The plot is a complete mess, I'll just get that out there immediately. At times its slow, other times silly, but it is always incoherent. Characters talk in metaphors without the audience being privy to them until ten minutes later or about technical subjects that seem irrelevant to the central plot. I still don't quite know what set up the clock tower scene myself. But I still can't bring myself to hate this movie.

The reason being that so much care went into every other aspect. The art direction is first class, the ghostly dream world with its bluish gray with sharp red and yellow accents is down right beautiful. The setting is great, each location is recognizable and interesting from the vampire camp ground to the sheriff's bird house cluttered home. And in spite of having nowhere to go, so much care was put into the characters. The ghostly pallor of the dead girl drives home what she is long before the writing with just enough color to give her a somber beauty. And while the plot leaves much to be desired, the writing is excellent. The characters were written with such life in their dialogue and the narration perfectly balances being informative and entertaining. Character tropes like the drunk writer and the lazy deputy are used well, the drunken writer and the lazy deputy feel fresh where a lesser writer would make them cliché and tired.

The flaw of the film was the way it handled the theme. Coppola got so caught up in his theme that the story comes off as an afterthought. As result, it takes great leaps in the hopes that you share his mindset when he is writing it. The mind set of a writer which is not a particularly common thought process. There is so much good I can't help but like the movie on some level, it just feels like that good doesn't go anywhere.

And I would read the hell out of The Vampire Executioner.

Best known as the director of classics like "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now", Francis Ford Coppola has directed some unusual movies in the past few years: "Youth without Youth", "Tetro" and now "Twixt". What's particularly interesting about this movie is that Coppola uses a trick that he previously employed in "Rumble Fish": color objects standing out starkly amid a black and white setting. This could draw your attention to the object...or to the object's color.

It's not really a scary movie. Unsolved murders are a common theme in movies. But each character has something perplexing about himself or herself. Just which kind of secret does each of these individuals hold? I recommend the movie. I guess that you could say, it's an offer that you can't refuse.

Wow. It's hard to believe that Francis Ford Coppola (THE GODFATHER) would put his name to this travesty. It's a shot-on-video, zero budget piece of nonsense featuring a chubby Val Kilmer playing a horror writer who visits a creepy small town to work on his latest novel. While there he encounters the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe (yep), alongside a creepy vampire kid and lots of bizarre townsfolk. Is what's going on all in his head, or is there something more disturbing about the town?

As another viewer noted, TWIXT looks like one of those cheap, live-action horror video games made in the 1990s, like PHANTASMAGORIA, except worse. The whole blue-tinted look of the movie is a mess and the storyline is even worse. It seems Coppola made this as an experimental film but the experiment is a complete failure. The only interesting thing is that Joanne Whalley turns up playing Kilmer's ex-wife as an in-joke (she's Kilmer's ex in real life). Kilmer seems embarrassed by the whole thing and rightly so. Bruce Dern cameos as the town sheriff and the reliable Ben Chaplin plays Poe, but for most of the running time we're stuck with one of those annoying Fanning kids. For shame, Coppola...