Making Movies with Doppelgangers: Special Effects

Doppelganger's are a major part of horror/thriller history. Vertigo, The Other, Femme Fatale, Dead Ringers, Sisters, even Dracula. It's to the point that when I watch a movie and one character sees another that they've supposedly never met, I assume it's because of an identical lost love (I was worried this was the case with Bloody Pit of Horror). The trope is well played out and I'm not sure when it hit its breaking point, so I hesitate being too hard on 1984's Special Effects. I probably just came to it after too much exposure. Anymore, it just feels like a lazy way to move a plot along.



Special Effects follows a wannabe actress but actual nude model, Mary Jean/Andrea (Zoe Lund) who has run away from her husband and child to chase her dream. Her husband, unfortunately named Keefe (Brad Rijn), tracks her down and wants to take her home but she runs away to filmmaker Chris Neville (Eric Bogosian) even though she's never met him and his career is spiraling downward. Andrea showing up at his door and he letting her in the the first "wha?!" moment of the movie. There seems to be a trend in this stream of horror movies I'm watching that the more you think about stuff, the less it makes sense.

Chris and Andrea's meeting is filled with silly movie talk like, "maybe we should slow dissolve to the bedroom" and, "I'll call you when it's time for your entrance." The movie talk is milked throughout Special Effects and it makes directors seem like they are insufferable to be around (maybe there are...). Chris kills Andrea when she won't put out and starts insulting him, but he's a creep and was recording their sexual encounter so he caught the crime on film. Instead of destroying the evidence (which he tried so hard to get rid of by washing the body and cleaning out underneath the fingernails) he decides to make a movie out of it (wha?!). I'm not sure what his plan was to begin with, but he ropes the accused and out on bail (via Chris) Keefe to star in it. Did he just know he'd find the dead girls exact double? How was he going to cut it into the film? It doesn't matter. For some reason, he's obsessed with whether or not people can tell reality from fiction out of context (with Lee Harvey Oswald's murder as his example). The plot isn't unlike Frenzy in that the guilty and accused party work closely together with the guilty trying to build evidence against the accused. There's even multiple strangulations.

I want to like Larry Cohen's movies more than I do. He tries to imbue his movies with a bit of social commentary that many horror films are more than happy to ignore for cheap scares. I still have plenty to see (most notably Bone and The Stuff), but while I respect the man, his good ideas never really pan out. With Special Effects, it feels like he wants to make some sort of indictment around the culture of filmmaking. those who want to get in it, and tabloid journalism. Everyone Chris Neville meets nose the details of his failures. The detective keeps trying to get more prestige out of his screen credit for his consulting help and offers rewrites for scenes (and infers during the conclusion that he's talented enough to finish Neville's movie). The doppelganger, Elaine (also, unsurprisingly, Lund, who has the most inconsistent accent as both characters that I've ever heard), freely goes along with pretty much everything ever and gets wrapped up wholly in her role (she doesn't even have am moment's qualm of getting naked on film). Unfortunately, Special Effects doesn't really hold up as a movie and that hurts any points Cohen is trying to make.

Special Effects isn't all bad, though. There are some very nice shots, notably the sea of headshots strewn across the floor and the shot from within the freight elevator. Bogosian does a pretty good job in an early role often reminding me of Elliott Gould. There's funny little moments such as the reveal of Dustin Hoffman's Tootsie headshot. And I was deeply unsettled by the implications of Elaine so freely going along with so much stuff willingly, especially the ending. It's not a very good film, but if you're into Larry Cohen's films, you should definitely check it out.