#Hooptober9

💀 NUMBER NINETEEN 💀
💀 SIX COUNTRIES (Mexico) 💀

"The Similars" (2015)
* dir: Isaac Ezban
* Science Fiction / Horror / All Around Me Are Familiar Faces 🧔
[ ★★½ / ★★★★★ ]

I was promised a feature length episode of "The Twilight Zone" (1959) and instead received a feature length episode of "The Twilight Zone" (2002).

Featuring a cavalcade of weirdly calibrated overactors and a screenplay that thinks it's way more profound than it actually is, "The Similars" was one of the films that I was most looking forward to in my Hooptober list for this year, so I can't help but feel more than a bit let down by this thing. Shot with the barest amount of imagination or visual flair outside of "make everything look vaguely old", it seemingly couldn't be bothered to even commit to the full black-and-white aesthetic that this story was so desperately calling out for, instead settling for some sort of desaturated, semi-sepia toned atmosphere that never quite settles in to become anything truly eerie or evocative.

And while the story itself does get considerably more interesting the deeper down the rabbit hole we go and the more wildly absurd everything becomes, it's just...it's just too silly, far too goddamn silly by a considerable degree. It was basically impossible to take anything seriously right from the start, and the goofball premise combined with the performances being constantly cranked to 11 in a plotline that makes half-assed allusions to state violence and political revolution certainly didn't do anything to clarify the intended tone for me.

Although a third act twist DID finally start to turn me around a bit; not that it was mind-blowing or even that unpredictable, more that I found it to be the only direct "Twilight Zone" riff to unequivocally work here (outside of Edy Lan's perfectly grand Bernard Herrmann-esque score and our requisite omnipotent narrator bookending the film while doing his best Rod Serling).

While "The Similars" didn't quite work for me, I could never possibly hate something this proudly, unabashedly fucking STRANGE. I just wished that I found Isaac Ezban's particular flavor of strange a bit more personally palatable.