Exterminator City

Exterminator City
United States - 2005
Director – Clive Cohen
York Home Video, 2005, DVD

A woman is taking a shower when a skull faced robot barges into the room and murders her. Damn, these robots are awesome. Credits, oh crap, Julie Strain is in it, and I have a hard time dealing with this whole clique of on-the-cheap meat-for-hire scream queens. And I wasn’t expecting boobs in this movie.

Oh, right, robot puppets! Lots of creepily lit model high-rise buildings make a rain soaked noiresque atmosphere of tilted walls and tinny canned sound. Aero-cars zip through the semi-darkness suspended from strings.

Skull face robot, a former pest exterminator-bot catches another well-endowed woman in the bathroom with her top off and chops her up. He halucinaties an evil bloodthirsty Christian God for a little while, sweats, fingers his killing blade, and then goes to robo-confession.

So, this is basically a low budget blasphemous, stripy, puppet, robot, noir gorror film?

A detective robot, programmed to be hard boiled, and unleash a string of crusty hardwired catchphrases teams up with the killers shrink, another chromed cookie-cutter charicature to solve the rapidly mounting top-heavy death-toll.




As the Exterminator carves up another preening prosthetic princess, the detective is subjected to the lo-bugit data-onslaught of robo- serial-killer psychology and his own sweaty unrelenting vice.

An merciless onslaught of bitter, hard-boiled and unscrupulously corrupt robots populate this emotionless evisceration of genre standbys. Little attention is given to building a living, breathing world for these characters to fill. Rather, they mutter cynical, cliché sarcasm, gazing out through dimly glowing LED eyes and let their dark digital void fill the world.

Whether by conscious intent or haphazard compromise, easily the best use of puppets since Henson or the Feebles. A blundering, full-force low-budget exploration of the boundaries of creative insanity exploitation filmmaking.