Identical twins have always played a large part in film fantasies both titillating and frightening. It’s no surprise that this genetic and reproductive anomaly is fascinating, and Scooter Corkle takes advantage of this fascination in his film Chloe and Attie. Identical twin sisters Jacqueline and Joyce Robbins play the title characters. Chloe looks after her sister Attie; Attie appears to be in a strange wakeful yet vegetative state, not able to walk or move without Chloe’s assistance. Chloe spends most of her time drinking by her sister’s bedside. One day, Attie sends her sister a signal. And then the horror begins. Attie has a secret and deadly power; Chloe is her enabler. Would it be different if they weren’t twins? Does the loyalty to family matter over everything else? Or does Chloe get her own perverse pleasure from Attie’s destruction? The washed-out photography adds to the somber and terrifying atmosphere of the sisters’ blind devotion. This is one of the few times I wish a short had been longer, as the creepy feeling almost didn’t have enough time to set in. Not since The Shining has there been a more disturbing set of twins.
The mockumentary has become a popular cinematic device for telling fantastical stories, particularly in short films. Sex! With Hot Robots is one such film, set in a future where former cleaning / maintenance / sex robots have taken over and use humans as their slave labour. Various humans who were children when the robots began to appear give their views: the men who dreamed of their first sexual encounters (cleaning schmeaning – these robots wore French maid outfits!), a wife tells of her frustration with the device until the male version was made, and one of the creators of the original device who only later realized his mistake. In this future, the male and female bots discovered each other and almost completely eliminated human society, the remnants of which live in the sewers. Except that the humans being interviewed all look healthy and well-dressed, and have a documentary made about them, which takes away from the effect. But then, this is a pretty tongue-in-cheek look at western culture’s obsession with gadgets and sex, with finding the perfect person who isn’t a person: both the stereotypical male desire for a woman who will cook, clean, and do whatever her “master” desires, and the female stereotype of having a man to repair things and let her do all the talking.
