Parallel is based upon the thin but fleetingly interesting idea that there is a parallel universe which runs alongside our own, and in that universe our mirror-image twins are having more fun, terrorising more people and enjoying more violent sex than we are. Because our mirror-image twins are nasty and horny pieces of work.
When a loved-up young couple called Neil and Heather (David Magowan and Faye Sewell) meet Machlis (Brian Carter), a shifty looking medium who puts Heather under hypnosis so that she can see into the parallel world and vicariously watch and experience what her mirror-twin is doing (mostly getting off with a guy who isn’t Neil), their whirlwind romance begins to disintegrate faster than a muppet in an acid bath. Heather can’t get enough of her twisted mirror-twin so she begins visiting Machlis behind Neil’s back, and then Neil begins to visit Machlis as well, mostly because his mirror-twin keeps hooking up with a beautiful Eastern European femme fatale stereotype who’s into S&M and sounds like Natasha from the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. But things go dangerously wrong when their real lives and their parallel lives collide and Neil inadvertently opens the doorway that lets their murderous mirror-twins into the ‘real’ world…
Or something like that. After the first couple of minutes we’d given up caring. Parallel is (thankfully) only 79 minutes long but it felt like the longest fortnight of this reviewer’s life.
It’s usually a very bad sign when a writer stars in his own script and writer/lead actor David Magowan does nothing to buck that trend. His screenplay is awful and his performance is even worse. In fact, all of the performances (with the very slight exception of Brian Carter) are excruciating to watch, and the actors are aided and abetted every step of the way by a director who barely knows which way to hold the camera. And let’s not even get started on the amateur-hour fight/sex choreography and the cacophony that’s called a musical score.
This writer doesn’t think he’s ever reviewed anything and given it a 0. This writer always try and find at least one positive thing to say about whatever he’s reviewing and, after giving Parallel a lot of thought, here’s the only positive this writer could come up with…
Yep. There isn’t one. This is the worst film this writer has ever seen. It is the cinematic (and we use that word advisedly) equivalent of the vengeful ex-girlfriend who sewed prawns into your curtains and six weeks later the smell was so bad you thought something had died under the floorboards. And you know what’s really annoying? That there are talented filmmakers and screenwriters out there who would sell their souls for the chance to make a no-budget feature and may never get the opportunity, and yet people who do get that opportunity squander it away on a turgid ego-driven car-crash like this. AVOID.
PARALLEL / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR: IEVA MAKSELYTE / SCREENPLAY: DAVID MAGOWAN / STARRING: DAVID MAGOWAN, FAYE SEWELL, BRIAN CARTER / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
