The Cronenberg Crawl: The Trifurcated Cervix Edition

This looks legit. Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers.

In Dead Ringers. Jeremy Irons plays a pair of twin gynecologists who share a clinic and, unbeknownst to the women they seduce, most of their lovers. When the meeker twin falls in love with an actress who comes to them for fertility treatments, the relationship between them begins to sour.

Dead Ringers is a movie about twins and vaginas. If this leads you to conclude that it’s a titillating sex romp, you’re going to have a bad time.

Unfortunately for porn enthusiasts, the leading twins in Dead Ringers don’t have vaginas. They fix them. And because this is a David Cronenberg movie, fixing a vagina in this movie means stuffing it full of custom-made spiny instruments while dressed like a delegate at the Council of Nicea, at least in the second half of the movie.  This is because Elliot and Bev (played by Jeremy Irons and, when both Elliot and Bev are on screen, Jeremy Irons and the back of somebody else’s head) share the responsibilities of running a cutting-edge fertility clinic. They also share a crippling drug addiction, paranoid fantasies about mutant women, and a debilitating co-dependency on the other twin. They live in the house, sleep in the same bed, and pass unsuspecting patients and lovers back and forth between them without informing these women when this switcheroo occurs. 

If this doesn’t sound toxic enough already, the situation goes even further to hell when shy, subordinate twin Bev falls madly in love with their patient Claire, a famous actress who is infertile because her cervix has three holes in it. The good news is that a quick Google search reveals that a “trifurcated cervix” is a medical condition that exists only in Cronenberg’s head; at any rate, both brothers acquaint themselves thoroughly with said cervix both with and without a speculum, until Claire finally realizes she’s being tricked and has slept with both Bev and Elliot when she only intended to sleep with Bev. Clare’s furious rejection of the brothers devastates the twin who loved her. As a result, Bev begins to abuse prescription medications, hallucinates that his female patients are “mutants” with severe reproductive deformities, and, worst of all, begins operating on these women with a series of custom-ordered instruments that look like rejected props from the Hostel movies combined with titanium beetles. 

You can pretty much divide Jeremy Irons’ entire filmography into films where he either chose to act or not to act, and this is fortunately the former. There’s undeniable power in his performance. Irons manages the nigh-impossible feat of rendering the brothers’ relationship as multi-dimensional and not relentlessly creepy; it’s by turns tender and terribly sick. Irons also manages to make the brothers distinguishable from one another without relying on obvious character foils or stock tropes. For this reason, then, Dead Ringers works because the dynamic between Irons and Irons works. He has excellent chemistry with himself. We believe that Bev and Elliot love each other powerfully and could share a beneficial partnership in their personal and professional lives if they weren’t so toxically consumed with one another. We also believe that their natural bond has mutated beyond healthy limits into a dangerous absorption with the other, coupled with a shocking disregard for all external parties. We believe Bev and Elliot’s ability to both love and resent each other for the power they have over the other, and we believe that they simultaneously long for freedom and crave the sustained safety of their own exclusive relationship. On this level, then, Dead Ringers works. It is a solid film about an unbreakable, consumptive, and tragic bond between two people who share everything, including genes and a womb.

So does Dead Ringers work? Sure, but not as well as it could. The problem is that Cronenberg doesn’t want his movie to be about a destructive relationship between twin brothers. He wants it to be (as near as I can tell, given the tone and third-act horror tropes) a genuinely unsettling psychological thriller with body horror elements. And this is where the movie doesn’t deliver. The average horror movie relies not only on tone but on a premise that that the audience will immediately relate to as genuinely dangerous and frightening. 28 Days Later is scary not only because of the movie’s quick pace and ominous visuals but because of the relatable dread of being left without one’s friends and family, coupled with the terror facing a national tragedy. Nothing bad happens to Cillian Murphy during his opening walk through London, but if you don’t have goosebumps while watching that sequence, you’re not paying attention. The same can be said of older horror movies like The Exorcist and The Shining. Both feature strong scripts, great performances, and marvelous practical effects, but both movies are inherently scary because the horrors that the characters experience are so familiar to us. Isolation is terrifying. Harm coming to one’s child or family members is terrifying. A change in a loved one’s demeanor, a doctor’s inability to treat sickness, and profound religious uncertainty are all terrifying. We find these movies scary because we’ve experienced the small-scale versions of what these characters are going through.

