Listen. This is going to be long, okay? It’s worth it.
Do you know what the Chiller Channel is? It’s a cable channel that shows horror movies, if by “horror movies” you mean “endless crappy Twilight Zones and movies with names like ‘Rock Monster’ and ‘The Cricket,’ edited so that all of the curse words and blood and weapons and scary parts are gone.” In other words: the Chiller Channel is fucking awesome.
A few weeks ago, I recorded a movie called “The Attic,” because I noticed that Elizabeth Moss was in it.
(Holy crap – is Betty wearing Louboutins in that photo??) I watched about 20 minutes of it before realizing it was AWFUL and giving up.
A while later, bored or drunk, I finished it.
It. Was. Amazing.
I have never been so thrilled to be so wrong about something. This is one of the best bad movies I’ve ever seen, in no small part thanks to Miss Moss herself. I had intended to just write a sort of Lifetime, Wow! recap here, but I ended up not able to stop myself from just giving you a scene-by-scene playback. It’s still worth watching: DVR that shit, yo. Highly recommended. But. Whether you’re planning on watching it or not, here it goes:
The Attic opens with a scene of a young woman taking a bath and painting her toenails. Because, um, people do that. Apply wet paint to their persons while sitting in pools of water. Like how I always put on my mascara in the swimming pool. She finishes, leans back, and closes her eyes. A woman silently walks past the doorway, but the scary music which plays as she does awakens the toenail-painter! “Teddy?” she calls out, presumably to her ree-ree brother, but he doesn’t answer. As she gets up from the bathtub, this close-up lingers on the screen for like four seconds.
In quick succession, then, these things happen:
1.Girl picks up a blue towel.
2.Girl is wearing blue towel and holding the brass candlestick that she keeps in the bathroom (but which we have not seen before), like as a weapon.
3.Girl runs to bedroom; is wearing white nightie and has white towel around hair. (No candlestick.)
4.Girl picks up the kitchen knife which she keeps in her bedroom.
5.Blah, blah, stalk stalk around the house, oh no! The girl who walks to scary music is standing inside the attic, whose trap door is open! It is…HER! The girl herself!
6.Run away, go outside, Scary Twin Her is standing in the yard – but her nightie is dirty!!
7.Girl falls down and writhes on the ground for a while.
End scene!
Oh man. This is going to be so good.
Next we see a real estate agent removing a “for sale” sign from the yard, and Peggy is “moping around,” as her mother tut-tuts. “It’s Frankie,” she announces, dreamily, stoned, seeing her ree-ree brother out in the yard. Frankie might be autistic or have Down Syndrome or be an idiot savant or basically anything else, it’s hard to tell, and his level of ree-ree-ness keeps fluctuating depending on whether or not the actor remembers to jerk his chin over to the right side of his body and flex his hands in front of his chest or not. He also kind of has a crush on his sister, I think. Peggy, we learn, is enrolled in college, but “doesn’t feel well” and has a history of not attending classes.
That night, Peggy hears some scary noises and has a dream about the girl with a towel around her head doing that scary too-fast-J-horror movement out on the front porch. (This ghost is never seen again – it becomes a different ghost immediately, and this one is never explained. [Frankly, though, neither is the other one.] Get used to this, please.)
The next morning is the first day of class, and Peggy’s skipping. “You’re going to stay inside again today?” her mother asks. She promises to hang out with Frankie in the woods tomorrow. We’re noticing three trends here:
1.Whaaaa? Peggy doesn’t go outside??
2.Frankie insists on wearing really ugly sweaters every day.
3.Peggy talks in this soft, whispery, infuriating little-girl voice.
Peggy’s brushing her hair in the bathroom later on, when – oh noes – a spoooooky girl walks past the hallway! “Frankie?” she calls out. (Maybe it was Teddy.)
In bed that night, she hears the spooky noises again. She follows them up to the attic, where spookiness occurs, she sees the girl, who is – oh no! Her! – and she falls out of the attic in a really amusing way.
