Screamers (1995)

Release date: 1996-01-26
Country: Canada
Language: English
Director: Christian Duguay
Production Co: Triumph Films, Fuji Eight Company Ltd., Fries Film Group
Genre: Horror, Thriller, Science Fiction
Rating: 6.4/10
Length: 1h 48min

Storyline

(SIRIUS 6B, Year 2078) On a distant mining planet ravaged by a decade of war, scientists have created the perfect weapon: a blade-wielding, self-replicating race of killing devices known as Screamers designed for one purpose only -- to hunt down and destroy all enemy life forms But man's greatest weapon has continued to evolve without any human guidance, and now it has devised a new mission: to obliterate all life. Col. Hendricksson (Peter Weller) is commander of a handful of Alliance soldiers still alive on Sirius 6B. Betrayed by his own political leaders and disgusted by the atrocities of this never-ending war, Hendricksson decides he must negotiate a separate peace with the New Economic Bloc's decimated forces. But to do so, he will have to cross a treacherous wasteland where the deadliest threat comes from the very weapons he helped to create.

Plot Keywords

stop motion, ruins, android, killer robot, elevator shaft, part stop motion, cult film, future, shakespearean quotation, based on short story, dystopia, future war, decapitation, elevator, exploding body, hologram, laser, severed arm, spiral staircase, torso cut in half

Short Review

The ensuing Darwinian struggle combines space opera skirmishes and Cold War paranoia - although the characters' dialogue involves the kind of tough guy/gal posturing overfamiliar from the sort of '80s action movie this was in fact supposed to be.