Year of Release: 1993
Director: Avi Nesher
Starring: Drew Barrymore, George Newbern, Dennis Christopher, Leslie Hope, Sally Kellerman, George Maharis, Peter Dobson, Carl Bressler, Dan Shor, Jaid Barrymore, Stanley DeSantis, Danny Trejo
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 0
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Synopsis and Review
By the time "Doppelganger" came out, writer/director Avi Nesher had already been steadily working on feature films for over a decade. During the 1980s he wrote and directed "She" featuring Sandahl Bergman, which piggybacked on the sword and sorcery genre that John Milius boosted when he wrote and directed "Conan, The Barbarian" in 1982. The film follows the story of Holly Gooding, whom we firstly encounter arriving in LA, looking for a place to live. She ends up sharing a place with Patrick, a writer who posted a room for rent, even if his space only has one bedroom. Holly and Patrick become friends, even though Patrick believes there's some quirkiness to her personality. He confides this impression to his writing partner and former girlfriend, Elizabeth. In the interim he finds out that Holly has a brother who is interned at a psychiatric hospital, after killing their father. He also uncovers that Holly is a suspect in the killing of her mom in New York. Holly admits she has a doppelganger, and that she is the one responsible for all that goes badly in her life, including the killing of her mom. She informs Patrick that her therapist Dr. Heller, can confirm the veracity of her statements. Patrick in the interim, is attacked by someone identical to Holly's supposedly dead father, and finally has a confrontation with Dr. Heller where a lot of the events taking place become clear.
This film is perplexing. And possibly quite nuts, but either way, it's a film that Ed Wood would be quite pleased to showcase or possibly feature side by side with one of his creative outputs. "Doppelganger" came out just as Drew Barrymore's career was starting to take off, since Jonathan Kaplan's "Bad Girls" came out in 1994, and started opening other professional doors for her. It's quite puzzling that writer/director Avi Nesher managed to get Drew Barrymore, George Newbern (who had already done the successful "Father of the Bride" from director Charles Shyer), and Leslie Hope (who had already done Oliver Stone's "Talk Radio" and Emilio Estevez's "Men At Work"), for a script that is nonsensical, with no character development, featuring a third act that is truly insane. This film attempts to illustrate a pre "Melrose Place" vibe of what it's like to be a young creative trying to make it in LA, mixing it with a noir narrative of sorts, throwing in a monster episode into the kitchen sink just for good measure in the third chapter, all of this without a semblance of coherence, taste, humor, or for that matter, logic. This is the type of film that will literally make the audience ask themselves, "What am I watching here". It's dumbfounding, with rotten performances from everyone involved, and at some point with Dennis Christopher's over the top performance taking place, one can't help but ask - "Is this deliberately so bad that it's like an art installation on how a bad film should be made?". The film amazingly features a score from the talented Jan A.P. Kaczmarek (who won an Oscar for the score of Marc Forster's "Finding Neverland"), but the overall production team is rather forgettable. This film is not forgettable, but that is solely because of how atrocious it manages to be.
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