Morgan Douglas Movies
This high-tech spin on the slasher genre pits a group of sex-obsessed teens spending the night in a shopping mall against the mall's marauding robotic security guards -- whose programming turns homicidal after a bolt of lightning scrambles their control circuits. Director Jim Wynorski cut his exploitation teeth working for Roger Corman's legendary "B"-movie factory New World Pictures in the '70s and '80s, and this film's comic early scenes contain homages to that outfit's heyday -- with humorous cameos from Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov (reprising their characters Paul and Mary Bland from Bartel's Eating Raoul) and the ubiquitous Dick Miller. The majority of the film, however, is essentially a teens-in-jeopardy story, with the lethal bots unleashing their amped-up arsenal and bringing the victims to nasty ends amid buckets of gore -- such as the unforgettable moment when one woman's head is targeted by one of the droids and blown up like an overripe melon. (The shot is repeated during the end credits.) ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi
- Starring:
- Kelli Maroney, Tony O'Dell, (more)
George Lollar (Charles Grodin) overrides his wife's judgment and takes his family for a vacation on a sunny Caribbean island that just happens to be on the verge of a revolution. Their hotel is not the usual Hilton on the beach but a pick-up joint for singles where the main activities are sex, sex, and sex. In that order. As the horrified father watches almost helplessly, his wife becomes liberated, his daughter falls for a Frenchman who is actually a guerrilla, one of his sons loses his virginity to a buxom, worldly-wise woman, and his other son burns down the mini-camp he was forced to attend. But that's hardly the worst of it -- there is that small matter of a political overthrow about to explode on the scene. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Charles Grodin, Robin Pearson Rose, (more)
