Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
Directed By: Danny Dones
Starring: Allison Shrum, Quinnlan Ashe, Schyler Tillett, Ted Welch, Henry Haggard, Rashad Rayford, Phillip Cordell and Ravi Patel.
Screenplay By: Danny Dones and Phillip Cordell
For Fans Of: Robocop, Rocket Jump, Empire International Pictures
Cool Line: “Good luck, I live in SPACCCCE!”
A group of outlaws suffer reveal after reveal as they hole up in their hideout and defend themselves against waves of, you guessed it, clone cops.
Clone Cops has a simple bottle premise that feels perfect for a lofi 80’s riff, but it muscles it’s way into something more interesting than another no budget nostalgia piece immediately. We spend a good amount of time in a science lab owned by an evil mega-corporation (Nefaricorp), we watch a reality show framing device with two hosts that feel right out of G4-TV, and we’re even interrupted by in-universe commercials. Despite being primarily set in one warehouse, Clone Cops establishes a whole world clearly and quickly, and I personally was drawn in by the sheer effort that takes in a film of this caliber.
The overall production value feels amateurish and “backyard” at times, but I’ll take that in a movie willing to earnestly swing at the ball this hard. Filming anything of this scope is hard, and yet here we have a nonstop series of action sequences with fist fights, gunfights, vehicles, throwing knives, etc. The filmmaking is sneakily super impressive, it’s just easy to dismiss since it’s being used to deliver some classic “nuh uh I have a force field” kid fight shenanigans.
The film is very silly (and genuinely funny), but it’s consistent and takes its cartoon setting seriously. Yes, the world here is loaded with hijinks like breakdancing to get away from clones, comically evil villains who push their lab assistants into human juicers, and hero characters that hack mainframes and do Predator handshakes, but those heroes can (and often do) die, and their stakes are never treated as a gag or afterthought.
The titular Clone Cops over-deliver. Every single time a new type of cop, all played by co-writer Phillip Cordell, shows up the movie picks up a ton of steam. The clones are all just different enough for their bits and antics to stay fresh, ultimately building to a grand finale where dozens attack in a giant hysterical siege.
Tubi Tuesdays are not really about reviewing, breaking down, or recommending a movie as much as they are about highlighting whatever we (I in this case) find interesting about them, good or bad. The reason I picked Clone Cops for the inaugural one is partially because it has stayed with me for weeks and I wanted to shout it out, but also because it is a genuinely good entry point for lower budget cinema.
The movie really strikes a line between bigger budget indie and zero dollar labor of love that not many movies do. It’s usually really hard to elevate out of the second group without getting sucked in. If you’ve ever wanted to genuinely engage with with genuine Z-Grade films unironically but couldn’t handle the jump in quality from what you’re used to, then give this one a shot, stick with it, and see if you don’t come out the other side glad you did.
If for no other reason, do it because Tubi is a vast wasteland and this journey is going to get a whole lot worse.