Brian DePalma’s 1973 movie SISTERS set the trend for the early part of his career, in which he successfully dressed up old Hitchcockian tropes with contemporary stylistic showiness and exploitation movie goodies. Although it is the work of a former short film director, Douglas Buck, many fancied as a fresh horror auteur, the inevitable 21st century remake of SISTERS chooses to divert far too little from the original source material, only occasionally offering some interestingly twisted wrinkles on the earlier flick. It’s competent and worth seeing but, like so many remakes in this unending cycle, you can’t help wondering why it really exists.
Matthew Modine-lookalike J R Bourne is a doctor at a clinic who has an affair with beautiful, alluring co-worker Angelique (Lou Doillon). She’s a little unstable mentally and bears a gruesome scar that’s the result of separation from her infinitely more unhinged conjoined twin many years earlier. As in the original movie, the narrative employs the much-imitated PSYCHO device of setting up a protagonist who will meet a grisly end at an unusually early point. Here, the bloody knitting needle stabbing of Bourne – apparently by “bad twin” Annabelle – kick starts a fresh plot strand involving the investigations of Village Spectator reporter Chloe Sevigny, who has her own psychological issues.
The new SISTERS begins promisingly, displaying a slow-burning creepiness and an underlying menace that’s enhanced by the eerie minimalist score and sound design. Buck looks like putting his own stamp on the material during a disquietingly kinky detour into Cronenberg territory for an early sequence in which Bourne erotically caresses Angelique’s huge, grotesque scar during a subtly disturbing sex scene.
Buck appropriates recurring DePalma concerns and tics : the well staged central murder sequence quotes from REAR WINDOW (as DePalma did many times throughout his career) with Bourne’s death throes being witnessed from across the street by Sevigny. DePalma’s fondness for commenting on his own voyeuristic tendencies as a director surfaces in this film’s creepy use of (split-screen) CCTV footage. A graphically gruesome separation scene and a bloody stabbing form part of Buck’s gorier reworking of the surrealistic revelatory climax of the earlier film.
Sadly, despite its early promise and striking scenes dotted throughout, the new SISTERS sags badly in the police procedural scenes and during the mundane B story of an unsympathetic Sevigny doggedly trying to incriminate sinister experimental doc Stephen Rea and simultaneously solve the mystery of Bourne’s death. Sevigny, who at least authentically looks like someone who hasn’t slept in ages, sleepwalks through an admittedly banal role and helps take the movie into unwelcome plot-by-numbers TV movie territory.
Stay with it for a nicely eerie, subtle final shot. William B Davis appears briefly in a key flashback role. Executive produced by Larry Fessenden.
– Steven West
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
