact the twin. Milford herself basically lets the homicidal brother rape her in an ill-conceived effort to save her unfaithful boyfriend from a murder charge. The ending might be an interesting attempt to explore the same psychological and metaphysical ground touched on in "Sisters" or the later David Cronenberg movie "Dead Ringers", or it could be just another sorry excuse to show Milford naked--hard to tell with these kind of movies. An interesting film though, especially for Michael Moriarty and/or giallo fans.