Dir. Neil Breen. 89 minutes.
3.5/5
In what must be the most peculiar online release of the year, twins Cade Altair (director Neil Breen) and Cale Altair (Breen, in a stick-on beard and mustache) are abducted by an unknown force that gifts them with superpowers. Cade and Cale must join forces to stop the “programmable virtual reality,” which is a “limitless digital universe, connecting all shared virtual reality digital tribes.” Please email me if you have any idea what this means.
What can be said about “Twisted Pair,” an 89-minute plunge into a vortex of total lunacy? What Breen tries to convince us is a supercomputer network is manifestly just a school computer lab, and a “fancy restaurant” suspiciously resembles an empty food court. The improbably named villain, “Cuzzx,” looks like an escapee from Warhol’s Factory, wearing a flamboyant, color-changing scarf and continually fondling handfuls of diamonds. Much of the dialogue, dealing with “reprogrammed DNA” and “biochemical and cyber control of human life-support,” is frankly incomprehensible, and almost every single line is delivered with the awkward intonation of a new English-learner. The overall effect is hypnotic: you struggle to believe what you’re hearing and seeing.
Breen, most of whose other films also star him as a Christlike superbeing, is a man of limitless ambition, but who seems to lack normal human intuitions about what appears credible onscreen. “Twisted Pair” is not “good” in any ordinary sense, but it must be seen to be believed.