Seriously, did no one object when Bev ordered red scrubs?

That said, for Dead Ringers to work, it really needs you to look square in the face at the world of clinical gynecology and squirm.  A lot of the power of this movie depends on the audience being unsettled by the inherent ickiness of vulvas and codependent twins, and unfortunately for this film, I have one of each. Louise and I are the daughters of doctors, and if I’m going to be scared by body horror, I need to see the horror and not just the body. When Irons says that his patient has a “trifurcated cervix” (go ahead and say that out loud, it’s a riot), I get out my laptop to see if this really happens. When I see a couple of twins cuddling in bed together, I think less about incest and more about the last five vacations I’ve taken. To me this is not a thriller; it’s a family drama about two sad, broken, and brilliant brothers. It doesn’t leave me running for the exits; it has me running to the phone so I can call Bev and Elliot and tell them they can beat this thing.

The creep factor really doesn’t even get ratcheted up when we see Bev’s madness made manifest in his treatment plan for “mutant women.” The surgery scenes just strain our credulity too much. Rest assured, ye squeamish: Bev never actually gets around to cutting on anyone, but when we get an eyeful of his special-order tools we immediately wonder why no one on his sizable surgery team has had Bev’s hospital privileges suspended. His equipment looks like Steve Martin’s dental tools in Little Shop of Horrors. The stupidity of the surgery sequence isn’t helped by the fact that the hospital staff dresses like Death Star employees. They don’t wear scrubs; they wear red Klan uniforms.  And when a fellow doctor exclaims “Jesus, Bev!” when Bev passes out on a patient, we wonder why the patient, scrub nurses, anesthesiologists, and janitor weren’t also yelling “Jesus, Bev!” when they saw the batshit cardinal uniforms they all had to wear to work that morning.

All in all, then, Dead Ringers tells a good sibling story but not a good horror yarn. Maybe I’m not the target audience, maybe I’m not squeamish enough, or maybe after watching so many David Cronenberg movies I’m just too far gone, but it just didn’t come together for me. If you want Jeremy Irons to be party to your depression today, this is a good pick alongside M. Butterfly. But if you want Cronenberg to gross you out today, watch The Fly instead.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

Podcast Episode 1 - The Movies We Hate the Most

In the first episode of the podcast, cranky critics Beth and Louise look at the movies they hate the most, and what constitutes a truly hate-worthy, disappointing movie.

For more Beth and Louise, follow us on Twitter at @BandLHateMovies or subscribe to the podcast. Give us a rating and leave a comment on iTunes!

The Cronenberg Crawl: Beth Watches Oeuvres from the King of Body Horror Until She is Blinded/Driven Insane

In our quest to plunge through the canon of some of the most celebrated and popular directors today, twisted sister Beth has been in a contest with herself to see how many David Cronenberg movies she can watch and review in one summer. Whether or not she can complete this task without suffering permanent brain damage or attracting the attention of terrorist watch groups remains to be seen.

For the uninitiated: who is David Cronenberg? This creepy son of a bitch is a Canadian director who, according to his gushing IMDB page, is also known as the "King of Venereal Horror" and the "Baron of Blood." We here at Beth and Louise Hate Movies don't know how many people have to call you the "Baron of Blood" until it is officially one of your epithets, but there you are. After a promising start in cult horror films in the late 70's (Rabid and They Came from Within), he moved on to bigger and better head explosions with more mainstream movies like Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and The Fly.