When she comes to, Smith, an EMT, is fondling her head and calling her “Sweetheart” a lot. Smith has a really distracting dot on his thumbnail that I guess is a bruise? He doesn’t usually have that, does he?
Smith says she’s okay, and her parents decide not to take her to the hospital.
Then, for some reason, she’s in the living room talking to two detectives. “There was a girl in the attic,” she tells them. “Maybe it was a bad dream,” one says. Then, in a very insinuating bad-guy voice, “Maybe you need to see a neurologist.” So, like, did they call the cops so that the girl who had just hit her head really hard could report that she had seen a woman who looked exactly like her in her attic? Or do cops just show up when girls in spooky farmhouses fall down in small towns?
Later, Peggy is sitting and reading, photogenically. The phone rings, and the machine picks up. A girl leaves the following message: “Hey [Peggy], it’s me. It’s really retarded that you don’t have a cell phone, but [I had to say that out loud so I could justify why you're listening to this bit of plot advancement out loud. Also, I] just thought you might want to know that your ex-boyfriend is dating Melonie.”
Also that actually somehow wasn’t plot advancement. This has nothing to do with anything else and never comes up again. Unless, I guess, maybe it’s, like, supposed to be some sort of horrible blow to her ego that helps make her be crazy later on? (Oh noes – spoiler alert – right, she’s crazy.)
Smith comes back, introduces himself as, “Trevor. John Trevor. Most people just call me Trevor.” Which is apparently the same name as some person on TV. Peggy is wearing a hilarious black lace gothic blouse and has weird intricate hair. It’s unnecessary and distracting.
Smith tells her that he is a part-time paramedic, but mostly a detective. He doesn’t think that the detectives “Baker and Carter” were really listening to her last night and he wants to ask her some more questions.
“Do you have any friends that might be screwing with you?”
“I decided to leave all of my friends behind when we moved here.”
“Specifically, who closed the door to the attic stairs?” he continues, without missing a beat, because what she just told him is normal.
That night at dinner, Peggy announces that she’s feeling better, though it is pointed out that she is still not eating anything. Her father talks like a hilarious old-timey Bronx gangster and asks her brother why she hates him. “It ain’t my business,” Frankie says, and Dad slaps him on the back of the head and says, menacingly, “Don’t lie to me.” “She has a journal, okay?” Frankie cries. This, too, is not a plot point and is never mentioned again.
Smith comes by the next day to look around the attic and they find a mysterious sign written on the floor in red paint. “Doesn’t it look like…some kind of zodiac sign?” she asks Smith. He says he’ll look into it.
Later, Peggy stares out at the tire swing in the front yard for what I’m realizing now is like the third time (nope – the tire swing is not a plot point, either). Then she sees herself standing outside, but with way more eyeliner on, and she falls down really hilariously again, hitting her head on the kitchen stove, this time. Seriously, these falls are, like, CGI-ed or something. I don’t know how to explain them, but they’re ridiculous. Peggy tells her dad that she saw her twin. He replies, “[Peggy], you don’t have a sister.” She gets Very! Suspicious! and asks him, “Why’d you call her my sister?” like it was some sort of clue. Peggy apparently does not realize that twins who are not boys are also sometimes called “sisters.” Dad wants to take her to the emergency room, but she freaks out and announces that shes not going to go outside until she figures out what’s going on.
Now Peggy’s talking to a psychiatrist, who sort of appeared out of nowhere in her living room, telling him that she hates her dad and the house, and acting full blown cuh-ray-zee. Like, curled up in the fetal position, then suddenly coming on to him, laughing wide-eyed crazy.
Hey! Tire swing again!
Then Smith is back at her house, on the computer, googling the zodiac sign, which it turns out is the “Gemini” symbol. (Ooo!) Nice work “looking into it,” Smith.
