Today’s topic – robots. Big, mean, pissed-off flesh-rending robots. Since I was too slow to jump on Death Machine for the roundtable review that this was originally written for, I picked A.P.E.X. because it was basically the only other killer robot movie at the video store.

We start with Dr. Nicholas Sinclair and his team of scientists working on time travel experiments in the year 2073. They take a robot that looks like a suit of armor and whose head is too big for its body and send it through a Home Depot™ version of the Stargate™. It winds up in the desert in 1973, but the time machine malfunctions, causing the original robot to self destruct. It also sends Dr. Sinclair and a Sterilization Unit (basically one of the probe robots, but with a machine gun in place of its right arm and a rocket launcher on its shoulder) back to 1973 to the landing site of the probe. A vacationing family loses their camper to the Sterilization Unit before escaping, and Dr. Sinclair manages to leap through the closing time gate, leaving the lone Sterilization Unit out in the desert with nothing but orders to destroy everything it sees.

When Dr. Sinclair comes through the other side of the gate, he lands in an alternate reality where the Sterilization Units have taken over the world and small pockets of frightened human resistance are all that’s left of civilization. There’s also some kind of virus floating around, somehow started by Dr. Sinclair during the time warp. Although not much is made of its symptoms, the mortality rate is apparently quite high, because soldiers who contract it are used as robot bait on missions outside the humans’ hidey-holes. Sinclair decides to take just such a mission to find the lab where the original time experiments took place, and discovers that his wife from the other reality is one of these infected bait soldiers.

The team finds their way to the lab, where Dr. Sinclair discovers that the equipment is aware of the new alternate reality, and is sending Battle Units through on autopilot to sterilize the planet. Dr. Sinclair turns the power back on, jumps through the Home Depot Stargate™ and shuts off the power at the other end where his past/alternate self is initiating the original experiment. Everything returns to normal, everyone in the alternate reality disappears, and Dr. Sinclair wakes up safe in his own bed.

The good: Aside from having really big heads, the robots are pretty cool. The movie features lots of explosions. Um…

The bad: Although most of the acting is passable, I wanted to stab the token black guy to death with an icicle of frozen vomit from the second he came onscreen. He whines and complains and is generally subordinate enough to probably just be shot by his commander out of sheer contempt were this a squad of real soldiers. That, and he constantly looks like he’s going to burst into tears, although it’s supposed to be a tough guy grimace. The plot doesn’t make a lick of sense. If you went back in time and caused an alternate reality, then went back to your original parallel present reality and shut off the power before it started, and everything just reset as normal, all memory of the fiasco would be erased and the problem would start all over again. I think. Just trust me, it makes even less sense than The Terminator.

The verdict: The biggest problem with this movie is that it’s not very good, but it’s not very bad either. It’s mediocre. Mediocre movies are the worst to write about, because they feature very little good joke fodder, but they don’t have anything you can really praise and recommend them for, either. So if you really like robots, go rent this movie. If there’s a Russian folk dancer convention in town and all the other movies in the store have been rented by guys in fuzzy hats, go ahead and rent this movie. It won’t hurt you, but it probably won’t really interest you either. Eh.

The Moral of the Story: Robots are bastards.

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