30 Years Ago, The Man Behind Robocop Starred In An Even More Dystopian Sci-Fi
After handing the keys to Robocop to Robert John Burke, Peter Weller went on to headline Screamers.
Three years after passing the RoboCop mantle onto Robert John Burke for a third helping of cyborg crime fighting, Peter Weller headlined a sci-fi which imagined an even more dystopian vision. Indeed, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, Screamers made the sin-ridden streets of near-future Detroit look positively idyllic in comparison.
Set on the desolate planet of Sirius 6B in the year 2078, the largely forgotten tale is relentless in its misery, from the opening scene where a soldier is brutally torn limb by limb to the closing shot twist (which the sequel confirmed caused the only survivor to commit suicide). It also looks bleak as hell, the color palette rarely straying from murky grays and browns and most of the action confined to rusty underground bunkers infested with rats. This is not the kind of film to cheer you up on a wet weekend.
Interestingly, the film itself had been stuck in its own personal hellhole for more than a decade. Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon had completed his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story Second Variety way back in 1981. Yet it wasn’t until Montreal’s Allegro Films finally kicked things into production. It ultimately was without O’Bannon’s knowledge, 14 years after his efforts — given some spit and polish by Miguel Tejada-Flores — made it to the screen.
Allegro’s involvement no doubt explains the strong Canadian presence. Director Christian Duguay is a two-time Gemini Award winner who’d previously helmed the two straight-to-video follow-ups to David Cronenberg’s cult horror Scanners. Main villain Becker is played by Roy Dupuis, a hugely popular star of French-Canadian cinema, and Montreal’s Olympic Stadium and a Quebec quarry were both used to help create its toxic wasteland.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of a film, which clearly showed its lack of budget elsewhere, were these vast dangerous terrains. In the film, they’re a result of a long-running war between nefarious corporate overlords New Economic Block (N.E.B.) and plucky miners’ union The Alliance. While the former exposed its employees to radiation in the pursuit of Beryllium, a rare substance powering the Cold War back on Earth, the latter developed its own vengeful weaponry in the form of Autonomous Mobile Swords.
As the first scene displays in bloody detail, these sand-burrowing robots are designed to rip apart anything with a heartbeat, explaining why Alliance members wear a special tab which essentially leave them impervious to the lean, mean killing machines. They still, however, can hear the ear-splitting, high-pitched noises emitted whenever they attack: hence their nickname and the film’s title. And thanks to a series of mixed messages which forces the group to cross enemy lines in search of the truth, they soon discover their creations have evolved beyond their worst nightmares.
Peter Weller leading the fight against the robot uprising.
Weller’s commanding officer Hendricksson leads the voyage, accompanied by his polar opposite Jefferson (Andrew Lauer), a naive, jock-like private who’s just added to the confusion by crash landing in a nuclear reactor-storing spaceship. And things get even more complicated when they stumble across a teddy bear-clutching young boy who claims to have been orphaned by the conflict. Although they take him along for the ride, he’s soon gunned down by enemy soldiers Becker and Ross (Charles Powell).
Yes, this is a horror unafraid to kill off its kids. Well, kinda. The boy isn’t actually a kid, but the first sign of how the screamers can now pose convincingly as flesh and blood human. Pretty soon, this new alliance — which also includes Jennifer Ruben’s black marketeer Jessica — are wiping out the bots (which also take the form of small dinosaurs) en masse in a sequence which evokes Children of the Corn. Furthermore, they also end up pointing the fingers of suspicion, and their triggers, at each other.
Quite how the mechanical beings have developed so dramatically in such a short space of time remains a mystery. In fact, the film poses more questions than it answers throughout. Why do the screamers kill their own kind? And who sent the initial message calling for a truce? Screamers initially does a solid job building its grimy otherworld, but it ultimately leaves too many parts unfinished.
Is it a boy? Is it an orphan? No, it’s a highly evolved killing machine.
That said, it’s surprisingly biting, and depressingly prescient, in how it approaches its dominant themes of global capitalism, political paranoia, and, most notably, the dangers of AI. “Well, you're coming up in the world — you've learned how to kill each other,” Hendricksson wryly remarks about how the advances in technology have also led to advances in criminality.
Weller gets all the best lines as the curmudgeonly commander with an apparent aversion to anything that exists within the past century: we’re first introduced to him blaring out Mozart while studying an Ancient Roman coin. “Goddamn Morse code was better than this virtual reality s***,” he barks after a conversation with a malfunctioning hologram. He has almost as much disdain for his colleagues, too, whether deriding Becker for his limited vocabulary or Jefferson for his oversharing (“you must be confusing me with someone who gives a s***”). It’s a first-class performance in a second-tier film, although even Weller can’t sell the shoehorned-in romance which briefly threatens to sink the finale into soap opera melodrama.
Indeed, Screamers lacks the ability to make you feel much for its characters, with the intelligence it displays rarely leaning toward that of the emotional. As a result, the various casualties, and the denouement in which Jessica and Hendricksson offer to sacrifice themselves for the good of humanity, fails to pack a punch. Still, you have to admire a film which so willingly commits to abject misery.
