BlinkyTM

A boy decides he wants a robot companion like the friendly, smiling Blinky™ that he sees on the TV adverts. His parents oblige and he finds himself with a great friend and servant who never tires and always does what he is told. However, while the boy has this friend he has to see his parent's relationship deteriorate in front of him.

This short film has a nice air in brooding tension and it builds it pretty well across the film. The main selling point is of course in the area of the visual effects because for a short film these are very well done. Blinky looks convincingly real for the majority of the time, but he also has a nice sense of menace in the way that all dead-eyed staring and smiling things do; he feels wrong even when he is so clearly just a loyal robotic dog of a thing. So on this level it works but the problem is that the narrative moves us too quickly and the further it goes the more blatant it gets. This is seen very quickly as the brooding menace becomes almost comic excess, whether it be the melodramatics of the boy yelling at the robot or final shots. This disappointed me a bit because it felt like the leaps were too big and undercut the nice build up it had mostly done.

It does still work for what it is and the visual effects are well worth a look, but at times it appeared much smarter and more subtle that it ultimately turned out to be, and it was hard not to feel like the journey was better than the destination.

In the future a child is given a pet robot by his warring parents. Before long the neglected child grows tired of Blinky the robot and begins to play unkind games on it. It all ends in tears.

This was a decent enough, if unremarkable, little short. The robot is easily the best character, although the child actor is incredibly convincing as an annoying little brat. Mostly, this is a showcase for the animation of Blinky. We also get to see an unusual scene where Blinky and the boy pass by another android in the street, with a future city-scape in the distance. Although it isn't a sequence that has much relevance to the plot-line it's probably the most memorable moment in the film. As short films go though, this isn't too bad. The ending is quite amusing as well.

where to even start with this thing?! so, "BlinkyTM" is a short "horror" movie by Ruairi Robinson that tells the story of a kid, who's hates his life and adopts a robot. the kid starts slapping the robot around and tells the robot to kill his family and gets what he wanted.

now, what i liked: the premise overall looked interesting. ya know, kid adopts a robot and starts slapping it around, and robot goes in a killing rampage. and it also had good visuals, it wasn't like any indie movie or something. they had good cameras and good quality, and Ruairi's direction was alright.

what i hated: everything else! the dialogue.. oh god! the dialogue in this thing was really bad. every line that comes from either the robot or the kid is either stupid or nonsensical. and the pacing... oh my god, the pacing! this is thing that i hated the most in this movie. There's mountains of time where nothing's happening, it's just a annoying little kid talking to either his parents or his robot friend and the conversation goes nowhere. this makes the movie really disjointed and depressing. all the kid ever thought was just "I want a friend; i feel lonely; i want you to kill my family". this thing either had me laughing to tears or it had me falling asleep. and there was almost no f***ing writing here either. whatever script this thing had was probably written on a cocktail napkin. i don't know if Ruairi Robinson was brain-dead when he made this movie.

so, can i recommend this movie? hell no! there's no way i'm gonna recommend this horrid thing to anybody! 1/10

With a rather disturbing plot in a futuristic world, this short film is an interesting audiovisual piece. It has a stupendous cinematographic quality in the direction, production and digital effects. What is striking is the robot Blinky who looks quite sweet and adorable until the mistreatment of young master Alex changes all that. The plot turns dark and terrifying as it progresses. The disturbing thing lies in Blinky that makes one wonder if a robot can not reach certain limits regarding how it is treated. Artificial intelligence in the world of science fiction is a creation that can replicate many characters of human behavior. If it can be developed to that level, there may perhaps be a possibility that a robot is not just a domestic service machine. It may even become something with a developing consciousness capable of doing what humans do, including evil deeds. Blinky is without a doubt one of the best short films I've seen for its terrifying vision of the future of robotics. My rating for this short film is 9/10.

I couldn't help but crack up at the parts where Blinky was starting to go bad, I'd like to believe it's possible to depict a cute little robot going evil in a non-comical way, but maybe in this medium such a scenario just isn't possible and I should excuse the director. It was a very predictable short and nothing too clever, but the special effects were top-notch and the acting was above average. The idea behind BlinkyTM was unoriginal but the story seemed very fleshed out and set in reality compared to most other shorts of the horror genre, if you can even consider BlinkyTM "horror". That's the main problem I had with this short: the absolute lack of horror aspects in it. The film dragged on and that's saying a lot when talking about a 13 minute short; nothing really happened, 12 minutes were used to set the stage, and 1 minute was used for horror.

The short itself--regardless of the lack of horror--was still well done, albeit riddled with clichés (fighting parents, neglected kid, takes it out on the robot, etc.) which make the film rather uninteresting. It's definitely not a short you'll remember for years to come, it's very forgettable but the quality of special effects and execution of the short overall--even though lacking in the horror field--earns itself a generous 7/10 from me.