Screamers

For the few who happen to be fans of Peter Weller, this is certainly one to hang onto. A great little film that is just as brutal and vicious as any movie by Paul Verhoeven. I was surprised Verhoeven didn't direct a film like this. A little cheesy, but often times interesting, Screamers is a little film I like quite a bit. The funny thing is, I liked this film, even though I had watched Twelve Monkeys just a couple hours earlier (I did a little theater hopping). A cool little film with a freaky ending.

OK this film has virtually no budget for a sci-fi movie and no real stars to speak of other than Peter 'Robocop' Weller but that doesn't matter because what it does have is a good story well told. It's a shame that bigger budget sci-fi productions never seem to remember that sci-fi should be have an interesting premise and not just throw a few explosions at the screen every few minutes.

What is on offer in Screamers is a solidly entertaining 1hr 40mins of sci fi fun, reasonable acting and a great story based on a Phillip K Dick short. The main idea of screamers is a very scary one a war that had been taken over by machines that fight on our behalf a war that can't be stopped.

For sci-fi fans this is a must see, for everyone else it's still solidly entertaining 7/10

Screamers has all the tricks for a good science fiction flick. Alien planets, evil robots, paranoia of your fellow man and fancy weapons. All this is very well done in Screamers and I happen to enjoy watching this whenever I get the chance.

Weller does a superb job with his grizzled character, and manages to hold his own in the action scenes. Most of the other characters are throw away, but their lack of development doesnt set back the plot all too much.

All in all Screamers is a very good look at man's weapons gone awry. the Screamers are just more mobile landmines of today, still around long after their purpose is long past.

Gave it 7 outa 10. for a buck, its a great deal.

Woah... I saw it in 1996 in a theater near my small Provençal village, and i simply wasn't expecting that... Christian Duguay proved once again he was terribly underrated by both the press and the public, "Screamers" ("Planète Hurlante" in France i/e "Screaming Planet", nice title too...) is the B-side at its best, the B-efficiency with an almost-A script. The cast is OK (Roy Dupuis was almost a star here in the early 90s, the VFX impressive (for the most of them), and - as some viewers wrote earlier - the first part very promising. Overall, a good job. Take it on video with a couple of friends, some chips'n'soda (ok, beer if ya want).

This movie aptly showed that you don't need a huge budget to make a good picture, even when that picture is a sci fi. It wasn't the best movie I've ever seen, but for crying out loud it was a heck of a lot smarter than Independence Day and that movie cost a mint. I had read Phillip K Dick's 'Second Variety', the short story upon which this movie is based, before I ever saw Screamers, and I didn't realize Screamers was even based on the story until I watched it. Being a big fan of the original story I was glad to see it brought to the screen, and more or less faithfully - I thought Peter Weller did a great job in this movie, the atmosphere was actually somewhat as I had imagined it reading the story (they updated it somewhat by placing it in a totally different location, since the original story's wasteland was a result of nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia; something which I'm sure seemed plausible at the time it was written but is a little dated now), and although I don't think they pulled off the sort of paranoia we saw in The Thing, there was some nice tension as the story unfolded, although it fell apart a bit at the end.

Bottom line - if you're a sci fi fan sniffing around for some sci fi you haven't seen but don't want to sit through a total dog, it's not a bad renter.