As my friend John and I watched Death Machine, we kept yelling out names of other movies that it seemed like we were watching. Aliens! Robocop! Terminator! Bladerunner! Edward Scissorhands! Now, don't get me wrong - even though a lot of sequences looked like they were patched together from other genre favorites, this was a pretty entertaining flick. After "near future" appears on screen, it starts off abruptly at the death-strewn scene where a cyborg has gone berserk. Just as the armored security dudes get to him, he shorts out and collapses. Turns out there's one of those nasty megacorporations (Chaank Armaments Corp.) that has been working on a variety of nasty military projects trying to come up with the ultimate war machine. After all, their motto is, "Hard Technology for a Hard World." These projects have all been hush hush until a new board of directors member, Hayden Cale, leaks some info out. She hopes to stop the secret productions or at least acknowledge their existence. The rest of the board is not too keen on that idea. It seems there's this little psycho genius named Jack Dante who works in the basement on these secret projects and the last time a board member tried to stop his work, Jack made sure he turned up dead. Shredded, to be exact. Cale thinks this is all phoney baloney and decides to confront Dante in his lab.
Unfortunately, he decides that she is going to be his next girlfriend. Later that evening, Dante overhears (he of course hears and sees everything with all of his little cameras and such throughout the building) two board members plotting to kill Cale so she won't upset the balance of things. Since Jack doesn't want his new (however unwilling) girlfriend to be offed, he sends his Death Machine (referred to as Warbeast in the film - perhaps the original title?) to slice and dice. At this point, I figured that the rest of the movie would be crazy ol' Jack directing his chomping erector set to julliane all of his enemies, however, a new twist was thrown into the mix. A trio of eco-terrorists break into the building with the intention of breaking into "vault 10" and seizing a bunch of "technology bonds" or something, essentially stealing all the corporation's money. So with the terrorists, Cale, Dante, some fat guy board member and the Warbeast as our cast, the movie continues as an exciting thrill-ride with a bunch of funny one-liners (no, not stupid Arnold or Freddy Krueger-type ones, these are actually funny) and a couple of neat plot twists.
Now, let's get down to specifics. The warbeast is a pretty cool-lookin' piece of work - kind of a metal skeletal alien queen with chomping teeth and long Edward Scissorhands hands. Dante is played by Brad Dourif, who is known for playing creepy and/or psycho guys in movies like Dune, Spontaneous Combustion, Trauma and on the X-Files episode "Beyond the Sea." He's got long greasy hair in this one and just barely avoids playing Dante over the top. Some of the hilarious lines include Gale saying "Sign my ass!" and one of the terrorists saying to the fat guy, "F**k you, Ho Ho!" That was so funny I had to find a pencil and write it down.
All in all, Death Machine is a pretty cool sci-fi action thriller that may borrow some concepts and set design from other movies, but is entertaining just the same. Check it out.
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