Death Machine (1994/1995, UK)

'Warbeast' Death Machine

This low-budget, cyber-punkish, violent, sci-fi action film set in futuristic 2003 opened with a scene of destruction at a roadside diner. The Chaank Armaments Corporation (with the slogan: "Hard Tech for a Hard World"), a mega-corporation that manufactured military hardware, was threatened with closure following protests over its malfunctioning cyborg soldiers (a secret project code-named Hardman). The protests were being conducted by a group of pacifist eco-warriors, led by leftist Sam Raimi (John Sharian).

The rogue weapons research lab of Chaank was run by psychotic, stringy-haired mad scientist and weapons designer Jack Dante (Brad Dourif). They were Robocop-like super-warriors - ex-soldiers with erased minds, developed in the covert "HardMan Project."

The new CEO Hayden Cale (Ely Pouget) headed the company's investigation, and met with the board of the Chaank Corporation (led by Scott Ridley (Richard Brake) who was covering up the facts) and argued for full disclosure of their research. She was confronted with lack of cooperation from Dante.

To see for herself, Cale entered Dante's ultra-secure Vault 10 in the lab with a stolen security access card, and removed Dante's security and computer clearances after learning of the death of Ridley. This caused disgruntled Dante to retaliate by releasing his ultimate weapon on her - the Death Machine (a "front-line morale destroyer").

The Death Machine was an 8 foot tall, non-humanoid killer robot named the 'Warbeast.' The carbon-steel robot (with high-speed razor-sharp claws/talons and jagged chomping jaws with teeth, similar to a T-Rex) pursued tough heroine Cale and Raimi and others through the high-rise corporate building in the tense climax.

Evolver (1995)

Evolver

This popular Sci-Fi Channel action/sci-fi film's tagline: "It was supposed to be a game" referred to the film's plot about a robot named Evolver that existed in a virtual reality videogame (similar to laser tag) made by the Cyber-Tronix Corporation.

Teenaged hacker and videogame whiz-kid expert Kyle Baxter (Ethan Embry) won an Evolver videogame contest (that he rigged), and a real-life prototypical version of the robot he had defeated was delivered to his house.

Evolver (voice of William H. Macy) was an Atomic Robot with a built in Laser Tag-BB-paintball combo gun, smoke machine, and electrified claws.

Kyle was unaware that it was programmed with Defense Department military software programs (S.W.O.R.D. or "Strategic War-Oriented Robotic Device"). The competitive Evolver soon became a deadly killing force as it evolved to 'win' and 'play for keeps.'

Judge Dredd (1995)

ABC Warrior

Director Danny Cannon's action film starred Sylvester Stallone as the title character Judge Joseph Dredd. Dredd was derived from a popular comic-strip character from the British science fiction anthology 2000 AD.

In the film, Judge Dredd was a futuristic, unemotional, ruthless, notorious law enforcement officer in a violence and crime-ridden mega-city (formerly New York), located on a dystopic desert wasteland known as The Cursed Earth in the year 2139 AD.

He was commissioned to battle an antique collectible robot (with rusting metal), called an A.B.C. Warrior, a war robot designed to withstand 'Atomic,' 'Bacterial,' and 'Chemical' warfare. The diabolical villain Rico (Armand Assante) had re-armed and recycled the robot to be a killing machine.

Screamers (1995) (aka Screamers, The Hunting)

Mechanical "Screamers" or Autonomous Mobile Swords (David, Becker, and Jessica)

This sci-fi horror/thriller noir, adapted from a 1952 Philip K. Dick story called "Second Variety," was set on the distant Earth colony/planet of SIRIUS 6B in the year 2078.

SIRIUS 6B was a radioactive wasteland suffering from a decade of war and strip-mining - long forgotten by those who settled it. Earlier, murderous cyborgs (or "autonomous mobile swords"), perfect killing weapons or machines, had been developed by the Miners "Alliance" to use against their ex-corporate masters (called the New Economic Block (NEB)) to protect them from their enemies. The self-replicating cyborgs were small armadillo-like 'dinosaurs' that had razor-sharp saws or blades to cut off arms and legs.

The artificially-intelligent "autonomous mobile swords" pursued their enemies from underground. As they quickly moved along, they squealed or screamed in a high-pitch while attacking - hence their name screamers. The robotic, reptilian-looking devices had become a highly-advanced killer race ("they're smarter now") that had begun to dangerously replicate, evolved to look like human beings and mimic human behavior, and were now intent on eradicating the human race. They attacked everything including Alliance soldiers.