They play a little kissy-face, and get interrupted by Frankie. Frankie’s wearing another ugly sweater. He wants to go outside, but Peggy sees Evil Twin Her outside, and won’t leave the house. Frankie has brought her a present: it’s a disposable camera. “The next time you see somebody you don’t like,” he says, “you can take a picture of them.” Now that’s a plot point, friends!
Peggy tells her psychiatrist about Evil Twin Her.
“It’s like a bad dream I used to have, and when we moved into this house, it became real.”
“And your fear of the outside is greater than your fear of the inside?”
Peggy enunciates her little heart out as she tells him, “I…can’t…go. And I…don’t…want…to stay.”
This movie came out in 2008. Mad Men premiered in 2007. Just fyi.
Just for reference, this is what Evil Eyeliner Peggy looks like:
Pretty!
Also, here’s some more intricate distracting hair:
That’s a birth certificate she found there on the wall. Turns out she had a twin. Oooo. Peggy asks Smith to do some checking into it for her at Riverview Hospital. Listen, lady, he’s just going to put it off until he comes over again and then he’s going to remember when you ask him about it and he’ll google it real quick. Anyway, Peggy’s dad overhears the phone call and starts acting all suspicious, and tries to make her eat something, and it’s messy and gross.
She says she wants to move out, he says he’ll help and tries to throw her outside. She sees Evil Her, screams, runs away, and tells her dad she’s going to “[EDITED OUT BECAUSE CHILLER CAN'T CUSS] kill [him].”
Then there’s a commercial for The Home Free Program, starring Ludicrous (Ludacris, maybe?) and Greyhound. The soundtrack’s song’s lyrics go, “Don’t keep running away/ I’ll run away with you/ If you want me to,” which seems like the wrong message, frankly.
Anyway, Smith comes back and says that, yes, Peggy did have a twin who was born three minutes after she was (Again, not a plot point, but a big deal is made of the fact that she was born at 11:58 and the twin was born 3 minutes later, so, like…the next day. Not that it matters.), and who died 12 days later. “There’s something else,” Smith says. “There was something wrong with her. …Part of her brain wasn’t formed. She would have never had a normal life.” “Did they…did he just let her die?” Peggy asks. You know what? If “part of her brain wasn’t formed,” maybe, you know, this wasn’t really the heartless murderous act you think it was, Peggster.
Peggy gets weird and incestuous-y and sexually menacing and interrogates Frankie about whether he remembers her having a twin sister.
“You’re joking, [Peggy],” he ree-rees.
“No, Frankie,” she moans, “I’m dead serious.”
Then Peggy goes to an awesome rave in the attic.
She brings Frankie up later, but Frankie doesn’t see the awesome rave! What’s going on! On the other hand, Frankie touches the mirror and is cured of ree-ree-ism. He starts breathing fog and telling Peggy that she will never leave this house; this house is part of her soul now. After he snaps out of it, he starts acting ree-ree extra hard, and still breathes steam for another line or two. Maybe it was just cold?
Peggy calls Smith about her rave symbols.
“Could you do some more research for me?”
“Sure, name it.”
“I saw more Wicca signs in the attic.”
Wait – Wicca? Where did that come from?
Smith is unfazed.
“Did you copy them down?”
“Yes. Listen, I need you to find a man named Dr. Stephen Coffee, and I need you to bring him to the house.”
“Okay. Who’s Dr. Coffee?”
“He’s an expert on the occult.”
Whatever.
Peggy acts some more:
(You know what? I’m just gonna go ahead and say…compare the acting there to the acting in this video. I mean…right?)
Anyway, then Peggy’s mother is drinking whiskey on the porch. Father walks past and asks her, bitterly, “What did you get all dressed up for?” She answers, furious, “I’m not dressed up.” Also not a plot point, but, you know, great.
Then there’s a scene with the psychiatrist talking to the parents and you do get some plot points…but you know what they are and I’m not going to bother typing them.
