Carbon Copy

When it comes to shit movies, how shit is too shit? At what point does entertaining predictability just become boring?

The answer to both of those questions could be Carbon Copy. This movie is bad to the extent that a Google search of “Carbon Copy movie” will not give you any results for this film. If you do find its IMDb page, you’ll find a review titled “Carbon Crappy” which begins with the words, “I understand why there are no reviews for this film. Nobody bothered watching to the end.” I saw that review as a challenge. I’m an idiot.

OK, the movie starts with Ben Shaw waking up at home and looking at a picture of his dead wife. How do we know she’s dead? Why would he look at a picture of her otherwise? This devotion to his deceased better half shows us that he’s a good man and also that he has nothing to lose. He’s some kind of cop; I don’t know what kind – it’s America, and they have all the cops. On his rounds one day, he hears a gunshot, finds dead bodies, and then finds an old military truck with a strange machine that he inexplicably turns on.

A tangent here: We later find out that a team of highly skilled, well funded soldiers have spent years looking for this machine without success, but sad widower Ben Shaw somehow stumbles across it in a field, just off the road in a reasonably well known location. I know it’s a shit movie, but they could at least try to make it make sense. Is that too much to ask?

The machine shoots out lightning like the hammer of Thor’s shitty cousin, or maybe just this 1980s Incredible Hulk TV show version of Thor – yeah, that’s just a regular hammer from a hardware store, isn’t it?

The lightning then starts producing copies of Ben Shaw, except they’re evil, zombie versions of him, which means that technically, they’re not carbon copies, and the movie name means nothing.

Another tangent: Isn’t it considerate of zombies to always announce their presence with that weird throaty roar before trying to kill people? They’d surely be far more effective if they just tried to creep up on us.

Things escalate. Seemingly hundreds of these zombies are created, soldiers appear out of nowhere, and for some reason, we discover that Ben Shaw wasn’t there for his wife when she was dying. It makes no sense, but you’ll have stopped caring a long time ago – just like Ben Shaw stopped caring about his wife when she needed him most.

This movie gets no stars.