Annihilator

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.

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.

Dated 1980's shlock, except for one brilliant throwaway scene near the end.

I wouldn't recommend buying the VHS, and pretty sure this never made it to DVD or Blu Ray, but with a little digging you can probably find it on YouTube. Be ready to skip forward to this scene (a little less than an hour and a half into the movie) if you don't find the movie watchable.

A momentary nice touch, completely unnecessary to the story or plot.

A malfunctioning android. The WAY it malfunctions is nothing short of genius!

It's only a couple of minutes, midway into the climax. I don't want to spoil with any more detail. All I can say is that 30-odd years later, it's every bit as good as I remember.

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.