That night, Frankie hears a scary noise and decides to go out to investigate. Peggy begs him not to, but the ree-ree insists that he’s “big and strong.” So Evil Peggy slits his throat with a kitchen knife and then stares at Not-Evil Peggy for a while. The detectives show back up and interrogate Peggy about the murder. She tells them that her sister Beth did it. “Beth?” She nods sagely. “There’s a case file. Detective John Trevor has been helping me with it.” The detectives find nothing strange about this and decide to go home for the night.
Later, Peggy sees her parents hugging Evil Her, and takes a picture of them with Frankie’s camera. Oh, right. That took a while to show back up.
Smith stops by, and they act:
What do you think he’s thinking in this scene? I think his face during these cutaways is my favorite part of the entire movie, maybe.
Peggy accuses him of just wanting to fuck, and so they do. It’s weird. Then she takes some photos of him on Frankie’s camera, which certainly couldn’t possibly be a plot point. (Actually, it is, of course, entirely possible that it’s not a plot point. But it is.) Also, check out Smith’s post-doing-it hair:
Eh? Eh??
Some more ghostly stuff happens, then Peggy dyes a blonde streak in her hair so that “when she comes back, she won’t look like me, and then everybody will know it was her.” Whatever. She tells the psychiatrist about the camera, he offers to take her to a mental institution, she says she wants to go. He tells her parents that she should be hospitalized, and they seem to disagree with him – he sort of runs off in a weird huff. Then Peggy sits on the stairs and eavesdrops on her parents downstairs. You can hear her father saying, “This isn’t the Miss American beauty pageant,” whatever that means. Then it fades to some weird scene where Peggy has her normal hair color back and seems to be standing in, like, a bus station or something. I guess it’s, like, a metaphor? For, um, overhearing people talking? Look, I don’t know.
The next day, her father walks downstairs and sees her pigging out at the kitchen table (remember how she used to never eat? Maybe I didn’t harp on that very much – but trust me, the characters kept informing each other of this fact every few minutes). That’s spaghetti sauce all over her chest and upper arms, btw. I know it’s not super-visible in my photo here, but trust me – she had it smeared all over her like SPF 75.
I guess this represents her giving in to going to the idea of the mental hospital, and starting to get better? Because that’s healthy. Rubbing pasta on your biceps. But then her father reaches in front of her for a piece of…chicken or something…and his sleeve rides up and – oh noe! – reveals a pentagram tattoo on his wrist! So she freaks out and starts with the crazy again, offering him handfuls of pasta and then dropping it on the floor, telling him she knows what he’s doing, blah blah. He hugs her, in his nice suit, which seems crazy to me, also, frankly. Then they kiss.
Whatever.
Some more ghostly stuff happens. There’s some whispering, and a door rattles ominously. Frankly, I was kind of distracted by how much she looked like Cruella DeVille suddenly.
Evil Ghost Her shows up and they start wrasslin’ and hair-pullin’. It’s a total girl-fight, too: like, with little pained gasps of “ow!” and slow-mo rolling-around and slapping. Then Smith busts in and – I swear this is true – holds a gun to Evil Ghost Her’s head. For some reason this is threatening to Evil Ghost Her, so Evil Ghost Her quits pulling Good Her’s hair and then jumps out of the window and disappears. Guns? Threatening. Jumping out of top-floor windows and disappearing? Eh.
But at least now Smith has seen her, so he knows she’s not crazy. She tells him that her dad told Evil Her to kill her. He says they need to go to the police, convince them, and then bring them back to “end this.” But isn’t he the police? Also, um, what?
Anyway, it’s moot – Peggy still refuses to leave the house. He gives her his gun and goes off on his own to “find the detectives.” But but! Anyway, she swears she’ll leave with him “when it’s over.”
Whatever.
You know, I’m just noticing how pretty this room is, that she was just attacked in.
