Word: cronenberg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DEAD RINGERS. David (The Fly) Cronenberg directs a spooky parable of split identity: twin gynecologists drive themselves to dementia and a symbiotic suicide-murder...
Thus it is with the gifted Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Images of corporal corruption -- of malefic birth and voracious organs -- stalk his They Came from Within, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome. Heads explode, and monsters issue from the wombs of women. In Cronenberg's masterwork, The Fly, one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; his body has a twisted mind of its own. The catalog of punishments seems medieval -- Savonarola meets Bosch -- even as it taps baby boomers' fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose...
...subject of twin gynecologists, driven to dementia and a symbiotic murder-suicide by urges that both share but neither understands, seems a scenario only Cronenberg could dream up. In fact, the story comes from the novel Twins, by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, which in turn was based on the case history of Drs. Cyril and Stewart Marcus, a pair of respected gynecologists who in 1975 were found dead in a Manhattan apartment. From these threads Cronenberg has spun a fantasia of split personality and the vulnerable male ego. The film's identical twins, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played...
...times Dead Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn. But Irons is splendid in both roles, and Cronenberg can create tour-de-force tableaux with his effortless black magic. In one, Bev strides into surgery dressed in red, like a demon priest at a sacrificial rite. The victim is woman; her crime is woman's unique advantage over man, the power to produce perfect new bodies from the most vulnerable part of her own. Any mad scientist, any man, can try either to serve that power or to destroy it. And Bev must finally love...
...meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg's 1986 update of The Fly and the best monkey movie since the original King Kong...