Jack Be Nimble

Film (Trailer and Excerpts) – 1993 Horror

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In director Garth Maxwell’s 1993 gothic horror twins Jack and Dora (late US actor Alexis Arquette and Kiwi Sarah Smuts-Kennedy) are separated while young; their adult reunion sees them battling the trauma of their past while being pursued by Jack’s sadistic step sisters. Complete with ESP, and a steam-driven hypnosis machine, Maxwell makes an exuberant and surreal contribution to the cinema of unease. New York Times’ Stephen Holden lauded the heady head-spinner as “a superior genre film” with a “feverish intensity that recalls scenes from Hitchcock and De Palma.”

Key Cast & Crew

Donald Duncan

Cinematographer

Sarah Smuts-Kennedy

As: Dora

Garth Maxwell

Writer, Director

See all 27 credits

The Gothic horror film Jack Be Nimble has a hallucinatory power and psychological refinement that you won't find in any number of movie adaptations of Stephen King novels, including Carrie. [...] As the film cuts back and forth between scenes of their childhood and adolescence, it evokes their misery and isolation with a feverish intensity that recalls scenes from Hitchcock and De Palma.
– Stephen Holden, New York Times, 10 June 1994

Produced by

Essential Films

Source

Essential Films

More information

Dominic Corry on the film, including an interview with Garth Maxwell, May 2014 NZ Herald