Commander Hendriksson (Peter Weller), leading a handful of Alliance soldiers still alive on Sirius 6B and trying to establish peace with the N.E.B., was in charge of leading his men across a treacherous wasteland filled with screamers. One of the stealth androids, innocently named David, was an advanced 'type 3' screamer in the form of a young boy clutching a teddy bear, and asking: "Can I come with you?"

After it was discovered that there were only two surviving N.E.B. soldiers, Becker (Roy Dupuis) and Ross (Charles Powell), and a civilian named Jessica (Jennifer Rubin), it turned out that both Becker and Jessica were evolved screamers.

Virtuosity (1995)

SID 6.7

In this action VR thriller from Brett Leonard (known for The Lawnmower Man), the Law Enforcement Technology Advancement Center (LETAC) developed a computer-generated, nano-tech synthetic android named SID 6.7 (6.66 rounded up, signifying its evil nature). SID stood for Sadistic, Intelligent, Dangerous.

The "50-terabyte self-evolving neural network" was composed of the personality traits of 183 serial killers, mass murderers, tyrants and terrorists that were placed into the android, used to test the LAPD in a virtual reality world.

When the VR criminal SID escaped and entered the real world of Los Angeles in year 1999 (arguing: "I will not be shut down"), he evolved and was "free of any behavioral limits he might have had in virtual reality." He said to himself: "I thnk I'm gonna like it here." The casually sadistic SID was noted as saying to disgraced ex-LA cop Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington), who was tracking him down:

"Just because I'm carrying the joy of killing your family inside me doesn't mean we can't be friends."

Parker's family had been murdered by a brutal terroristic killer, political terrorist Matthew Grimes (Christopher Murphy) - one of SID's own personality profiles that he was channeling.

(Wallace and Gromit in) A Close Shave (1995, UK)

"Cyber-dog" Preston

In this third film of Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit Claymation short film trilogy, one character was an evil, Terminator-like robotic bulldog named Preston (named after director Nick Park's home town), owned by local wool shop owner Wendolene Ramsbottom.

Preston was involved in a plot to rustle sheep during a period of wool shortage, shear them, and then murder them to manufacture his own brand of dog food.

Preston met his end when he was knocked into his own sheep-mincing, dog food processor machine, the Mutton-o-Matic (based on stolen blueprint designs of Wallace's sheep-shearing device the Knit-o-Matic), and was shredded into spare parts.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996) (aka MST3K)

Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo; also Gypsy

Two robot sidekicks were there to assist marooned Mike Nelson (Himself):

• Tom Servo (voice of Kevin Murphy), dark red/white colored
• Crow T. Robot (voice of Trace Beaulieu), gold-colored and wise-cracking, with a netted headpiece

They provided sarcastic and mocking commentary, from a front-row 'peanut gallery' (the backs of their heads were often seen in silhouette in the lower portion of the picture) on the awful sci-fi B film, This Island Earth (1955) being screened.

This full-length feature film was derived from the long-running popular TV series about a mad scientist named Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) who wished to subject the entire world to bad movies - and experimented on this three-some on an Earth-orbiting space station called the Satellite of Love.

Robo Warriors (1996)

Earthbot (Robo Warrior) vs. Tsu Garu

This straight-to-video release was the third unofficial entry in the short-listed giant robot subgenre, coming after Stuart Gordon's Robot Jox (1989) (Albert Band's Crash and Burn (1990) used some of its robot footage), its sequel Robot Jox 2 (1993), and Albert Band's Robot Wars (1993).

The film's tagline succinctly told the plot:

"Two Gladiators. One Planet. No Prisoners."

It told about life on Earth in the year 2036, when the planet was occupied by an evil, totalitarian alien race of half-human, half-reptile creatures called Terridax.

The Terridax used a giant, towering steel robot called Tsu Garu to subjugate the people.

A group of freedom fighters (skilled pilots of giant robots, known as Robo Warriors), led by the last heroic individual, resistance fighter and former robot-jox pilot Ray Gibson (James Remar), searched for remains of an older wrecked giant Earthbot, the last remaining Robo Warrior machine, to defeat the oppressive invaders.

Solo (1996)

Solo and Solo II

This sci-fi action thriller was based on the 1989 novel Weapon by Robert Mason. Mario Van Peebles starred as Solo - a robotic android killing machine manufactured for the military (known as Project Solo), to be sent as a cyber-soldier to battle Central American rebel insurgents who were setting up a remote airstrip (to destabilize a friendly regime).

