[yasr_overall_rating]
A group of teenagers stumble upon a secret lab and battle their superior clones.
Every film lover has at least one, I think–a really bad movie that they like, sort of as a guilty pleasure. For me, it’s ’70s action movies. You know the ones, “Death Wish” and “Dirty Harry” or any movie with martial arts (especially if Bruce Lee is in it). As a teenager, I sat up night after night watching those movies and loving every minute of it. They mostly had the same plot, the same tropes and archetypes re-played timed and again, sometimes to a ludicrously bad script; but they had heart. They gave the audience a slice of catharsis in the middle of Watergate and gasoline rations. So what if Charles Bronson seemed more like a video game character than an actual person. He killed bad guys long before Jack Bauer finished high school. Unfortunately, “Cloned: The Recreator Chronicles,” doesn’t have any of those redeeming, silly qualities. It’s just a bad movie with no heart. I mean, the film begins with a scene of John de Lancie urinating and goes downhill from there.
“Cloned” begins with three friends camping on an island in the middle of a lake. Two are best friends Craig (Alexander Nifong) and Derek (Jamal Mallory-McCree), who have gone on one last trip together before Derek joins the Marines. Tagging along is Derek’s girlfriend Tracy (Stella Maeve), who’s come back from her first summer at college a different girl. What the trio doesn’t realize is that the island they’ve chosen features a once abandoned house that is no longer abandoned and a series of lightning heavy thunder storms that create a rather dangerous situation for them. When a particularly nasty storm hits, the three take shelter in the house.
Since the owners don’t appear to be home, they make themselves quite at home. Everything seems to be going just fine, thank you, until the owners, Dr. Frank Miller (John de Lancie) and his wife Elizabeth (Laura Moss) show up. Except the man and woman now chasing them through the house aren’t actually its owners, but stronger, faster clones bent on replacing humanity with other clones. You know, just because. The majority of the film focuses on the teens trials with clones of themselves who sprang from the same detritus the original clone pair had. All of this comes with some of the typical retro horror motifs such as a mad scientist and an abandoned lab.
The performances here alternate between the near sleepwalking portrayal of the original teens (see the scene where they first see the naked clone versions of themselves where they can barely offer more than a wide-eyed gasp) and the somewhat overacted clones. Nifong and Mallory-McCree go through the entire script looking unsure of how they’re supposed to play each part. Neither leaves any room for subtlety in distinguishing human from clone. Instead, they fall back on wild fluctuations and obvious overacting that takes all suspense out of their scenes. No one watching “Cloned” will mistake human Derek from clone Derek.
Maeve comes closest to pulling it off. She had me guessing a few times about whether her clone character’s motives were genuine or not. Her Tracy plays as a stereotypically self absorbed sorority girl. Everyone in the movie, and the audience, can see she has no real feelings for Craig anymore. The clone Tracy, however, sees an opening here and takes full advantage. Maeve’s portrayal feels more genuine overall, but still lacks a consistency that could have given the film a saving element of quality.
Writer-Director Gregory Orr’s background in non-fiction television demonstrates how difficult transitioning from one medium to another can be. The dialogue here had nothing at all that stood out. For fun camp, I really wanted colorful words and witty banter, or at least some interplay that was unintentionally funny. What I got was, “If I were a key, where would I be” and other such gems for 90 minutes. The lack of color in the script meant a lack of real personality in the characters themselves and a plot that telegraphed every important event almost as if there were a scroll at the bottom of the screen saying “Hey, that naked guy running from the beach is a clone.”
Orr’s direction creates a boring, cheesy and weak horror film that’s hard to watch. The effects at the beginning reminded me of something I had seen in a ’60s horror film, not because they were supposed to look that way, but because they simply didn’t work any better. I’m sure he worked on a tight budget, but if Shane Carruth can create better effects (limited though they were) on a $7,000 budget, then something’s wrong with your effects team. The editing seems pretty seamless given the material, but I wonder what ended up on the cutting room floor. Was it better or worse for this movie? Orr’s work with his actors reminds of George Lucas trying to coerce meaningful emotions from Jake Lloyd (now Jake Broadbent). You know the emotions are present in the actor, they’re just hiding behind that blank face.
Overall, I wanted to find some good fun in “Cloned: The Recreator Chronicles”, but I couldn’t. The more I watched, the worse it got. Very little of the story held up, likely because very little of it was original or had any heart and soul. I wanted to see some good slasher movie gore or feel tensely nervous for the characters as they get manipulated toward their impending doom, but I felt no tension at all for the entirety of its 90 minutes. It was as if someone had taken a fun but bad horror movie and stripped it of the gore, the tension, stupid chases through the woods, screaming emotion, and everything else that makes us watch those films. What we’re left with here sits blandly on the screen, just a shell of a film, incomplete and uninteresting.
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