"Four Sided Triangle" manages to do almost everything wrong. The story had possibilities: two childhood friends who have created a replicating machine fall in love with the same woman; she marries the first; the second decides to duplicate her, forgetting that the duplicate will have the same feelings as the original. It's a fairly simple story, and one that could have been handled nicely in a half-hour segment of "Twilight Zone." Here the writer and director managed to pad it out to 80 tedious minutes, beginning with a completely irrelevant description of the village in which the film takes place (sure, it seems a lovely village, but it plays absolutely no part in the plot, and after the first few minutes of travelogue, the film may just as well be taking place in New Jersey). The doctor (played inertly by James Hayter) is given a lot of narration, much of which is punctuated by platitudinous quotations from poetry. We watch the two scientists raise the money for the machine; we watch them gazing intensely at bubbling test tubes; we watch as they and the woman manipulate the machine, trying to drum up some suspense as to whether it will really duplicate the doctor's watch or not. It goes on forever. The story itself, apart from the cheesy window-dressing, doesn't begin until about the film is half over. The acting gets stagier, the pace gets choppier, the script gets clumsier. The scenes of the village at the beginning are nicely photographed. Otherwise, not one of Hammer's better offerings.
Review of Four Sided Triangle
