An
unoriginal B style low budget sci-fi that's occasionally fun. We know
what we're in for with 'Screamers' when it opens with the classic
explanatory text crawl. It feels like it was made at least ten years
too late - I think this movie belongs in the 80's with a smaller
budget and a larger quantity of tongue in cheek.
It
has a slightly overcomplicated background, but basically the Earth
has collonies all over the place, and one of them is on some planet
with a precious fuel in the ground. When you mine it radiation or
something comes out, so they refused to, so a big war started between
the inhabitants of that planet and the corporation that owns the
mines. The corporation bombs the guys on the planet and the guys on
the planet make these tunnelling robots to kill people, who end up
improving themselves to the point of looking like people.
There's
lots of other background information, most of which is given to us
via the long exposition dialogue chunks dispersed throughout, but
that's already more than you need to know. All you really need to know is that there are evil
replicants everywhere. A green marine acts as an audience surrogate,
and with his arrival comes awhole lot of extra information that I
felt was basically unnecessary. It was at this point that I started
to see how odd the pacing of this movie was. It both starts and ends
haltingly, in several steps with stretches of filler in between. As
it ends we get a lot of false final showdowns, but at that point it
felt unintentionally awkward rather than an intended surprise.
The
dialogue is terribly cheesy and the characters are simplistic, but it
was a fun story and I liked the design of the bare robots (there was
one short scene of a stop motion one that I thought was fantastic,
but sadly they only used it once). There are no big twists, other
than the realisation that random people are robots. I found the kid
mildly creepy though (the phrase “can I come with you?” quickly
becomes disturbing), and I enjoyed the scene when they were burning
and shooting a horde of them.
Screamers: 35.9