Conjoined Screener Review

I got in touch with director Joe Grisaffi about the possibility of reviewing his film "Conjoined" after reading several positive reviews elsewhere on the interwebs. As you may have surmised by the title of this post, I got to see it. While Conjoined might not be a perfect indie effort, what it lacks in other areas, it makes up for in terms of originality. That may not count for much to some movie buffs out there, but for me, it goes a long way.

Conjoined is the tale of Stanley, a lonely bachelor who doesn't have a ton of luck with the ladies. He spends most of his nights, and money, hanging out on porn sites. Things are about to change for Stanley though, as he's counting down the weeks until he gets to meet and marry his online girlfriend Alina. During an online chat session just days before the big date, Alina informs Stanley of a secret she's been keeping from him. Alina actually has a twin sister named Alisa, to whom she is conjoined. At first this comes as a shock to Stanley, but true love knows no bounds, and he goes through with the wedding, and lets Alina and Alisa move in with him. As if that isn't difficult enough to adjust to, it turns out that Alisa also just so happens to be a homicidal maniac. Yes, Stanley's new bride has an evil twin, and she just to happens to be conjoined to her. As Alisa's body count continues to mount, Stanley must continue to clean up her messes, in order to keep his wife from going down with her.

So the idea of the evil twin has been done many, many times before. However, as far as I've seen, this is the first time the twins have ever literally been connected at the hip. It's one of those brilliant ideas that seems obvious, and just makes you wonder how nobody's done it before. Conjoined is as low budget as low budget films come, but that doesn't stop it from being entertaining from beginning to end. It's filled with dark humor, a few practical effects which work well enough, and while it won't necessarily appeal to gore hounds, there's a good bit of the red stuff, and some fairly gnarly stuff going on, it just mostly happens off camera.

If you can look past it's flaws, and just accept it for what it is, Conjoined is a really fun movie. The performances are decent from most of the cast, and while a couple of scenes ran a bit long, I never found myself bored with it. Joe Grisaffi proves he's got some directorial chops, even with obvious budgetary constraints. Imagine a soap opera set in Hell that doesn't take itself too seriously, and you start to get the idea.