Synthoïd 2030

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs ...I don't know what other people (other IMDB reviewers,for example)might think of me,judging me by myself or by my reviews,but I've never thought I was that much of a demanding individual.I've always thought I was quite easy going and undemanding as a person.I try not to winge when things don't go my way,or if I have to do a job for other people.I know other people who've tossed stones at old people's houses,or taken drugs like draw and got pregnant at an early age.Yes,stones are readily available for those nasty,thoughtless people to throw at their own pleasure,yes,draw and sex are there to be consumed whenever the mood suits them.So,okay,I decide to take a risk..I decide to spend a fiver of my hard earned money on a video I had'nt previously seen,which on impulse,I would never usually do.I buy it from this really convienient store in the market,which is'nt perhaps majorly up to date,but still sells old or forgotten films,at cheap prices,which I think is really ace.Judging by the cover and the Sci-Fi genre attached to it,heck,even by the supposedly brilliant plotline on the back of it,I thought Crash And Burn would be a risk worth taking.

Then,after I've seen Coronation Street,I race upstairs to watch this baby.Hello,what's this?Not 2 seconds in,and already I've noticed this is'nt shot like a regular film.That's probably one of the biggest,in my many ,complaints about Crash And Burn:if every other film can manage to be shot like a proper film(even the realy,really bad ones)why the hell can't this one pull itself together and do the same thing?This is shot like a poloroid-cum-video recorder.That was my first step towards getting really angry and fed up with this film.In fact,it was the main thing that bugged me about it throughout.Not once did it appear to improve.I'm aware it has the (V)for video symbol by it,but what,is that a direct excuse for crappiness ?(does this serve as a direct example with the Billy Blanks dud 'Tough And Deadly?).

And,what from the back looked like it was going to serve like an original and exciting Sci-Fi venture went totally downhill from there.The special effects were diabolical,the acting was abysmal,the dialogue was atrocious , although the end line 'you really felt for her?Well,she'd only break your heart...then tear it out'had some credit to it.But that only led to a glaring implausibility error that the hero had had sex with the female robot and not noticed she was'nt a real person.And that only lead to the fact this was the only movie I knew that thought it was being clever by giving a human-looking-robot it's own name,a synthoid.Every other Sci-Fi movie calls them cyborgs.And that only led to the fact that the main 'synthoid' in question is a pathetic Terminator rip-off,that gets done in at the end by an impressive giant robot,which we only see for a brief glimpse then disappears,presumably to a better movie because this giant robot has much more talent than all the actors in this drivel.He was cool. , He quashes him in a standard better suited to the Wrigley's Spearmint gum adverts ,the only thing missing was the 'pluuurp'sound.

It really is very unfair.All I asked for was decent entertainment.Society,and hollywood,really should set better examples than this.*

The year is 2030 and America is in shambles. Big corporations run the country and the ozone layer has been depleted. A group of folks find themselves inside a remote TV station run by Lathan Hooks (Ralph Waite), who is secretly a member of a resistance group. And hiding among this group of 8 is a cyborg with "crash and burn" orders to kill. This was the third release by Charles Band's Full Moon Entertainment (following PUPPET MASTER and MERIDIAN: KISS OF THE BEAST) and the second he directed (after MERIDIAN) for his new label. Revisiting this after 21 years, I'm surprised at how dated it now looks to me. It definitely fits into Band's world of futuristic desert wastelands also featured in PARASITE and METALSTORM. The acting is solid (co-lead Eva LaRue is now a CSI: Miami lead; Megan Ward makes her screen debut), but the plot is as flimsy as can be. The film also features the cheapest excuse to have a 80-foot robot (effects expertly done by Dave Allen and crew) on screen for a few minutes. It should also be noted that the DVD is an absolute mess with tons of ghosting issues. The source print used actually looks worse than the clips featured in the "making of" segment originally from 1990.

In the future year of 2030, a powerful organization called Unicom has seized control of the world after being driven to economic ruin following market manipulation ushered in by the computer age in conjunction with an ecological crisis where the Earth is now a scorched wasteland due to damage to the Earth's ozone layer. Tyson Keen (Paul Ganus) is a Unicom worker delivering freon to an independently owned TV station situated in an old industrial building whose owner, Lathan Hooks (Ralph Waite) has sympathetic leanings to a resistance group working against Unicom. When a heat spike is announced Lathan's granddaughter, Arren (Megan Ward), invites Tyson to stay. The group wait out the heat spike along with engineer Quinn (Bill Moseley), obnoxious tabloid talk show host Winston Wickett (Jack McGee), teacher Parice (Eva LaRue) and a few others, however when Lathan is murdered in the dead of night it becomes clear there's someone not human in their midst.

