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Just seen this film on tv......and well the plot had promise but never delivered on it-we never found out why all this was happening and how.The way the film ends you think there may be a sequel-leaves a lot of unanswered questions.......

This was a second series attempt from musician Roderick Taylor a year after Otherworld for CBS. Strangely, the very title, "Annihilator" is never explained. The unsold pilot tells the story of a newspaper publisher whose girlfriend has been apparently replaced by an android during the return flight from a vacation. A trip he missed due to business. After discovering the switch, he begins a quiet investigation of her fellow travelers, leading only to several attempts on his life and finally being framed by some unknown party for murder, sending him on the run with only a list of the passengers aboard the unfortunate flight as a starting point for his search for the masterminds behind the androids and their ultimate goal. The film maintains the Taylor trademark of an altered reality with the use of surrealistic imagery and music. Many story elements that would define the X-Files years later are on display here. It should also be noted that leading man Mark Lindsay Chapman, then going under the name Mark Lindsay, was given this role as compensation after being cast as John Lennon in a TV biopic, only to be removed when his real name was discovered to be the same as Lennon's killer.

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'.

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.

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.