Clonus (review)

Though the Mondo Macabro DVD release uses the simple title Clonus on cover and spine, the source print for the transfer bears a variant, Parts: The Clonus Horror. The film seems to have been made as Clonus, then – with an eye to beefing up its slightly feeble sensationalist side – retitled several times, as The Clonus Horror, Parts and Parts: The Clonus Horror. On its release in 1979, the film seemed a modestly effective sf picture, made under the influence of George Lucas’s THX 1138 (US 1971), William F. Nolan and Clayton Johnson’s 1967 novel Logan’s Run and Robin Cook’s 1977 novel Coma (and their respective film adaptations: Anderson US 1976; Crichton US 1978), Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932) and (especially) the TV movie The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler (Wynn US 1971).

As this suggests, Clonus – directed by Robert S. Fiveson from a script by Bob Sullivan and Ron Smith – is a synthesis of several hot-ticket themes in American sf cinema of the 1970s: cloning, organ banks, pastel-hued totalitarianism, government conspiracy and the generation war. Intriguingly, many of these have returned in the early twenty-first century – as exemplified by Michael Bay’s The Island (US 2005), subject of a plagiarism suit brought by Fiveson and settled out of court for a ‘seven figure sum’. A comparison of Clonus and The Island does show a far closer similarity than, say, that between Clonus and Zachary Wheeler, but the tones of the films differ to suit their years of production and status within the industry. Clonus is an independent, hand-to-mouth drive-in programmer with a few more ideas than usual, hobbled by its low budget and limited resources; The Island is an expensive major studio product with some content (it is not much of a claim to label the film Michael Bay’s most intellectually demanding work, especially since it is also his least commercially successful), which uses its subject matter as a springboard for a spectacular chase and action scenes. Though IMDB contentiously lists The Island as a remake of Clonus, the relationship between the two films is most likely down to the fact that they both grow (in different directions) out of a similar stew of ideas.

Like The Island, Clonus opens in an enclosed society inhabited by healthy, mostly simple-minded twentysomethings shepherded by plausible men in white coats (Dick Sargent, the sit-com dad of Bewitched (US 1964–72), plays the chief scientist) as they go through a daily round of exercise and primary school-level education. Our first viewpoint character is eager, handsome George (Frank Ashmore), who is told that he has reached the point in his progress where he can go on to his reward and relocate to ‘America’, which a filmstrip suggests is at once idyllic and exciting. Naturally, we have picked up on enough sinister undercurrents to suspect that – like the Carousel in Logan’s Run, which purportedly shifts citizens of a youth-oriented dystopia to a higher level but actually euthanases them on their thirtieth birthdays – ‘America’ is a lie and George is marked for death. After a going-away party, George is ushered through the ‘door to America’ and given a knock-out drug in a glass of orange juice, then vacuum-sealed inside a large plastic bag. Our attention shifts to Richard (Tim Donnelly), a ‘control clone’ (literally earmarked as different) who has not been treated with a virus to limit his mentality. Richard begins a relationship with the similarly normal Lena (Paulette Breen) and starts to question the underlying assumptions of his society – not to mention asking what has really happened to the folks who have gone to America. He finds a discarded beer can in a stream but cannot get a straight answer as to what the unfamiliar word ‘Milwaukee’ means – one of the creepiest moments in the film finds Richard using an apparently automated information booth (called ‘the confessional’) to ask about ‘Milwaukee’ and receiving several weak...