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DEATH MACHINE

Norrington would later gain mainstream attention by directing the hit film BLADE (he'll next be doing GHOST RIDER), but this earlier, and far less expensive, project is the more impressive effort in many ways. The film takes place in a fairly typical near future where the Channk Corporation is on the defense against a public outcry over their experiments in creating a cyborg soldier. In the film's opening, a Channk security team finds one of their soldiers has slaughtered the customers at a roadside diner and is now mindlessly pounding away at a brick wall. As public protests and TV news investigations intensify, company executive Hayden Cale (Ely Pouget, who looks a bit like Sigourney Weaver) comes in to take control of the corporate research center following the shark attack death of her predecessor. What she finds, once inside the ultra-secure skyscraper, is that Channk's top weapons designer, Jack Dante (Brad Dourif), is a longhaired, porn and violence obsessed sociopathic maniac with the hots for the lean, leggy and lovely Cale.

When Cale learns that the rumored stories about inhuman Channk experiments on actual humans are true, she decides to shut down Dante's work, but he's not about to let anyone take away his toys. Not while he's got the War Beast at his command, he isn't - a metal-taloned robot with shark-like jaws, tremendous speed and virtual invulnerability. And yes, you guessed it. Cale's predecessor met his shark attack doom while within the walls of an office building.

Soon, Cale and a couple other Channk execs are on the run from a Robby the Robot with a seriously bad attitude. Adding to the mix, and the action, a trio of socially conscious terrorists has infiltrated the Chaank building to strike a blow for humanity. Instead, they become additional targets for Dante and his murderous offspring. There're a couple of great chase sequences and a dynamite attack in an elevator, but the film really kicks loose when one of the would-be terrorists (who are actually decent guys with blanks loaded in their guns) decides the only way they can defend themselves is if one of them dons the cyborg soldier gear and undergoes the mind-wipe necessary to become a fighting machine himself.

Short on plot and long on action, DEATH MACHINE is a near perfect B movie that unreels with considerable tension, excitement, and even moments of dark humor. The cast is letter-perfect, with Dourif chewing up nearly as much scenery as the War Beast does and Pouget a most convincing kick-ass femme. Norrington pays homage to his cinematic heroes by giving characters names like Scott Ridley, John Carpenter and Sam Raimi, utilizes every special effect in the book to realize his large scale story on a meager budget and the War Beast itself is a most suitable menace.

Sadly, Trimark has not given Norrington's film the care and attention he so obviously lavished on it. The DVD features no extras and the visually reliant, widescreen-lensed film is given a full screen transfer that sometimes lops off information on the sides. The director apparently shot the film with TV in mind, so the missing material is rarely important to the film, but it's still frustrating. In addition, the overall image is a little soft - little improvement over Trimark's earlier VHS release of the title. Still, these faults aren't enough to deprive the film of its entertainment value, particularly when it can be picked up for as low as $7.00 on some websites, rented through Netflix or even bought as part of a sci-fi multi-pack with a couple of other worthwhile, but overlooked, titles. Any way you look at it, it's worth the meager outlay to check DEATH MACHINE out.