Screamers: The Hunting DVD Review

If someone asked you to cook up a science-fiction stew, what would you throw into the pot? A little Predator costume design? A splash of Alien corporate intrigue? Some tremors burrowing? A twist of Hardware buzzsaws? And to garnish? Well, that would have to be Lance Henriksen! Throw in at least another half dozen other film references which I must withhold here to protect a few shocks and surprises along the way and what you have is Screamers – The Hunting. While no where near an equal to the illustrious films which have inspired it, this is at least a good looking slice of schlocky sci-fi/horror nonsense.

So, this is a derivative film through and though. Set thirteen years after the Screamers of the first film in the franchise wiped out the population of the civil-war ravaged mining planet Sirius 6B, this one starts with a group of forgotten survivors sending out a distress signal. A small group of soldiers are sent to investigate and rescue anyone left behind. The Screamers batteries were supposed to have run down by now, making the mission easy, but the machines are rumored to have evolved... Oh, and by the way, you only have six days to find and rescue them because we’ve just discovered an asteroid strike heading to the planet. What are the odds of that happening!

The pins are all in place then for a standard straight-to-DVD release. This film’s saving grace is that the ball they use to knock those pins down is quite a pretty one. The special effects, particularly of the Screamers seen later in the film, are really quite good – very creepy and quite convincing. The heavy use of prosthetics rather than CGI definitely helps here. Less so are the cast I’m afraid. We have a military medic who seems to have qualified without ever seeing blood, judging by her reaction to her injured teammates, a spineless engineer, someone whose sole defining trait is his heroism (so we lose him pretty early in the proceedings!) and, given the obviousness of some of the twists, a collective IQ quite close to that of a warm cup of tea. When one of the characters decides to jump into bed (well, on to a cold rock floor, but that doesn’t quite work as a euphemism!) with a guy who she met on the wrong side of a firefight a day ago and who really, really needs a bath, you have to start to wonder what is going on in their heads!

As the sci-fi tropes pile up thick and fast, and heads and limbs are severed, you may find yourself able to switch off and go along for what is, as I’ve said, quite a pretty ride. I just found myself pulled back out of the film every time I spotted another reference to another film. They even start using lines from adverts. ‘Part man, part machine’ all Robo-Screamer? Harmless fun, but nothing to get fans of the original excited.

Extras on the DVD consist of a series of trailers for other films and a ‘making of’ featurette which mainly consists of people telling you how great everyone is and how terribly complex their characters are. More interesting are the sections about the location shooting and the make-up effects for the screamers