Automatons

More violent than anything Wood ever did, Automatons nevertheless has the kitschy feel and look of something he might have concocted. And I mean that as a compliment.

The acting is flat, and the scientist's ideological speeches too bluntly designed to mirror post-9/11 rhetoric. But there's a dreamy fascination to the iconic images of machines fighting a perpetual war for the human creators they'll inevitably outlast.

Automatons is driven less by its hints of suicide bombers than by its rigorous adherence to a time when robots were played by inverted dustbins and battles were represented by dots converging on a crackling screen. This lack of sophistication is enormously endearing, leaving us with the comforting notion that the end of the world will look a lot like the beginning of television.

A mild and static attempt at sincere camp.

With its hypnotic pacing, blatantly nonsynchronous sound, clunky robot costumes, and graphic but unconvincing violence, the movie falls flatly between camp and art-house pretension.

An unwieldy mix of self-conscious camp and heavy-handed allegory, Automatons plays like a cheesy '50s no-budget sci-fier with serious delusions of grandeur.

Automatons is what happens when "Eraserhead" and "Tetsuo the Iron Man" bong themselves into oblivion and collaborate on a minimalist avant-garde sci-fi cheapie shot in a toolshed.