Costing $2 billion, the bald and muscle-bound Solo (with a face "like Mike" -- modeled after basketball star Michael Jordan) was constructed of polymers and computer chips, equipped with motion-sensors, and night-time vision (and "virtually immune to small-arms fire...about 15 times stronger, 10 times faster than any man"). He was "proficient in all types of combat" - "it's not just the weapon, he can make decisions!"

Due to programming flaws or a "glitch," Solo was uncharacteristically self-aware (and human) during the aborted mission-raid (realizing that there were women and children non-combatants in the line of fire), and opposed his ruthless and obsessive Colonel Frank Madden (William Sadler).

Solo eventually escaped by hijacking a helicopter and joined the side of the rebel peasants in the jungle, where he exchanged his protection for energy to power himself, due to a damaged power supply.

The surprise toward the end of the film was that a more powerful, unflawed and highly-developed version of Solo, a super cyborg prototype named Solo MKII ("the model for the next generation") (also William Sadler), appeared with the face of Colonel Madden! He was in charge of pursuing the aberrant, malfunctioning android in order to recover it or destroy it.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

The Borg and the Borg Queen

The second Star Trek: The Next Generation film featured the TV series' fearsome cyborg gestalt - the villainous, nearly invincible and ruthless Borg, whose mission was to absorb or assimilate all other species or cultures into their collective consciousness ("We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own"). Their catchphrase was: "Resistance is futile."

Captured android Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) was threatened with the words: "You are an imperfect being, created by an imperfect being. Finding your weakness is only a matter of time."

The film then introduced the character of the sexy, cunning Borg Queen (Alice Krige), whose plan was to use time travel to enslave Earth's humanity in the 21st century (the year 2063). Her memorable entrance featured her organic head, shoulders and spinal cord descending from the ceiling and latching onto her synthetic, artificial body, as she announced:

Are you ready?...I am the Borg... I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many. I am the Borg...I am the Collective ...By assimilating other beings into our Collective, we are bringing them closer to perfection.

She attempted a seduction by grafting organic, human flesh onto Data's arm (she assisted him in his goal to become more fully human) and the promise of having sex with him ("Are you familiar with physical forms of pleasure?" to which he replied: "I am fully functional. Programmed in multiple techniques") in order to have him surrender encryption codes that would allow her to take over the USS Enterprise.

Attempting to save Data, USS Enterprise Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) located Data and was confronted by the Borg Queen ("You were very close, you and I...Welcome home, Locutus"). Picard offered himself in exchange for Data's freedom ("I will take my place at your side"), but the android refused to leave ("I do not wish to go").

Commanded by the Queen, Data deactivated the Enterprise's self-destruct sequence, entered encryption codes to allow her control of the vessel, and then aimed the Enterprise's quantum torpedoes at the Phoenix during its historic flight -- but the missiles didn't hit their target.

The loyal android had deceived and betrayed the Borg Queen and turned on her - he ironically warned her: "Resistance is futile," and then killed her with flesh-eating vapor-gas from a smashed coolant tube. When she fell into the corrosive gas, it liquefied her organic parts on contact, rendering her into a twitching, lifeless skull and spinal cord.

The remainder of the Borgs under her command were also neutralized when she perished.

Picard went over to her metal-skeletal remains, pulled off the upper part of her skull and spinal cord, and snapped her spinal cord with his bare hands (causing the flickering red lights to be extinguished).

Alien: Resurrection (1997)

Call

The fourth film in the Alien film series was from French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

One of its characters was female mechanic Annalee Call (Winona Ryder) - a young, mercenary inter-stellar smuggler from the freight cargo spaceship Betty who was in a group that delivered contraband cargo of hijacked bodies in hypersleep to experimental military scientists on the deep-space military research vessel the USM Auriga.

She was first described by Betty's captain Frank Elgyn (Michael Wincott) as a "little girl playing pirates...she is severely f--kable."

Recognizing who Lt. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) was - a cloned, bionic superhumanly strong warrior queen named clone # 8, Call first attempted to kill her ("You're a thing, a construct. They grew you in a f--king lab. And now they brought it out of you") - she wanted to "stop this thing before it gets loose," but Ripley told her: "It's too late. You can't stop it. It's inevitable."

Call rightly feared that the scientists were spawning adult aliens from Ripley's recently-extracted alien child (she said they were conducting "illegal experiments... breeding an alien species").

