I love this movie so much

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

In Twixt, a "bargain-basement Stephen King" writer (Val Kilmer) visits a small town on a going-nowhere book tour only to find himself very much a part of a real mystery containing a haunted belfry, ghosts of dead children, and a corpse with a stake through its heart. It's a movie chock full of atmosphere and unease, and it's really well done. Good movie for this time of year.Kilmer plays Hall Baltimore. He drinks a lot. I mean a lot. At a quiet book signing, the local sheriff Bobby Lagrange (played with absolute zeal by Bruce Dern) slyly mentions that he himself is a bit of a writer and would Mr. Baltimore care to collaborate? Why, Sheriff Bobby even has a story all ready to go. Has to do with missing and/or murdered kids, or maybe the aforementioned belfry (it's haunted!) and probably everything to do with those kids who live across the lake, the ones who look like they practice Satanism or some such.Meanwhile, Baltimore has money woes. His wife (played by Kilmer's real-life ex, Joanne Whalley) pressures him to get another advance from his publisher (David Paymer) so that she can pay off their mounting debt, even threatening to sell his priceless copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. This is kind of what gets Baltimore to agree to a sort of collaboration with the sheriff.One night, Baltimore has one heck of a dream. He wanders through a forest, where he is joined by an ethereal girl in braces (Elle Fanning). They converse, and their path leads them to an old hotel - one that's not open when Baltimore is awake. The girl refuses to go in; Baltimore does, and he learns some things about missing children and the secrets of the town. He wakes up. But was it a dream? Coppola strikes just the right tone with this movie, and the casting is superlative. Kilmer is fine - perhaps even better than usual - and Dern is terrific. Love that guy. Alden Ehrenreich (the new Han Solo, plus the guy from Beautiful Creatures) and Don Novello (yes, Father Guido Sarducci from SNL) are both a real treat. The ending both comes out of nowhere and makes all the sense in the world, just the kind of ending you want in a horror thriller.

Released in 2011 and Written & directed by Francis Ford Coppola, "Twixt" is a mystery dramedy with elements of horror starring Val Kilmer as Hall Baltimore, a mystery/horror writer with a declining career. On his latest book tour he arrives in a small town and gets caught up in a murder mystery upon meeting the eccentric sheriff, Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern). He meets a quasi-goth girl named V (Elle Fanning) who reminds him of his pubescent daughter. There's also a camp of weirdo goth-kids across the lake and Edgar Allen Poe shows up now and then as a kind of spirit-guide (Ben Chaplin), but what's dream and what's reality? And who murdered the female in the morgue? Alden Ehrenreich is on hand as the leader of the wannabe vampire youths, Flamingo, while Anthony Fusco plays the dubious pastor. Joanne Whalley appears as Baltimore's wife while Bruce A. Miroglio plays the fat bastage deputy. "Twixt" (as in 'betwixt,' between) combines the look of Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992) with the inscrutableness of 2007's "Youth Without Youth" plus a sense of humor. It's a quirky, hermetic mystery flick that leaves you scratching your head, but you strangely find yourself enjoying the ride, for the most part. It's a fun Gothic tale with beautifully haunting cinematography & atmosphere, highlighted by Poe, bell towers, ghosts and bats in the belfry, which bring to mind the horror tales of KD/MF, like 1987's ABIGAIL and 1993's IN THE SHADOWS. The enhanced moonlighting and otherworldly blueish gray tones are awesome. At the same time, "Twixt" is about the creative process as we observe the desperation of a writer with a splash of actual talent scraping the bottom of the barrel, often under the influence of sundry intoxicants. Will he come up with a best seller? Will he solve the murder mystery? Will he come to terms with his ghosts of the past and his inner demons, so to speak, specters and demons that arise from his guilt over what happened to his daughter? A lot of the movie is an internal dialogue with the writer's own ghosts and literary influences. Poe and Charles Baudelaire (a notorious substance abuser) are referenced, with the former intermittently appearing, but only when Baltimore is under the influence, or dreaming. Did the abuse and murder of the children happen as shown? Or did Poe and the vampire incarnation of his own daughter serve as muses to the writer as he works his way through creating a story that turns his career around? Coppola leaves it up to you to decide what is real and what is imagination, but the answers are there if you want to mine 'em. Francis got the story from a dream he had while staying in Istanbul. This sets-up the criticism that Coppola's dream is the audience's nightmare. While "Twixt" leaves too many threads dangling, the parts are all there; they just needed sewn together more effectively. Then again, Francis likely wanted the viewer to leave with questions to ponder. See below for insights. The film runs 88 minutes and was shot at Kelseyville and the Clear Lake area of Northern California. GRADE: B- (6.5/10)MISC. INSIGHTS ***SPOILER ALERT*** (Don't read further unless you've watched the movie)A lot of what happens in the town was the author working out his story. Most of it isn't real. The sheriff and deputy are real, as are their deaths at the end, not to mention Baltimore's wife. The sheriff really wanted to write with him. The movie shows what Baltimore experienced as he journeys through his creative process. His book is completed by the end, selling 30,000 copies.The bell tower keeps 7 different times, a representation of when Baltimore wasn't able to go on a trip with his daughter, as he set the clock with the wrong time, so the alarm didn't go off. And his daughter died on the trip. So "time" in the novel for him is useless and naturally the antagonist. Even V says keeping track of time "here" is pointless, which is why she missed his book signing. A big part of the movie is Hall's loss of his daughter. Time is the 'villain.' By not dealing with the tragic accident Baltimore is figuratively keeping his daughter undead. He's fighting time somehow. The age of his daughter when she died is also pertinent. She was betwixt a child and a teenager. And Hall was perhaps between deadlines and going on tours, thus missing out on some of her late childhood/early adolescence ("I thought they would be small boats... children's boats...") The vampire kids represent the strange changes children go through as they enter their teens – the music they like, how they dress, etc. – as they start developing a disposition of their own. It seems so weird to their parents who suddenly find themselves "on the outside looking in." Sheriff LaGrange represents the older generation thinking "Bah, these kids today!" The psycho pastor slays the kids to keep them from "becoming vampires," that is, becoming teenagers who will lose their innocence as they make many mistakes learning to decide for themselves. Flamingo is akin to the Pied Piper; he "gets away" at the end because he'll always be around: There will always be a teenage sense of rebellion, regardless of the clothes it wears.If my comments sound like several dubiously-linking threads its because the movie leaves you with this impression.