"But Beth and Louise," you might be saying, "why would you watch every movie made by a man who was famous for producing hideous cult movies?" Because we're terrible people, that's why. But more importantly, because you might know David Cronenberg from some of the OA History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007), A Dangerous Method (2011) and Cosmopolis (2012).
scar bait that he's made in recent years. From the mid to late 80's until now, Cronenberg's films have fared quite well at Cannes and Berlin and have picked up a number of Oscar nominations. You might know him from his more recent productions, such as

So there you are. Like Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi, Cronenberg has followed a well-worn path from sordid B-cinema to mainstream glory, and has somehow never stopped giving everyone the willies every time he switches on a camera.

We have personally had an eye on Cronenberg ever since we stumbled across The Fly in high school (that makes for one hell of a gnarly popcorn movie, if you're interested), so we're proud to say that Beth will embrace this coming exercise with appropriate masochism and aplomb. You may not want to hang out with her when this is over, though. Stay tuned.

Keep smiling, Beth, you creepy freak.

We Were Just Thinking that the Internet Needed Some More Angry Embittered Opinions

If Rottentomatoes.com can be trusted, the general consensus among Americans today is that most movies, as a rule, suck. It is late July, 2013. It has been a notable summer in the eyes of many entertainment writers, not because the movies that came out in the summer of 2013 were absolutely terrible (that comes standard), but because the absolutely terrible movies didn't make a ton of money (this part is surprising). 2013, say many movie critics, has been the year of the apocalyptic destruction movie. Films like Iron Man 3, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Man of Steel, and Pacific Rim have all trundled into theaters featuring constipated run times and extended sequences of ruin and chaos. Cities are leveled, heroes and villains fistfight in midair, giant robots swing battleships like swords (thanks for that, Pacific Rim), and waste is laid in excess across the computer-generated cities of the U.S. and beyond.

This has been the summer of the loud, megabudget blockbuster, say the critics.

Which caused us, Beth and Louise, to look back at 2012 (The Avengers, Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises) and say, "Hang on, wasn't that last summer, too?"

Christmas is no less repetitive. In the race to scoop up Oscars with Hollywood's proven formulas, the slated releases in December often look like the regurgitated, reanimated pieces of whatever made money and won awards in the years before. There are your period pieces, your maudlin dramas, your movie musicals, your classy versions of summer blockbusters (seriously, how did Avatar get nominated for Best Picture?), your quirky comedies, and your third-rate book adaptations. You read for months about the excitement and interest surrounding a certain picture, you see the trailers on TV and think it looks worthwhile, you scrape together whatever they're charging you to go to the cinema these days, you go and watch the damn thing for two and a half friggin hours, and you leave, disappointed. You are always disappointed. Slumdog Millionaire lost its way in the second half. The Hurt Locker felt unfocused and muddy. Crash had as many improbable plot twists as Lost (except, to be fair, Crash came out in the summer), and The King's Speech was polite and pleasant but nothing to tell your friends about. It's an unlikely occurrence that the winner of Best Picture is the most outstanding film of the year. More often that not, it's a Best Picture, but not a great film.

And of course spring and fall are where the really ill-conceived pictures go to die.

So why do we bother? Every year we, Beth and Louise, see dozens of movies. We watch them together and we watch them alone. We go to matinees and midnight releases. We bike to the Redbox and stream them on our laptops. We devour Netflix television series and salivate over upcoming releases. We watch trailers. We read reviews. We read the reports from film festivals. We call each other and talk about everything we've seen and everything we're going to see.

Why? We're obsessed.

Because for every twenty films you see and detest, for every dozen you swear you'll never watch again,  for every movie you warn your friends to never, ever, ever spend a minute or sent on, you see one that makes it all worthwhile. Those are the movies that keep you coming back for more. And if you aren't willing to suck it up and sift through the garbage, you never know what treasures you might miss.

We are here to take a little guesswork out of the crapshoot of cinema. We watch movies, we research directors, we pick apart genres, and we write about them. If we find something great, we'll tell you, and when we find stuff to avoid, we'll also let you know. Don't worry. We'll take the cinematic bullets for you. We'll let you know when a Smurfs 2 or a Sucker Punch comes out. We've got you covered.

We're Beth and Louise. We hate movies.