Ultimately, Call was revealed to be a robot ("a new model droid"), when shot directly in the chest but unharmed as the newly-grown aliens attacked while surviving crew members attempted to escape. Ripley said this about Call's robot nature:

"I should have known. No human being is that humane."

Upon realizing her synthetic nature, alien-infected Purvis (Leland Orser) quipped: "Great. She's a toaster oven."

In the exciting conclusion, when Call was threatened by a half-Alien, half-human, skull-faced "Newborn" hybrid alien creature (a "beautiful butterfly") that tagged along on the departing Betty, Ripley saved Call by causing the monster to be sucked out through one of the windows into space.

Upon arriving safely on Earth with Ripley, Call commented: "It's beautiful. I didn't expect it to be."

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)

Fembots

Fembots is the short term for female robots (played by Cindy Margolis, Cheryl Bartel, Donna W. Scott, Barbara Ann Moore, and Cynthia Lamontagne). The remote-controlled Fembots (introduced with Nancy Sinatra's singing of "These Boots Were Made For Walking"), were beautiful blonde android replicants, wearing white boots, plastic raincoats, and silver two piece outfits. They were described as:

"The latest word in android replicant technology. Lethal, Efficient, Brutal. No man can resist their charms."

In an underground lair in a later sequence, the Fembots wore purple fuzzy teddy-bear nightgowns to entice Austin Powers - they asked him: "Care to have a little fun?" - one of them jumped onto his shoulders and gripped his neck with her thighs, while the others protruded tubes from their breasts (called "jumblies," British slang for breasts). He joked about their nipples: "Is it cold in here?" as they sprayed him with a pink-colored gas, to put him to sleep and distract him for battling Dr. Evil.

FemBots

Powers found himself lying in bed with the Fembots, who stroked him to tantalize him, as he attempted to think of distracting things: "Baseball, cold showers...Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day..."

When Powers tried to flee, two Fembots blocked his way and challenged him: "You can't resist us, Mr. Powers," although he knew better: "Au contraire, baby."

To fight them off, he performed an irresistible sexy strip-tease dance (down to Union Jack red underwear and hairy chest) to the tune of "I Touch Myself." His gyrations caused them to short-circuit with sexual electricity as their heads twitched violently and then exploded.

Powers explained later how he defeated the Fembots with machine-gun boobs:

...all of a sudden, the Fembots came by and smoke started to come out of their jumblies. So I'd thought I'd work my mojo, right, to counter their mojo. We got cross-mojonations, and their heads started exploding.

See also Fembots entry for the second film in the series, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999).

Flubber (1997)

Weebo, and Weber, and Weebette

This fantasy comedy was a remake of the Disney film The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), starring Robin Williams as Medfield College's Professor Philip Brainard (the role played by Fred MacMurray in the original).

Weebo with a female persona (voice of Jodi Benson, and puppeteered by Robert Cooper) was absent-minded Philip's hovering robot assistant, who helped him to create the miraculous polymer. It was a bouncing green goo called Flubber. Weebo was responsible for naming the substance, when she called it "flying rubber" - and it was shortened as "FLUBBER." At times, Flubber became anthropomorphic and sentient, could imitate human behavior, and terrorize everyone as a mischievous little green tormenter.

Weebo, a saucer-shaped computer mostly yellow in color but also black and gray, could take pictures with a pop-up flash camera, or playback 'old movies' on its curved pop-up LCD screen to express her feelings (i.e, Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Dumbo (1941), and Mickey Rooney in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938)). Weebo was adorable and in love with Brainard, and expressed jealous tendencies. She also made a holographic projection in the form of a human spirit named Sylvia.

There were two other robotic characters in the storyline:

• Weber, Professor Brainard's house-robot who would do house-cleaning chores
• Weebette (voice of Julie Morrison), the "daughter" of Weebo (after Weebo's destruction)

The main plot was that the professor's rivals, scientist Wilson Croft (Christopher McDonald) and greedy businessman Chester Hoenicker (Raymond Barry) unsuccessfully tried to steal Flubber. In the film's conclusion, Weebo was hit by a baseball bat while trying to protect Flubber. Weebo had shouted her challenging final words to the two thieves as she was shattered into pieces: "Kiss me, big boy." After Weebo ceased to function and faced her demise, Brainard asked: "What happens to the soul of a machine?" Weebo was able to provide Brainard with full and complete blueprints of herself (with flaws removed) to produce her daughter, Weebette.

Weber

Death of Weebo

Weebette