REPLICATOR
A review by Jeremiah Kipp

Replicator



When you’ve got weird purple light and tentacled monsters from the netherworld, you know you’re in H.P. Lovecraft territory.

A low budget love letter to Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond and Richard Stanley’s Color Out Of Space, from the opening sequence we know we’re in for a lurid color scheme, slimy special effects, parasites burrowing under human skin and some ferocious dismemberment. Director Mark Andrew Hamer clearly has a passion for the material, and Replicator feels more like a fan’s love letter to filmmakers he admires. Derivative, sure, but wholeheartedly so!

Replicator may be cosmic horror on the cheap, but it knows exactly where it needs to deliver. Right from the get-go, the star of the movie is clearly the impressive creature design and copious gore by David Greathouse - whose resume includes Brian Yuzna’s Revenge of the Living Dead III, Ernest Dickerson’s Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight, and more recent offerings like Shelby Oaks and Scare Package II: Rad Chad’s Revenge.

After teasing us with some body horror in the prologue, Replicator essentially says to the viewer “we’ve bought ourselves 20 minutes for character development before the next gore setpiece” and unfortunately its in the depiction of small town life and setting up a half-dozen characters that Replicator struggles.

Dedicated public defender (and occasional kickboxer) Darby Vigliani (Brey Noelle) carries on an affair with Sheriff Ty Williams (Brian Spangler), struggles to live with her unemployed drunken dad (Jim Azelvandre) and maintains a “you go girl” friendship with cynical bartender Neila (KateLynn E. Newberry). All of the setup is to highlight the character foibles (most of them are loveable fuckups), because there’s some pod people Invasion of the Body Snatchers shenanigans at work as the people in Darby’s life start showing up with their less endearing qualities wiped away, smiling like the converted.

Once Darby notices everyone around her acting weird, Replicator lives up to its title. And the replicated don’t take too long before announcing their sinister intent (preceded by some nasty flesh-tearing blood and slime action, as you’re all hoping for!) Vivid cinematography, synthy music and squelchy sound design add value, enabling grace for some awkward dialogue, uneven performances and occasional slow stretches.

With a lean one hour and fifteen minute running time, Replicator is thankfully efficient at driving the narrative forward. The alien tentacle sex possession sequences, monsters growing out of bloated stomachs, replicants crawling out of fleshy meat sacks and general all-around-craziness we’ve come to expect from this sort of thing (fans of Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession will catch some pretty overt references towards the end) are all present and correct. Just because you’ve seen it all before doesn’t mean its a relentless good time for its target audience. You know who you are.



Jeremiah Kipp is a film director based in New York. He has written for Fangoria, Shock Cinema, Filmmaker Magazine and Slant Magazine.