Last night Charles and I watched the latest Lifetime “premiere” movie together: Twisted Twin, which as its title suggests was about two identical twin sisters who were both put up for adoption by separate families, with the result that one of them, Tess Houston, grows up with a sympathetic mom who raises her as a single parent after Mr. Houston is killed in one of America’s innumerable wars (we know that because in their basement there’s a sort of mini-shrine to him, including a footlocker and one of those triangularly folded U.S. flags, encased in a triangular glass case, presented to the survivors of U.S. servicemembers killed in combat). The other, Samantha “Sammy” Crain, was adopted by a rich couple who live in the beach community near fictional “Coastal University” (oddly this film was made by the “Whittendale Universe” creators, producer Ken Sanders and writer J. Bryan Dick, but this time they call their fictional university something else) but, at least according to a bit of would-be pathetic exposition writer Dick throws us at the end of the movie, she was regularly beaten by her adoptive parents, Mitch (Jack Armstrong — what a horrible thing for the All-American boy to do!) and Kim (Julie Lancaster) Crain. As a result, she grew up to be a “bad girl,” constantly getting into various scrapes and getting into trouble from which her parents had to bail her out, and in the opening scene we see Mitch and Kim both getting stabbed to death in their bed, though we’re not yet aware of by whom. The elder Crains are seen in enough flashbacks that the filmmakers, Sanders, Dick and director Jeff Hare, needed actors to play them — though Hare can’t manage to make the cut-backs between present and past smooth and each such gesture jars — and what apparently triggers their murder was their decision to disown Sammy and write her out of the will. Mitch tells her they’ve already signed the document to do that, so Sammy figures she needs them dead immediately so she can at least grab the thousands of dollars’ worth of cash and uncut diamonds (the latter suggests that the Crains have made their money in some less-than-legitimate ways) and flee to Mexico with her boyfriend Damon (Rory Gibson, not surprisingly by far the sexiest man in the film), who’s actually killed her parents — one neat irony in Dick’s script is that, though she’s bloodthirsty and psychopathic enough to want everybody in her way to be killed, she’s too squeamish about murder actually to do it herself.
After the opening scene showing the murder, we’re flashed back to “Two Days Earlier” and Patricia Houston (Jennifer Taylor — the good news about her casting is that she looks enough like her on-screen daughter that they’re credible as a family even though they’re not actually blood relations; the bad news is Taylor’s so young she looks more like her on-screen daughter’s older sister) is packing her daughter Tess off to an “orientation weekend” at Coastal University. (Remember universities? Places where a whole bunch of young people traveled, often across the entire country, and sat in the same room together while an instructor actually lectured them live instead of by computer via a Zoom hookup?) Costume designer John C. Houston IV obviously knew the right iconography to portray the twin sisters: though her jacket is light blue, under it Tess is wearing a white shirt and a short white skirt when she shows up at Coastal for her orientation, while Sammy is wearing an all-black skin-tight pantsuit, one of those ensembles that’s designed to look like it’s all-in-one even if it isn’t, and matching black boots. It’s the modern-day equivalent to all those classic Westerns in which the good cowboy wore a white hat and road a white horse, while the bad cowboy wore a black hat and rode a black horse. Speaking of horses, though the Houstons are supposed to be less affluent than the Crains (when we got our first look at the Crain mansion Charles cried out “Xanadu!” and I said, “Wrong Welles reference — it looks more like the Amberson mansion to me”), they own a fairly extensive horse stable even though there appears to be only one horse in it (obviously the budget of K2 Entertainment and Greentree Media couldn’t stretch to rent more horses than that!) who’s called “Pepper” and is a particular favorite of Tess. In fact, the reason Tess is traveling across the country to attend “Coastal University” is she wants to be a horse veterinarian and they have a particularly good and nationally renowned program in veterinary medicine.
