Where to watch Recreator
2 1/2 Stars
Recreator finds three teens taking a camping trip into the wilderness to take stock in their lives before one ships off to Afghanistan. They are forced to take shelter in a nearby house when a storm hits. When the owners return the teens take refuge in the basement and discover two dead bodies wrapped in plastic. The owners force the teens to bury the bodies for them, and they reveal that they are clones that have replaced the original owners. Luckily the teens also have clones, who show up just in time to save them. Now the six of them must figure out how the clones came to be, and who’s going to make it home alive.
Recreator is a cautionary tale about the dangers of dropping a deuce in a strangers toilet. If you do, a clone just might pop into your life. The film is a sci-fi horror flick that degrades into a teenage love triangle story for a large portion of its running time. It’s clearly meant for a younger audience and skews a little toward the female viewpoint. That’s not a bad thing, but this is a lower-budgeted feature, and as such there’s a lot of downtime and filler. The narrative reminds me of Larry Clark’s Teenage Caveman Creature Feature, although not nearly as perverse. It’s just an incredibly simplistic story that would rather deal with boyfriend and girlfriend issues than the science and large ramifications of finding your clone. There were also other questions I had, such as if the clones went poop, do you get clones of the clones? Also these kids were here for days, wouldn’t they crap more than once? And then wouldn’t you get more clones? Also what amount of fecal matter makes one clone? If one were to take a really big dump would you get more than one clone? As you can see for me, the film’s focus was a little off.
Star Trek fans will recognize John de Lancie as one of the house owners and clones, he played Q on Next Generation. The three main stars Stella Maeve, Alexander Nifong, and J. Mallory-McCree do a splendid job playing their characters and their slightly darker clones. You can see why actors are interested in roles like these, essentially they get to show some range with relative ease, and have a little fun while doing it. Stella Maeve is the standout here, she’s cute as a button and innocent as Tracy, but turns dark and sexy as her clone. She’s very reminiscent of a young Brittany Murphy.
The script by director Gregory Orr uses mystery well, like Lost we’re promised answers – dangled in front of us like a carrot on a stick. There’s just enough intrigue mixed in at just the right times to keep the audience watching. Recreator feels like an expanded episode of The Outer Limits and would easily play to the SyFy channel’s audience. There’s danger, but no frights with a dash of science fiction and Scooby-Doo detective work. I’d recommend Recreator to teenagers that like sci-fi, but to most hard-core science fiction lovers, it might be a harder sell.
Director: Gregory Orr
Stars: Stella Maeve, Alexander Nifong, J. Mallory-McCree