The Asylum strikes again by presenting a movie with an interesting premise and failing in just about every way to make it work.  This company constantly produces schlock and we (I) should know better than to expect anything else.  This is the kind of junk that gives science fiction a bad name — similar to what was being produced on minuscule budgets in the late 1950s, but without imagination or fun.

Marcus Friendlander’s film follows two scientists who are dabbling in Artificial Intelligence.  Suddenly their pet project, Medusa, gains a will of its own, attacks them, and begins its conquest of the human world — the Robot Apocalypse (spelled as just one word in the titles).  It’s up to plucky young men and women related to or working for these dumb scientists to save the day.  One massive robot — working in a quarry! — is seen, and eventually goes on the rampage, and there are some Aries cyborgs, but that’s about it for the Robot Apocalypse.  Most of the menace comes from drones.  Yep, drones.

The premise is somewhat promising, but the film’s tiny budget puts most of the action in alleys and fields and forests, with nary a robot in sight.  The young characters are all computer hackers who never miss a keystroke, can hack into any government program, and have tough street names like Red Dragon and Zee.  With the help of Ultimate Fighter Tito Ortiz (playing somebody’s cousin), the hackers return to Medusa’s lab to stop the AI from destroying all human life on Earth.  Interestingly (to me, at least), the main character disappears about two-thirds of the way through the story, evidently killed in action (I suspect that performer finally had enough of this shoddy production and said “Hasta la vista, baby.”

Besides the lack of believable action, not to mention apocalyptic robots, the film’s main problem is the boredom factor.  The computer geeks constantly gab at each other about how fast they can work or what Medusa is up to or how Medusa can be stopped or bandwidth or gigabytes or blah blah blah.  Even in the action scenes they never shut up and let the visuals take over, probably because there are so few visuals.  It’s astonishing how overwritten this script is; for an 87-minute film the script must have been over 200 pages.  Perhaps this is a step forward for The Asylum, but the result is still boring and stupid.  ☆.  27 August 2022.