Pandora Machine

Roger Ebert once said that the star system for rating movies is a sliding scale. To give this movie high marks doesn't mean that it's almost as good as "Silence of the Lambs" or "Star Wars", or even "Bladerunner" (which it resembles slightly). It's not nearly as good as any of those movies. I give it high marks because compared to other low budget (very, very low-budget) sci-fi movies, it's totally watchable, silly in a fun way, and just a little bit smarter than much of the genre in the way it deals with the question of the nature of sentient life. It's even slightly moving in a couple of scenes. Daryl Boling is a fine actor, and writer/director Andrew Bellware is an enthusiastic digital-age Ed Wood, without an allowance or an editor.

One of the pleasures of watching this movie is seeing what someone can create without spending any money at all on production. Seriously, haven't you ever wished you could go out and make a feature-length movie yourself, with real actors? In this day of digital technology, who needs a studio, right? Well, here's an example of someone who did it, and all things considered, did it pretty well.

Also, there is a tremendous amount of gratuitous nudity. No character wears clothing unless the plot absolutely requires it. I've rented other cheap sci-fi movies at Blockbuster, and they didn't contain ANY nudity.

If you get your hands on this DVD, you must watch the bonus commentary track. It's very funny.

Pandora Machine did intrigue me, but it failed to deliver on the most part. It is not completely unwatchable, the ideas were interesting in hindsight, the two main characters did have some likability and the acting of the two leads and the ending while far from great were not bad. However, I did find the stock cuts and the security scenes very repetitive after a while, while the music is completely overpowering and doesn't fit very well with the mood. The graphics/effects are very amateurish-looking looking as if they were done in minutes, and the settings were too dully lit even for the atmosphere and just don't engage. The story had potential but spoilt by very derivative execution, a complete lack of focus as the film never knows what it wants to do or be, sluggish pacing and the atmosphere and suspense just weren't there. The dialogue is at best pitiful, the characters on the whole are shallow and the acting apart from the leads is reminiscent of a really bad porn movie. I don't know about you but the title came across as irrelevant to me.

All in all, amateurish and repetitive that while not irredeemable does little with the potential it had. 4/10 Bethany Cox

According to the box, this movie is about the future, where privatized police crack down on dissidents through the use of high technology and omnipresent surveillance devices. There's a serial killer on the loose and somehow, he, she, or it manages to evade all of the gadgets that are supposed to make dystopia safe for the proles.

Well, that's what it says on the box. The movie, on the other hand, is so poorly written, so badly directed, so pitifully shot, that the only the only thing I could figure out about the story was that it was wasting my time.

This movie was not only held back by its micro budget, but by the absolute lack of talent in any of the departments.

Save your money and rent something else.

Sometimes a student film really reaches out and grabs you. The Clerks is probably the most famous; Cube is the only such sci-fi movie I can think of. This movie really fails in many different ways. Although the two main actors are OK, the over-use of bad special effects is grating.

Every several minutes the movie shows the same 6 or 7 still pictures of factories that look like the cover of Pink Floyd albums. One gets the impression that the director got really excited reading a book about semiotics in film and wanted to inject some warmed over Tarkovsky to make up for the lack of interesting, futuristic scenes.

Indy films are supposed to be about crazy maverick stuff, but the corporate dystopia theme is poorly rehashed in this movie. The theme of a mismanaged, corrupt private police force was first explored in Verhoven's Robocop. Much of the silly dialogue in Pandora Machine is designed to re-enforce the impression that greedy corporations would run a dedicated police force into the ground; there's this painful scene where a woman at the police station is giving a performance review in which she criticizes the protagonists for their cost over-runs. You feel like telling the movie, 'ok, we get it, big business is evil,' but it never lets up.

My girlfriend thought the acting was so bad that she called it 'a porn movie without the porn.' There's one rather erotic scene where a programmed woman rides the main character, but she looks to be in her late 20's or older. There is way too little erotica to vindicate this film's abysmal dialogue and painful-to-watch Commodore 64 graphics. I could only watch about 20 minutes at a time and eventually gave up on it after an hour.

Behold the 'Alien/Aliens' rip offs. They were big in Italy in the 80s and some were actually worth watching as they were different takes on the classic story. Even worse they all had the same title, 'Alien 2.' (not kidding, there were several Italian films with this title) The worst by far was the one taking place in the Venice sewers where Italians dressed like Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, and Bill Paxton, used pump shotguns which did not actually fire anything, eject shells, or even produce muzzle flare at NOTHING! Footage of cheap puppets was added later.

'Pandora Machine' makes the above film look like 'Citizen Kane!' 'Pandora Machine is as bad as it gets! Take refugees from a scifi convention with air soft guns, filming with a camcorder in their parents' basement.

Much like the cheap pump shotguns which fired nothing, ejected no shells, and produced no muzzle flare, these kids' air soft guns also do NOTHING! They're not even real looking guns! The dialogue is truly as bad as it gets. "I'll shove this gun up your fxxx hole!" Get ready for 90 minutes of that.

Other scenes which show just how juvenile these film makers are is a gratuitous out of place girl on girl kiss.

Clearly this whole film is merely the result of kids with air soft guns, a camcorder, and a free weekend while their parents' were out of town.