I’m still amazed that they never made a sequel to Twins. Twins 2, off the top of my head: Vincent and Julius go back to the secret science island and we have the opposite fish-out-of-water story, as Vincent brings his city dirtbag sensibility to the geneticists and the meditation sessions and the skindivers.
I think that this is my first Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on the site. (Nope! You did Commando in 2020. —Ed.) Terminator 2: Judgment Day was in the production schedule before I gave up on the production schedule, and then the decision to write 40 of these randos sort of pushed everything else back for the foreseeable future.
This is also my first Danny DeVito movie, which is even weirder, as he’s one of my favorite actors. (He says favorite but means “has occasionally thought about getting a tattoo of Danny DeVito” —Ed.).
Another first would probably be Kelly Preston being one of the first movie stars who I thought of as specifically sexy. (Arnie in this movie is probably another, honestly. —Ed.) The very tame Marnie and Julius hotel room scene is seared in my brain from countless times watching Twins, and I haven’t even seen this movie in over twenty years.
I still don’t have a specific take on Twins for this week. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when Arnie was the biggest movie star in the world, so I have seen every movie that he made at least up through his stint as governor. I saw Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 3 and Batman & Robin in the theater, I wore out the tapes of T2 and Conan and Commando, and on and on. As for DeVito, I’m a fan of countless projects of his (as writer, performer, director, and producer), and I am usually on his wavelength even for his maligned films like Death to Smoochy, Drowning Mona, and The War of the Roses.
This was one of the first comedy two-handers that really resonated for me. It resonated for a lot of people, to the tune of $220 million in 1988. That is a cuckoo amount of money for a comedy in any year. Comedies don’t even hit $200 million now, and we’ve had 30 years of inflation between us and 1988. DeVito and Arnie are perfectly paired. Their physical differences are physically striking, their approaches to comedy are very different, and the movie wholly leans into their contrasts.
As with some earlier movies in this series, I can’t say for sure whether Twins is a good movie. It has been too long since last I watched it. But it’s definitely a great movie for an eight-year old who loves broad comedy and slapstick.
I really don’t have any particularly relevant memory for 1988. The notable films from this year have been done to death by other writers, and most of the movies that I love from this year are tied to older versions of me. So I’ll just close on how weird it was that Arnold Schwarzenegger was, for a couple of years in the late 80s and early 90s, simultaneously my favorite comedy actor and favorite action star.
Other 1988 Candidates: Who Framed Roger Rabbit; Coming to America; Crocodile Dundee 2; A Fish Called Wanda; Cocktail; Big; Die Hard; Working Girl; Gorillas in the Mist; Hairspray; Beetlejuice; Willow; Funny Farm; Bull Durham; Great Outdoors; Red Heat; Caddyshack 2; Young Guns; Married to the Mob; Eight Men Out; They Live; Ernest Saves Christmas; The Land Before Time; Scrooged; The Naked Gun; My Stepmother Is an Alien; Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; Accidental Tourist
I turn 40 in December. To commemorate the milestone, I’m writing 40 short biographical essays pertaining to a movie per year of my life.