Crew
Director – Bret McCormick, Screenplay – Keith Kjornes, Additional Material – T.G. Weems & Wynn Winberg, Producers – Bret McCormick & Wynn Winberg, Photography – Val Kyrie & Wynn Winberg, Music – Ron DiIulio, Computer Special Effects – Light & Shadows Graphix, Computer Animation – Nolan Goodnight, Will Nicholson & T.G. Weems, Makeup Effects – Josh McCormick & Joe Riley. Production Company – Whacked Movies.
Cast
Keith Kjornes (Dr Stan Oliver), Randy Clower (Dr Fields – male), Gunnar Hansen (Dr Kildare – male), Brinke Stevens (Dr Goodbody), T.J. Myers (Dr Laurel Hardy), Carl Merrill (Colonel Sanders – male), Alan York (General Mills), Rocky Patterson (Colonel Sargeant), Tyler Mason (West – male), Jim Taylor (Private Bruno Waring – male), Grady Niblo (Watson), T.G. Weems (Ripley), James C. Bock (Private Libo), Karen Alexander (Brainwashed Hooker), Janet Elaine (Dr Kildare – female), T. Seret Gomez (Col Sanders – female), Melanie Stewart (Mrs. Libo)
Plot
Dr Kildare tells a colonel the story of the Replicator Project. Dr Fields undertook a project for the military that could teleport a person. However, the major problem when the system was tested is that it turned the male soldiers into women. Meanwhile, rival scientist Dr Stan Oliver was seeking to perfect a brainwashing process. When the military sought to shut down the Replicator Project after Dr Fields’ demonstration, Oliver persuaded them to let him take over. There he combined both lines of research and used the replicator to turn men into brainwashed women or else make homely women beautiful. The unforeseen side effect of further use of the process was that it also turned the women into alligator hybrids.
I first encountered director Bret McCormick with The Abomination (1986), a film where the title serves as a very accurate description of the film’s worth – a film so bad that McCormick even hid behind the pseudonym Max Raven. Under his own name, McCormick has made over a dozen films in the ensuing three decades, mostly in the action genre. His other genre works include Highway to Hell (1990); Children of Dracula (1994), a documentary about supposed real-life vampires; the killer robot film Bio-Tech Warrior (1996); the time travel film Time Tracers (1997); Christmas Craft Fair Massacre (2022); and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Shark (2025); while he has also produced Cyberstalker (1995). In between this, the Texas-based McCormick has written several books and edited anthologies of horror tales.
The premise of Repligator feels more like one that is suited to a porn film – a machine that turns men into women and makes ugly girls look pretty. (We never find out what happens when pretty women are sent into it and whether they are made ugly or turned into men). Assorted sexual interludes follow, although this never goes any further than a getting various of the girls topless. Nor do the guys ever seem to have any concerns about the weird gender reassignments going on and whether they are really sleeping with men or women. Apparently switching gender also causes people to be instantly outfitted in dresses, lingerie and makeup as well.
As might be expected of a Bret McCormick film, Repligator comes with an extremely low-budget film. The script was apparently written in four days and the film shot in five days on sets left over from McCormick’s previous film Time Tracers. The makeups for the alligator hybrids look particularly cheap and rubbery.
McCormick attempts to gain some extra credit by casting cameos from genre names. Gunnar Hansen, better known for playing Leatherface is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), is cast as a scientist who introduces the story, while demonstrating a pair of x-ray glasses (that naturally show two women nude). At the end he and the colonel are turned into women. There’s also Brinke Stevens, who had a substantial career as a Scream Queen in the 1980s video market, who has a scene as a scientist exploring libido who conducts an experiment stimulating a soldier’s thoughts only to find he is dreaming of her naked (for some reason Brinke’s scenes appear at the start and are repeated later in the version of Repligator I saw). Neither of the scenes involving Hansen or Stevens seem connected to the rest of the story.
Trailer here