As I have noted many times here on HorrorBuzz, I celebrate low budget filmmaking and filmmakers who try to go too far, showing how far they actually can go. Working within the limitations of budget and time can still produce remarkable, interesting, innovative, and exciting work.  Sadly, however, Alter Ego is not that work.

The film has a short run time – 72 minutes, with eight minutes of closing credits and a five minute opening credit sequence consisting mostly of shots of the Tappan Zee Bridge at night. Cool visuals, but doesn’t actually set the scene for the film – more like a music video without any music. The result is less than an hour of actual narrative story (which, upon reflection, may be for the best). Alter Ego opens with a quotation (“We all have demons…I just choose to feed mine”) attributed to “Anonymus.” At first I thought perhaps they were referring to the Canadian rock band, or perhaps one of several medieval monks who wrote under the name Anonymus, such as Gallus Anonymus. Turns out, no, the film simply misspelled “Anonymous.” That’s the level we’re working at.

Alter Ego is bookended by police arriving at the suburban home of “relatively well-known” writer Alan Schaeffer (Dylan Walsh) to investigate a murder scene. We are not told who has been murdered. The film flips back and forth between the police at the scene in the morning and the writer and his private security guard (Steve Stanulis) the night before. Alan has just completed the manuscript to “Alter Ego,” the third novel in his trilogy about Ivan Tanner, a sociopathic killer. Tanner seems to be something like Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter – a minor antagonist who is moved to the central role in the series as he is more interesting and popular than the protagonist or main antagonist.

Faster than you can say “Stephen King’s The Dark Half,” Alan is receiving threatening postcards from someone claiming to be Tanner. His security guard checks out weird noises in the house. Here’s the kicker: Alan insists on writing using a typewriter, not a computer, so the paper copy on the dining room table is the ONLY copy of the manuscript of this sure-to-be-a-bestselling-novel’s manuscript. Alan’s agent is coming in the morning to get the novel, so Alan is worried that “Tanner” might come and destroy his work. The security guard, however, is also there to remind Alan that there was a real man named Ivan Tanner whose life was turned upside down because he shared a name with the fictional sociopath. Alan feels bad that the name he made up has caused this other man problems, but hey – it’s all just fiction. But maybe, just maybe, this real Tanner is the one coming for him.

A dead body is found, the argument escalates, and for some reason both the agent and Alan’s ex wife keep calling and leaving messages on the answering machine, because apparently Alan feels the same way about cell phones as he feels about word processing programs.

The two haves of Alter Ego don’t quite complement each other or mesh well. To me it felt like I was flipping back and forth between two different thrillers on two different channels. Eric Roberts was playing a detective in one of them, but didn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual plot. The revelation halfway through the film isn’t really a revelation at all, but rather has been obvious from the beginning, which leaves the entire thing devoid of tension or drama.

3 out of 10