Sometimes, when you're watching a movie every day, you are way more concerned with a movie being short than being good. And luckily for me, Alter Ego did a fabulous job fulfilling that requirement. It's 63 minutes long, which is about as short as I'm willing to go runtime-wise and still consider it a feature film (at least for anything made in the last half-century). But it's a good thing Alter Ego is short, because man, is it ever bad.
imdb kind of cracked me up with its synopsis. The first line:
From Takashi Shimizu, the famed director behind The Grudge and Ju-On horror franchises comes one of his undiscovered films.
First off, it makes it sound like it's worth watching because it's "undiscovered." Maybe there's a reason it's undiscovered, you know? You should at least put "terrifying" in there or something. But wait, that would be a lie. Also, Takashi Shimizu is listed as a Supervising Producer on Alter Ego. I don't know an awful lot about behind the scenes roles, but I think that's stretching the "from" description about as far as it can go.
Anyways - it's about three (female) teenage models at a fashion shoot in an old school. They are there with 4 other people: a creepy old man who's paying for the thing, a slightly less creepy man who found the girls, a pretty nice guy taking their pictures, and a nice woman helping the girls with their outfits/the lighting/etc. While the girls are on a break, they make some silly conversation about the old rumor where you can summon a demon (or get a wish granted) by facing two mirrors towards each other and looking in. But what actually ends up happening is that your doppelganger will appear, in Real Life, and kill you. So of course, the seven people are picked off by their alter egos, one by one, and whoever is left must work together to survive.
It's not the dumbest set up - and the concept is actually pretty well-used towards the end of the film - but overall the execution just sucks. I don't know where special effects were at in 2002, but Alter Ego has a very specific feel of a filmmaker getting their hands on digital equipment/effects for the first time. The signature move (if you will) of the doppelgangers is to sneak up on their people, start twitching their heads a bit - and then the camera gets all fish-eyed lens on them? Like there's a spotlight on the image, and it just makes that little spot get bigger or distorted or all swirly or whatever. It very clearly isn't happening in reality - even the shittiest CGI at least tries to pretend it exists in actual space. But this? I wonder if it was even done in post-production, or if there was just a plug-in or something on the camera. It looks like crap, and I can't imagine it looked good even in 2002.
I'd say the bad effects ruin the film, but I'm not sure if there would be anything to ruin. There's pretty much just nothing to Alter Ego - no real tension or scares (except the end - I'd say the last scene is the only thing in the film that approaches unnerving), and the characters are pretty bland. It doesn't help matters that the subtitles on Amazon seem to be a full second or two ahead of the characters actually speaking the lines - it's oddly deflating to read what a character says before it's actually spoken. But again, I don't feel like it would have mattered all that much.
Alter Ego looks pretty bad - again it looks like the era of early digital film before people really knew how to shoot with it. The school set is boring to look at and nothing is really shot in an interesting way.
Horror-wise? Not really any gore to speak of (unless you could puddles of blood), although I guess there's a qualifier to that. If you see a dead body, and it's all twisted up - like it's head is totally turned around and its legs are all bent up behind its neck and its arms are at unnatural angles - but there's no blood... does that count as gore? You get a couple of shots like that (it's apparently what the doppelgangers do when they're done shitty-effectsing you to death), and I guess they're kind of effective.
But there's still no meat on them bones. Alter Ego has a couple of effective moments that save it from the "Terrible" tag, but overall it's a rough watch. But it is short.
I would not recommend this film.
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