Replica [2005]

Gosh darn it, James Nguyen has done it again. This is his second film, shot in between Julie & Jack and Birdemic, and it's somehow so much more poorly made than either of them. Unfortunately, we'll never get anything this pure again since the only films he made after 2010 were sequels full of self-referential humor in the way of Sharknado. The undiluted bad movie beauty is gone. Cherish it.

The film is only an hour long but like his other two movies the first act is way longer than the rest of the film so you don't even hit the second act until more than halfway through the film. It follows a generic everyman who just got a heart transplant made from stem cell cloning; the opening plot description tells us regular cloning is illegal. He's a salesman and, because every one of these movies needs a romance with a blonde girl, he creeps on his doctor until she relents. Creeps on is the accurate expression here; he has even less game than the everymen in the other two films and she absolutely would have blocked him. After some bland dates and a Chinese expression that was utterly baffling and that online research could not verify the existence of, the doctor woman dies in a car crash. Not long after, he sees a brunette girl who looks just like her except she has a tramp stamp with her name, Claudia, and is always wearing low rise bottoms with her bellybutton piercing out (oh, 2005). At least now her intense vocal fry doesn't feel so incongruous. He creeps on this girl too and she dates him instead of macing him and then has the absolute six-feet-under level of self esteem to change her hair and clothes to look like his dead girlfriend, all while being offended that he can't seem to love her for her. Girl, this is what you signed up for when you decided to date this lunatic. In the last fifteen minutes we find out she actually is a clone of the doctor and she was made by the doctor's evil coworker for . . . reasons. Adam had theorized that she would be cloned to finish some project or something, but we literally get no explanation. Everyman and Clone go to destroy the cloning machine and tell the evil doctor beforehand what they're going to do so he pulls a gun on them. A cop shoots down the evil doctor, but the clone gets killed in the process. 

This film has everything: audio feedback, sub-Neil-Breen level green screen, skim milk level acting, Tippi Hedren footage on the television all the time, non-sex scenes, A BIRD. It's so worth a watch, and with the short run time you can even pair it with some wack commercials like we did including the TiddyBear and UroClub. Look them up.

Spoon Rating: 8