Repeaters (2010)

(On Cable TV, April 2012) The proverbial “low-budget but well-scripted SF movie” is hard to find, but it exists, and if Repeaters isn’t quite a complete success, it’s quite a bit better than the disaster-film swill that often passes for low-budget SF nowadays.  The central idea borrows liberally from Groundhog Day in sticking characters inside a day-long time loop.  The twists are that three characters rather than one are stuck, and that the treatment is much closer to criminal horror than to romantic comedy.  As three teenagers stuck in rehab understand their predicament and the darker implications of days repeated without consequences, the tension goes up, and the three characters end up having to fight each other day after day.  Repeaters doesn’t run all the way with the idea, nor can it escape a certain pat sentimentalism in deciding how characters escape their time-loop, but once the premise is firmly hooked, it’s easy to keep watching the film just to see what will happen next.  The limits of the budget don’t show in the rather good script as much as in the murky cinematography and intrusive handheld camera.  The film’s Canadian origins are more amusingly demonstrated by the fact that a big plot twist hinges on the fact that it’s snowing when it shouldn’t.  There is a lot of trash to be found in the wee hours of cable-TV, but Repeaters isn’t even close to badness –think of it as a nice little surprise.  (And don’t stop watching after the first few credits; there’s a nice little sting buried a few seconds later.)