Now available on DVD
Cast:
Orlando Jones as Detective Lampkin
Edmund Entin as Jonah
Gary Entin as Seth
Samantha Droke as Eve
Louis Herthum as Owen Trimble
Morgana Shaw as Rita Trimble
Directed by Antonio Negret
Review:
A pair of highly intelligent, high-school age twin brothers named Jonah and Seth are gifted with unique mental abilities that allow them to control other people’s perceptions and actions. They use these skills to make fellow students do everything from have sex to kill themselves.
A police detective investigates the twins’ latest orchestration: a group suicide by the participants in a card game at a school party. The detective, grief-stricken at the recent death of his wife in a fire, immediately gravitates toward the twins as suspects and puts himself on a collision course with the lethal pair.
The first thing that struck me about Seconds Apart is the pervasive influence of Canadian directing legend David Cronenberg. The film has a pair of brilliant twins that exist in their own enclosed world like the Mantle brothers in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers from 1989. Also like the Mantle brothers in Cronenberg’s film, Jonah and Seth have their bond threatened by a relationship with a woman.
The film also features Scanners-like powers, especially reminiscent of the kind on display towards the end of Cronenberg’s 1981 classic where a security guard psychologically melts down after being made to see an image of his elderly mother. There are several scenes like this in Seconds Apart, albeit with more deadly results. Also adopted from some of the earlier Cronenberg films is the way Seconds Apart opens. The aforementioned card game at the school party turns into lethal round of Russian roulette that ends up with no survivors.
This kind of stunning, unexplained opening scene that the audience is left to figure out as the film goes on is a technique used brilliantly by Cronenberg in 1975’s Shivers (the murder/suicide in the apartment) and 1979’s The Brood (the therapy demonstration) and was intended to be used in Scanners but the director moved the legendary scanning demonstration sequence to a later point in the film when preview screenings didn’t get the response he was looking for.
The reasons the card game sequence in Seconds Apart has nothing close to the impact of Cronenberg’s employment of the same narrative technique are the same reasons the film as a whole doesn’t come together: quality of screenplay by screenwriter George Richards and Antonio Negret’s directing.
The opening sequence is directed in a jerky, very distracting fashion that was obviously an attempt at âstyleâ, robbing the scene of its intended dramatic effect. This type of directing, heavy on flash frames, doesn’t help the rest of the film, either.
Seconds Apart, a cross between the aforementioned Cronenberg films and the real life Leopold and Loeb case, just doesn’t work despite a lot of potential for a very memorable film. There’s a flatness to the film and it contains no real mystery or suspense.
On the acting front, Orlando Jones doesn’t bring enough dramatic weight to his detective character and Edmund and Gary Entin come off as largely one-dimensional in their roles as the twins.
One very strong and unique moment of note is a sequence where the Orlando Jones character flashes back to the lethal fire that took his wife’s life. In the aftermath, the character finds himself standing in a frozen netherworld. He picks up a piece of ice and stares into it. This is revealed to be the result of a hypnotic therapy used to help the character deal with his burn wounds. It’s a beautiful, surreal scene.
The previous After Dark Originals films Husk and Prowl had potential that the screenplays and directing didn’t capitalize on. While the same can certainly be said of Seconds Apart, I’d add that this film’s premise could’ve been made into something really special, making the end result all the more disappointing.