Tess also had a boyfriend named Lucas (Bryson Powers) — of course the good girl’s boyfriend, though nondescriptly pretty, is hardly in the same league for hunkiness as the bad girl’s boyfriend! — only on the eve of her orientation weekend Lucas told Tess he was breaking up with her because he didn’t want the strain of a long-distance relationship. While Tess is in town near Coastal University for their orientation Sammy and Damon are plotting out and, in his case, carrying out Sammy’s parents’ murder, and the inevitable happens in a twins story: Sammy goes back to Tess’s home town and impersonates her, while Tess gets arrested for the murders and can’t get the cops to believe that she even has a twin sister, much less that her twin is the one the cops should really suspect. Tess realizes that the whole reunion with Sammy — who traced her online through social media and thus realized for the first time in her life that she had a twin — was a setup so Sammy could kill her adoptive parents and set Tess up as the fall girl. Peculiarly, the imdb.com page on Twisted Twin (Lifetime’s schedule page lists the film as The Twisted Twin, but neither the actual credits nor imdb.com list the article) doesn’t list the actress(es) who played Sammy and Tess — though it credits a woman with the improbable name “Destiny Gin” (who thought that one up? Her parents? Her agents? Herself?) as playing both the small part of Nurse Jordan and as doubling for both Tess and Sammy in the scenes showing them together. By process of elimination I’ve guessed that the actress in both roles (and it’s clearly the same person even though, as Charles pointed out after the movie was over, even identical twins don’t look absolutely the same; they develop subtle but unmistakable differences in height, weight and mannerisms) was Lorynn York. She’s quite good at creating two different characters for Sammy and Tess but without making them so similar we’d lose the point of the story that they’re supposed to have absolutely opposite senses of morality. She’s not as good as the classic-era actresses like Bette Davis in A Stolen Life and Dead Ringer or Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror, but she’s competent enough she’ll do.
Like all good impersonation stories, much of the fun of Twisted Twin comes from watching Sammy go to Roberta’s home and try to pass herself off as Tess — and Dick is an inventive enough writer he’s able to set her a number of traps and then create resourceful ways for her to escape them (like when she offers her “mom” a cup of coffee, says she’ll have hers black and asks mom how she wants hers, and mom says, “The usual” — Sammy responds by bringing her a tray with the coffee, cream and sugar on it and saying she’ll let mom do it herself), including the cold, rude way she tells off Lucas after he comes around all sweetness and light and offers to resume their relationship. Sammy does prove herself capable of murder on her own when she decides her boyfriend Damon has become inconvenient and eliminates him by giving him a shot of ketamine — an animal tranquilizer that’s also the highly abused party-scene and date-rape drug “Special K” — which she gets from an unlocked metal cabinet in Tess’s horse’s stable (Charles questioned whether anyone would keep such a widely abused drug in an unlocked cabinet) — and waiting in the woods with him until it overpowers him (there’s a nice shot in which he’s grabbing at her ankle, trying to pull her down so he can overpower her, before the drug kicks in and renders him first unconscious and then dead — after which Sammy steals his cell phone and on it writes what’s ostensibly his suicide note in which he confesses that he killed Sammy’s parents but says he did it on his own). The climax occurs at an old mountain cabin formerly owned by Roberta’s mom — once again, a Lifetime writer is setting a climax at a mountain cabin so it will take place outside cell-phone range — where Sammy has taken Roberta, who still thinks she’s Tess, in order to do her in while the real Tess has faked illness so she could be sent to a hospital instead of jail, then escaped from the hospital — there’s a nice scene in which she grabs a set of keys at random, punches the security button, watches which car’s lights in the parking lot light up, then steals that car.
She and Lucas, with whom she’s reconnected, drive out to that old cabin (Tess went there often as a child so she knows where it is), and when they realize there’s no cell phone reception Tess sends Lucas out to the nearest town to call the police while she confronts Sammy, who’s holding Tess’s dad’s old service gun on her mom. Mom reacts to the situation with almost preternatural calm, essentially daring Sammy to shoot her, and when Sammy does the gun doesn’t go off — mom then calmly explains that the firing pin for the gun wore out years before. Sammy uses the gun to club mom and render her unconscious — but Tess sneaks up behind Sammy, grabs a fireplace poker and knocks her out, then (unlike a lot of heroines in Lifetime movies who’ve just knocked out the villain) has the good sense to tie her up so they can keep her from escaping until the police arrive. Later there’s a tag scene “Ten Months Later” showing Tess visiting Sammy in prison. Twisted Twin is actually a bit better than the common run of Lifetime movies — especially Bryan Dick’s previous scripts, which were usually about nubile young college girls selling their bodies to rich men to get the money to afford Whittendale University’s tuition. (These were the ones he wrote with his former writing partner Barbara Kymlicka, of whom I joked that given the heavy-duty sexual content of their scripts it seemed odd that they were willing to have them credited to Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker.) It’s a neatly done movie and it’s well acted by the principals, but it’s also one tied way too closely to the usual Lifetime formulae and Dick doesn’t turn Sammy into the sort of genuinely conflicted character Christine Conradt might have made her if she had worked on this script.