Following the bankruptcy of Charles Band's Empire Pictures, Band moved back to the United States from Rome to start Full Moon Pictures which specialized in the burgeoning direct-to-video market and forged a partnership with Paramount which thanks to parent company Viacom's holdings in Blockbuster made Full Moon (and sister label Moonbeam) titles a staple of Blockbuster shelves throughout the 90s. One of the final productions under Band's Empire was the Stuart Gordon helmed giant robot action film Robot Jox which was an expensive gamble for the Empire that ultimately sat on a shelf for three years until it was given a "fire sale" acquisition by Sony label Triumph Films and dumped into theaters in December of 1990 when the box office was dominated by Home Alone and Dances with Wolves. While the movie's box office was pretty paltry here in the States, Robot Jox most likely did good business on home video and the international market as Crash and Burn was marketed as a sequel to Robot Jox in Europe despite no shared elements with Robot Jox (save for the giant robot, but we'll get to that). Crash and Burn promises high concept sci-fi action in its trailer and box art, but is mostly just people stumbling around in dark industrial structures with maybe 3 minutes of the giant robot (if that).

The movie's world is a hodgepodge of post-apocalyptic sci-fi tropes that feel like they've been thrown in at random with the establishment of Unicom as a corporate/theocratic/totalitarian master that outlawed computers because of the market crash and robots because of the Book of Revelations (yes, seriously) coming off as pretty ridiculous and feels like the filmmakers couldn't decide on what kind of force controls this dying world so they said "meh, let's just stuff them all in there!" and called it a day. Then of course we have the production design which consists of what seems like an abandoned industrial plant given the barest minimum to be turned into a TV station and serving as the primary location of the movie for roughly 90% of the runtime. The movie then becomes a "locked room" murder mystery...that carries absolutely no weight since the trailer clearly shows who did what and why so the 50 minutes where our characters sputter around doing absolutely nothing is basically filler to get us to feature length. The movie does become a bit more enjoyable once the movie drops the pretense of being a mystery and allows the character behind the murder to cut loose and chew the scene, but it's pretty silly basically becoming a mixture of The Terminator and Freddy Kruger with just more budget conscious action scenes in the dark. And that giant robot featured prominently on the box art and in the trailers? A complete lie (kind of), the DV8 mining robot is brought to action for about 3 minutes during the climax to lift an antennae tower and crush an android with its foot before unceremoniously collapsing to pieces...people who bought this thinking it was a sequel to Robot Jox were most likely really disappointed.

Crash and Burn is a low budget slasher disguised as a sci-fi action film. The movie crimps from sci-fi films like John Carpenter's The Thing, The Terminator, and the Weyland-Yutani conspiracies from the Alien franchise and does the barest possible minimum to squeeze itself to 80 minutes and including only enough money shots to sucker in chumps with a trailer. Maybe this movie has value to riffers or a room with multiple people surrounding a coffee table covered with beer and pizza, but outside of that don't watch this movie.

Ok, this is not a great movie. But it doesn't attempt to be. It's B movie city, and for that, it's not a half bad movie.

Full Moon productions continues to impress me, with the atmosphere and great b movie schlock they can create, with a shoestring budget.

My review was written in August 1990 after watching the movie on Paramount video cassette.

Latest fantasy film from Charles Band is a well-executed but uninspired futuristic tale. It's going direct to video, unlike its recent predecessors from the Full Moon label.

Pic's claustrophobic format resembles scripter J. S. Cardone's previous efort "Shadowzone" in trapping a group of characters at a remote spot with something preying on them.

Story is set in the year 2030, when a technocratic government has outlawed robots and private use of computers. A motley crew is stuck at Ralph Waite's local tv station during a lengthy "thermal" (storm). A synth (robot) is killing the cast.

TItle "Crash and Burn" refers to a type of computer virus use to override the synth's programming (derived fro Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics) not to kill humans. There's an okay twist explaining the clue as to the synth's identity, but once this baddie is identified, the film's suspense evaporates.

Band gets good ensemble performances, especially from Waite as the rebellious figure. Young Megan Ward, cast as Waite's daughter, heads the cast of beautiful women, with both Eva LaRue and Katherine Armstrong offering diversion.