Three years after handing off the role to Robert John Burke for the third installment of cyborg crime-fighting action, Peter Weller starred in a sci-fi film that envisioned an even grimmer dystopian world. In fact, marking its 30th anniversary this month, it made the vice-ridden streets of a near-future Detroit seem downright pleasant by comparison.
Set on the barren planet Sirius 6B in 2078, this mostly forgotten story is unrelenting in its bleakness—from the opening scene where a soldier is savagely dismembered to the final twist (which the sequel revealed drove the sole survivor to suicide). Visually, it’s also unbearably dreary, with a color scheme stuck mostly in murky grays and browns, and most action taking place in rusted underground bunkers swarming with rats. This isn’t the kind of movie to lift your spirits on a rainy weekend.
Interestingly, the film itself languished in development hell for over a decade. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon finished his adaptation of the short story Second Variety all the way back in 1981. But it wasn’t until Montreal’s Allegro Films finally got production moving—ultimately without O’Bannon’s awareness—14 years after his work (polished by Miguel Tejada-Flores) hit the big screen.
Allegro’s participation likely accounts for the heavy Canadian influence. Director Christian Duguay, a two-time Gemini Award winner, had previously directed the two direct-to-video sequels to David Cronenberg’s cult horror film. The main villain, Becker, is portrayed by Roy Dupuis, a wildly popular French-Canadian actor, and Montreal’s Olympic Stadium and a Quebec quarry were used to craft the film’s toxic wasteland.
Maybe the most striking element of a film that clearly showed budget constraints elsewhere was these expansive, hazardous landscapes. In the movie, they’re the outcome of a prolonged war between the evil corporate rulers of the New Economic Block (N.E.B.) and the scrappy miners’ union The Alliance. The N.E.B. exposed its workers to radiation while chasing Beryllium—a rare material fueling the Cold War on Earth—while The Alliance created its own retaliatory weapons called Autonomous Mobile Swords.
As the first scene graphically shows, these sand-dwelling robots are built to tear apart any living thing—which is why Alliance members wear a special tag that basically makes them immune to these ruthless killing machines. Still, they can hear the deafening, high-pitched sounds the robots make when attacking—hence their nickname and the film’s title. And due to a string of conflicting messages that force the group to cross enemy lines to find the truth, they soon learn their creations have evolved far beyond their worst fears.
Weller plays Commanding Officer Hendricksson, who leads the mission alongside his opposite, Jefferson (Andrew Lauer)—a naive, jockish private who just added to the chaos by crash-landing a spaceship carrying nuclear reactors. Things get even more tangled when they find a young boy holding a teddy bear who says he’s an orphan of the war. While they let him come along, enemy soldiers Becker and Ross (Charles Powell) soon shoot him dead.
Yes, this horror film doesn’t shy away from killing child characters—well, sort of. The boy isn’t actually a child; he’s the first hint that the screamers can now pass as real humans. Before long, this new group (including Jennifer Ruben’s black-market dealer Jessica) is destroying the bots (which also look like small dinosaurs) in large numbers in a sequence that calls to mind [original reference omitted]. What’s more, they start suspecting—and pointing their guns at—each other.
How these mechanical creatures evolved so drastically in such a short time is never explained. In fact, the film raises more questions than it answers from start to finish. Why do the screamers kill each other? Who sent the original truce message? Screamers starts strong by building its grim alien world, but it ends up leaving too many loose ends.
Even so, it’s surprisingly sharp—and sadly ahead of its time—in its exploration of key themes: global capitalism, political paranoia, and most notably, the risks of AI. “Well, you’re moving up in the world—you’ve learned to kill each other,” Hendricksson quips about how technological progress has also advanced criminality.
Weller delivers all the standout lines as the grouchy commander who seems to hate anything from the last 100 years—we first meet him blasting Mozart while examining an ancient Roman coin. “Goddamn Morse code was better than this virtual reality crap,” he snaps after a chat with a glitchy hologram. He’s almost as contemptuous of his peers, whether mocking Becker’s limited words or Jefferson’s oversharing (“you must be mistaking me for someone who cares”). It’s a top-notch performance in a B-level film, though even Weller can’t make the forced romance work—it briefly risks turning the ending into a soap opera.
Truth be told, Screamers doesn’t make you care much about its characters—the smarts it shows rarely extend to emotional depth. Because of that, the various deaths and the climax where Jessica and Hendricksson offer to sacrifice themselves for humanity don’t hit hard. Even so, you have to respect a film that fully embraces unrelenting gloom.