Annihilator

I watched "Annihilator" a few months ago and although its strange and unpredictable, enough happened to make me continue watching it till the end. Its quite a good movie and a clever idea although where they got the idea from is clear to see with the dinamatard robots having red eyes just like in the classic movie "The Terminator".

Overall, I would recommend this movie to anyone.

Enjoyable, rating 7/10.

In watching this film, I never got the sense they were aliens. The constant shots of churches and crosses made me think of something else. They called themselves Dynamitards. (This was an actual 1800s secret society in Europe.) I would have loved a sequel. Or maybe a look at the original script. I did wonder why the Dynamitards would leave an assault rifle and ammo laying around at their camp. Especially since they'd already bent the barrel on his handgun while he was away from his room. The film isn't available on DVD, which would be great. I think "Otherworld" is available in a boxed set (another fantasy series from the same producer).

I think this aired in 1986, on the old NBC Monday Night Movie, in the summer when it was usual to see lost TV pilots aired as movie-of-the-weeks. Told the tale of a newspaper reporter(Chapman) who has to miss a vacation(having won a "contest")with his girlfriend Angela, a scenario which, in the style it was filmed starts off very prosaic and normal until, as he narrates the entire film as a flashback, he finds her return plane had "gone off the radar" for 90 minutes, and returns, but delayed. He gets unnerved watching Angela speaking to a mysterious man in sunglasses,who seems to be watching the passengers leave the plane, asks who it was- and she denies having spoken to anyone. She is also unaware the plane was "delayed and missing". She begins acting strangely and having odd meetings with unknown people, and as the reporter begins to investigate things and ask more questions, she tries to kill him and he finds she's now a terminator-like robot(complete with the same kind of eye-tracking visuals from that film). Truly panicked he finds himself a wanted man, framed, and on the run with nothing more than the passenger list he got after dispatching the Angela robot. The only hint or clue we're ever given is one passenger who appears to be normal who claims "nothing went wrong on the flight, I slept, then felt a bump..and I had that awful nightmare.." . The reporter asks "What kind of nightmare?" and before she can say more, she's killed by another one of these robots. He finds out a little more, from another,older passenger who seems to be in charge of a localized group of these beings-he manages after a fight,to damage the mechanical brain and he begins talking incoherently about "Dynamitards...are the collective of Dymogeny" and how they intend to fully take over. We learn nothing else, other than he sets off,alone, in Fugtive-like fashion to find other normal passengers from the list-who were apparently checked off for termination-before the robots do. Obviously it was intended to be a series along the lines of Nowhere Man or The Fugitive, finding more clues along the way.

The film had some interesting "rock video" sequences,very much of the time-dissolves and used a perpetual "Los Angeles Sunset/Sunrise" for lighting. The use of Bowie's Ashes to Ashes and visual references to religious buildings and at one point, the hero seems to be standing in front of painted angel's wings, lead one to think these were possibly not aliens but something darker or even homegrown on earth.

This movie was a series pilot that was not picked up by the network.

It was not bad, but parts of it were a bit corny as some have pointed out.

As for the Ashes to Ashes segment with the music, this was in the era of MTV back in the days when they actually aired music videos 24/7. This scene was sort of a music video within a movie. Since I liked the song, I didn't mind it.

The basic concept had and still has alot of potential. Considering most sci-fi today is largely rip offs of Star Trek, something like this would be a nice change of pace. There was a kind of creepiness to it that the androids were so lifelike that most people would never know who was real along with the mystery of who or what was really behind the replacement of humans.

I would have to rate it an 9/10 for concept, but 7/10 for execution. This might be an idea for the Sci-Fi channel to pick up now since they did not exist 15 years ago.

I caught this on HBO back in 1989, and this was definitely meant to launch a television series. Mark Lindsay Chapman plays a reporter who discovers a plot by aliens/androids to begin a conquest of Earth. Unfortunately, he's branded a fugitive when he is caught killing one of the cyborgs who replaced his girlfriend. His trip takes him through California and Oregon, where he learned that while his girlfriend was replaced by an android, others that vanished with her on an airplane flight she was on are still human. The end had him on the run with a list containing the names of all people that were on the flight that his girlfriend was on in an effort to see just who from the flight could remember just what happened. Great premise, though a bit underbudgeted (what could one expect when it came to sci-fi on network tv back in 1986?), and there were many questions that were never resolved. Definitely should have been followed up, since we never learned if Chapman's girlfriend was alive (played by Catharine Mary Stuart) or how he would manage to convince the human race of the threats posed by the aliens. With today's budget, it'd be great to see 'Annihilator' retried. Nice mix of 'The Fugitive' and 'War Of The Worlds'.