Sisters

Once again, we've got another movie coming up on TCM that's been on my DVR for several months, so now is the time to post it and do a review of it. That movie is Sisters, and it's on tonight (June 26) at 11:30 PM.

The movie starts off oddly, with a local game show called Peeping Tom which is basically Candid Camera style video-clips asking the contestants what the mark in the video is going to do next. After the clip, the mark, a man named Phillip Woode, and the actress paid by the show, a woman named Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder) come out and get their prizes for participating in the show. The two meet outside the studio and go for dinner, since Phillip's prize was dinner for two at a nice Manhattan restaurant. There, a man named Emil shows up, claiming to be Danielle's ex-husband from Quebec warning her that she can never marry another man.

Danielle and Phillip go back to her apartment on Staten Island for a night of love-making which reveals that Danielle has a scar on her pelvis. In the morning, she asks Phillip to go out and get her a prescription as well as a birthday cake, since it's the birthday of her and her twin sister, who was apparently in the bedroom while Danielle and Phillip made love out on the couch in the living room. Phillip comes back and... Danielle stabs him to death!

Meanwhile, journalist Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) is looking out her window and just happens to see Phillip struggling before trying to write something on the window with his blood and then dropping dead. Grace calls the police to get them to investigate, but they're somewhat reluctant to do so since some of Grace's articles have been about police incompetence. But they're more or less required to do so. Naturally, they don't find anything. Grace knows what she saw, so she calls up a private detective, Larch (Charles Durning), who comes up with some way to get into the apartment. Larch finds he can't move the sofa-bed, which is a clue that perhaps the dead body is hidden there, although he doesn't have time to open it before Danielle and Emil return to the apartment. In his escape, however, Larch is able to abscond with a medical file suggesting that Danielle is really Danielle Blanchion, one half of Canada's first surviving set of conjoined twins. Except that Danielle is the only one that survives since Dominique died in an emergency operation to separate the two.

Emile and Danielle have called in movers to clear out the apartment and move somewhere else, leading Larch to follow the moving van while Grace tries to determine where Danielle and Emil have gone. She finds them, although this leads to some really wild plot twists that I can't go into detail about because it would spoil even more than I've already spoiled.

"Wild" is, I think, a good word to describe Sisters. It feels like it was made on a low budget, with the result that it certainly has some flaws consistent with a film needing more money. (One major plot hole is that certainly Phillip would have been reported missing by somebody who knew him.) But it's a heck of a lot of fun even if the ending is totally unrealistic. I'm glad I got the chance to watch it, and you should see it, too.