The preview looked interesting and seeing Coppolas name behind it seemed to suggest it would be good, but unfortunately it is not the case.By the end of the film I wondered if Coppola wanted to deliberately make a bad movie - there are dream sequences which go on for so long and seem to be where really anything happens. the things occurring when Baltimore is awake seem to often just have no reason to have even been shown - such as when he calls the police station and there is a cut-screen showing the call operator responding to his call and connecting him to the police station - i don't understand why this was even needed to be shown - that and the interactions between hall and his wife. too much just seemed unnecessary or made no sense to the plot at all, and the confusing nature of it all didn't work to raise any questions about possibilities as there was nothing firm to go on in the first placeas mentioned in the review title, i did like the Edgar Allan Poe figure and the visuals of Poe leading Baltimore with his lantern over dangerous ground was interesting - Poe had some interesting things to say. lastly reading in another review that Coppola released this as a 3d film makes me lean more toward thinking he really was deliberately trying to make a confusing, even irritating film

A writer in a declining career arrives in a small town as part of his book tour and gets caught up in a murder mystery involving a young girl. That night in a dream, he is approached by a mysterious ghost. He's unsure of her connection to the murder in the town, but is grateful for the story being handed to him. He is led to the truth of the story, surprised to find that the ending has more to do with his own life than he could ever have anticipated....If you expect a comeback of sorts from Coppola, stay away, it's not in the same league of any if his greats, this was more of an experiment for him in editing, that went a bit awry.But saying that, its a strange little film that harks of Twin Peaks merged with The Company Of Wolves, If written by Stephen King. In fact, there are lots of elements that are familiar in the narrative.A sleepy town has a secret uncovered, when a writer comes to town, it's been done before, and had me thinking of Misery, The Shining, and Secret Window.But the story isn't really the important part of the film ironically, it's the cinematography and the wonderful, boozy dream sequences Kilmer has that makes this the curious piece that it is.Its a predictable enough story, fused with bizarre but brilliant things, Poe popping up every now and again, and the brilliant inclusion of Whalley as Kilmer's long suffering wife.So all in all, its nothing brilliant, amazing to look at, and very bizarre, but homaging Stephen King a little too much.