That big window and all? What is this room? Why hasn’t this room ever been unpacked/set up? They’ve lived here for at least like two months (she mentions at one point that she hasn’t left the house in 40 days).
Whatever.
Her parents come home and immediately get caught crushing up some pills and putting them into a soda for her (we see a pentagram on her mother’s wrist, too, at this point). She starts waving the gun around at them and accusing them of trying to kill her.
“It’ll help you sleep, sweetie,” her mom says.
“For how long? A dirt nap??”
Whatever.
Jon Voight! That’s who her dad reminds me of! Phew. That was bothering me. Anyway.
He developed the pictures. …But she doesn’t look at them yet. Instead, she recaps the movie so far for him, informing him that her twin sister Beth died 12 days after she was born, but he’s been trying to bring her back with his witchcraft, and she killed Frankie (“Bitch killed Frankie!”).
“No, Sweetheart,” Jon Voight says, savoring his ownership of the movie’s twist line, “you killed Frankie.”
For some reason, this she believes. This is what breaks through her psychosis, and she breaks out in tears, realizing that it is true. Nice.
Jon Voight tries to take the gun from her, and she shoots him. Then she shoots her mom. Incidentally, you can still see her pentagram tattoo here in this scene, so if we’re going for one of those Fight Club things, shouldn’t that have disappeared once she realized she was crazy and imagining everything? Or…were her parents actually Wiccans? Anyway, she calls 911 and tells them that she just killed her parents in self-defense.
Oh…wait…no, there in the next scene, just after the commercial break: both tattoos are gone. I’m going to go ahead and call this one for “continuity error,” rather than “big reveal.”
Anyway, the cops show up and tell her to put down the gun that she’s pointing at them. She demands to see Detective John Trevor. He runs in, dressed in his EMT uniform. She tells him to tell the other detectives about Beth and Coffee and what they found out.
“My name’s Brad. Brad Howard. I’m a paramedic,” Smith over-explains.
“There is no twin sister, [Peggy],” the detective says, while tolerating having a crazy lady point a gun at him. “We have your birth records.”
“But what about the photos?” she asks, and hands them to him, and he takes them, and still doesn’t mind having a gun pointed at him.
“They’re just empty rooms, [Peggy],” he says, and hands them back to her, and it’s true, they are, and he still doesn’t mind that she’s pointing a gun at him.
And then there are lots of flashbacks to Peggy taking the pictures, and Smith keeps fading out of them, in case we didn’t get it. Also this wiggly shot:
I wonder what he’s thinking there, too?
Anyway, she demands that he tells them who he really is, or she’ll blow his brains out! On the count of three! But then, oh, twist after twist, she’s actually been pointing the gun at herself instead of him the whole time, and she kills herself, waaa-waaa, fade to the psychiatrist pedanting the next day to the detectives out in the front yard. Just in case we didn’t get it: yeah, Beth wasn’t real. John Trevor, neither.
“But what started it?” the detective asks. “Until two months ago, they were a normal family.”
“Well, something in this house triggered it.”
The other detective walks out and let’s loose this ASTOUNDING AND RELEVANT FACT:
“You’re not gonna believe it, but I just found out…30 years ago, a woman died in that same house.”
Everyone looks at each other very meaningfully, because THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.
And then another fade to the for-sale sign back up in front of the house and a new family with a vulnerable young daughter checking the place out. Man, doesn’t anybody have teenage sons these days? Who, you know, aren’t the ree-ree older brothers of crazy ladies?
Anyway, this new daughter, during the look-around, goes straight up into the attic (which, I’m now realizing, didn’t really have all that much to do with this whole thing – shouldn’t the movie have been called, like, “The Twin,” or something?). She looks into the mirror and oh noes, it’s Smith, dressed up in a cheap suit.
“Who are you?” she asks.
He answers with the six most terrifying words in cinema history:
“I’m Ron. The real estate agent.”
Recent Comments