Review: “Death Machine”
- Scott
- Oct 8, 2019
- 2 min read
I’ve been watching bad (and sometimes good) horror movies for a long time now. The best part about being a 40 something person that has been steeped in movies for the better part of their life is that you can pinpoint a time period a movie was made strictly based on its content. Death Machine is so incredibly mid-90s it’s almost painful.
Sometime in the near future, Chaank Armaments has been developing bleeding-edge weapons and military hardware long enough that it has become the world leader in this dubious field. One of their newest “weapons” they have been testing is something they are calling the “hard man” which is essentially just a cybernetically controlled super-soldier. The problem is that these soldiers are malfunctioning and in doing so are killing the actual people the cybernetic soldiers are built on. This, in turn, has created a lot of public backlash due to the human cost of these failed experiments.
Chaank’s main developer and idea person is a man named Jack Dante. He is a leather trenchcoat-wearing, self-cutting, heavy metal listening, greasy, computer hacker. He is the one responsible for creating all the weapons that Chaank then sells to world powers, and he has been developing a new weapon called the Frontline Morale Destroyer of the “War Beast”. Jack also has an unhealthy obsession with one of the new CEO Hayden Cale. Cale attempts to force the board of directors to give the public a transparent look at what Chaank has been doing with the Hard Man project. The board refuses, and Jack steps in, in an attempt to save the company and himself from being terminated.
Death Machine is 90s as fuck. It feels like someone watched “Hackers” and wanted to somehow make it edgier. The character of Hayden Cale feels like it was written with Angelina Jole in mind specifically. The look, the sound, the effects, hell even the title, everything in Death Machine is so 90s it hurts. Also, Brad Dourif as Jack is on par with every other slime-ball character he has ever played.
I feel like I need to draw attention to the characters names in this film as well. They are listed in the image, and believe me… they really went for it here.
Is this movie good? Eh… it depends on what you want out of it. I watched it thinking the entire time how much of a slice of cinematic life it was for the era it was created. If you remember the 90s as vividly as I do, it might be worth checking out. For most any other reason this is one to completely skip. Oddly this film was the first appearance of American and British academy, SAG and Golden Globe award winner, Rachel Weisz. That’s a weird one.
Comments