Recreator is set on Brewster Island in New York State & starts as three teenage friends arrive by canoe, boyfriend & girlfriend Craig Carlson (Alexander Nifong) & Tracy Bernstein (Stella Maeve) along with Derek Johnson (J. Mallory-McCree) intend to spend the weekend camping on the island away from the stresses of the big city. Once they reach Brewster Island they see a huge house in the distance & decide to check it out, Tracy manages to find the key to the front door & lets herself in, the house seems deserted & the three take the opportunity to use the facilities. However they soon see the owners of the house returning, they try to hide in the basement but find two dead bodies down there when they do, they are then caught & made to dig holes on the beach to bury the bodies. Suddenly out of nowhere three naked people who look exactly like them save the trio, things turn weird when the Tracy, Craig & Derek come face to face with exact clones of themselves who have a sinister plan to leave the Island & take over their originals life...
Written, co-produced & directed by Gregory Orr this low budget film seems to have some sort of identity crisis, to my mind I just can't see what it's trying to be or trying to do. The script has aspects from various genres such as sci-fi with the cloning angle, there's some horror with the teen slasher feel that it descends into along with a thriller feel as the clones play their originals off each other & try to manipulate the situation & there's even some mystery here as the script tries to keep you guessing about everyone's motives & who is who. Unfortunately none of it works or gels together, the script is pretty slow & there's little in the way of explanation but what I could gather from it is that these kids were cloned from their bodily wastes after going to the toilet, that a lightening storm activated the cloning & that these clones are largely quite polite until they try to kill you. People being cloned from their poop does seem like it's come from a comedy but Recreator takes itself deadly seriously but it's rather pedestrian & I was never drawn into the story. Ideas & themes are introduced, like the original experiments from the late 50's to a soldiers possible homosexual tendencies (he actually kisses his own reflection in a mirror) but are quickly forgotten & never lead anywhere interesting. At 90 minutes long Recreator tries to be different but it's dull, silly & makes no great sense, why did the clones wait to kill their originals? Why did the original teens react so well to be confronted with exact clones of themselves? Most of us might have been totally freaked out but not these three, they invite them in & dress them!
Another aspect of Recreator I didn't like was just how uneventful it was, hardly anything of any note happens. All the cloning is off screen, there's no blood or gore apart from one brief shot of a guy with shovel stuck in his head & there's no action to speak of either. It's set entirely inside or around one house which helps keep the budget down but becomes repetitive for the audience. There's probably more CGI then you think, all the actor's play both themselves & their clones so whenever they are seen in the same scene it's CGI & the effects to that end are good. The character's look identical so it's often hard to tell which is the original & which is the clone which I assume was intentional but it's not used to any great effect, there's no real suspense or tension & the sci-fi aspects are never given more than the occasional few lines of dialogue.
Probably shot on a low budget Recreator looks alright for what it is & is well made but hardly anything happens. The acting is decent enough from a small cast.
Recreator is a sci-fi horror thriller than disappoints in all areas, it just can't make it's mind up what it wants to be & ends up being an uneven mess. I saw this on telly over here in the UK so I didn't spend money seeing it but I know I would have been even more annoyed if I had.
Review by poolandrews from the Internet Movie Database.