Screamers - Urla dallo spazio

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).

In the future the mining planet Sirius 6B has become a war zone with two warring factions. The ground is patrolled by underground robots called Screamers who target anyone not wearing identifying marks. One side receives a plea for peace negotiations after 10 years of war and discover from a lost soldier that the war has been forgotten on earth. The two sides have been left to die on Sirius 6B while another way is started on another planet. Commander Hendricksson (Weller) sets out with the lost soldier Jefferson (Lauer) to contact the other side and declare peace. However what they find will spell the end of their war one way or another.

This is based on a Phillip K. Dick story and has all the intelligence you would expect from a sci-fi from him - this is not a gory horror movie. This is an intelligent story about the creation of the Screamers and their "evolution". It also has a cynical edge lended by the way that the soldiers have been deserted by their leaders and continue to be tricked into fighting while the leaders get on with their business.

Weller is excellent as the world weary commander who finds his life sold out from under him. The supporting cast are OK with their stereotyped characters but the real stars are the Screamers who start out by small things with saw-blades and gradually take other forms. The child versions of Screamers are particularly creepy and perhaps a little disturbing.

However this is not as terrifying as it should be, nor is it as intelligent as it starts out being. The whole issue behind the different screamers is not explained and towards the end they just keep popping up without reason! It also has one of those "watch out for the sequel" style endings - although in fairness it isn't quite as bad as that. The special effects are a bit ropey but do the job - after all this is a very low budget movie.

The whole thing is not as good as it could have been but is certainly head and shoulders above a lot of low budget sci-fi thrillers.

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.

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.

Based on a Phillip K. Dick story (the writer of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," which was the background for "Blade Runner") this movie delivers, but suffers because of the apparently tight budget. Some scenes in here reminded me of the original "Star Trek" episodes, where the production crew had to become quite inventive to get effects on an almost non-existing budget.

So movies low on money have to rely on their scripts and on good actors, and "Screamers" has them both. The story and its subplots could serve for three movies and especially Peter Weller showed a superb performance here. Generally there are some weaknesses, but they can be forgiven, if you allow yourself to get into the story.

If you have enough of FX loaded movies that cover their thin plot with a multitude of explosions, then give it a try.