Killdozer (1974 US 74m) #AmWatching #movies (~5600 words)

I watched the #1970sTV #film on #Plex (which is okay, but #Tubi is nicer). Short feedback: It’s a pretty solid movie of the week, and I’d give it a 7 out of 10. Also, humans are dumb. Four of the six characters died, and three of them did so because of stupidity.

This #TVMovie is based on the 1944 #ScienceFiction story "Killdozer!" by #TheodoreSturgeon. The basic story is a #horror tale: an evil force animates a bulldozer to kill people. The print story adds a tacked-on-front #SciFi element, where the evil force is briefly explained as being a member of an ancient race of energy beings that went to war with the intelligent species inhabiting Earth. The war wiped out both species, except for a single specimen that had been trapped by the corporeal species.

This piece of #70sTV #sff #cinema simplifies the setup. Our story starts with a meteoroid in space heading for Earth. Cut to it crashing on an island. In thirty silent seconds, we’re told everything we will be on the source of the evil spirit, which make its re-appearance (a few minutes | many years) later when a large bulldozer tries to move the meter-wide rock and fails.

Nice rookie bulldozer operator McCarthy (a baby-faced #RobertUrich, the only actor whom I knew by name, though I recognized two other character actors) calls for his boss Kelly ( #ClintWalker as an uptight, recently-dried-out drunk on probation), who then decides to take a whack at the rock himself. He backs the bulldozer up and rams the rock, resulting in a blast of blue light (which Kelly can’t see from the driver’s seat behind the blade) traveling into the dozer. The radiation released ends up killing McCarthy that night. Robert Urich got second billing on the IMDb poster, and he's dead 15 minutes in. [Death one: freak occurrence, no stupidity.]

The next day, Kelly tries to move the bulldozer, but it fights him. He manages to mechanically disable it, but notices the blade is still humming for some reason. Kelly tells Foster ( #NevilleBrand as the grizzled mechanic) to fix the bulldozer, giving no reasons or details. Foster does so, but after he leaves the bulldozer heads off. It's next seen by Beltran ( #JamesAWatsonJr as laid-back young dozer operator), whose own machine had gotten stuck on an incline. Kelly had just started to drive off to get another machine for a tow when the dozer shows up and goes after Beltran, who runs. During this, Kelly and Beltran both see the bulldozer change speed and direction several times, with it always going after Beltran while Kelly in his jeep watches from a hill. Despite seeing all this, Beltran decides to not run anymore, but rather to hide in a flimsy-walled drainage pipe clearly in eyesight (headlamp-sight?) of the dozer. Kelly watches it crush the pipe. [Death two: just plain dumb.]

After the #Killdozer reaches the camp and runs over it several times, destroying it in sight of the four remaining characters, they decide to leave, getting in three vehicles and driving off. After thinking through things at a stop, the group decides to set a trap. Now, these are construction workers (for Warburton Oil, though exactly what they’re doing on the island is never spelled out), and they know bulldozers. They know they’re loud, they move slowly, turn slowly, and a three-year-old could dodge one. Do they find a defensible position and wait for daylight to set the trap? No. They drive their two jeeps and a truck down a narrow path at night, a path with a gully to one side. Somehow over the noise of three vehicles, they don’t hear the bulldozer approach from the side, and it flips a jeep into the ditch, killing Foster. [Death three: proper caution not taken.]

Later that night Krasner ( #JamesWainwright as a veteran made jumpy by the deaths), who coins the name “Killdozer”, is given a bottle of booze by Holvig ( #CarlBetz of “The Donna Reed Show” as a mean-spirited loner who’s snide to the other characters) and Kelly to calm him down. Come sunrise, a drunk Krasner drives off to “go for a swim”, something he’d talked previously about doing with his friend McCarthy. Krasner encounters the Killdozer on the beach. His jeep stalls, and he keeps trying to restart it. Eventually the Killdozer is right in front of him and he just sits there staring. It runs over the jeep. [Death four: because running for your life is too hard.]

So now we’re left with Kelly and Holvig, who eventually decide to try to electrocute the Killdozer, because it’s not like you could gas it (while on the run, the pair had spent part of a rest stop discussing capital punishment). Kelly lures it onto some wire mesh rolls they laid out, Holvig flips a switch on the generator they connected to it, there are a lot of sparks, the bulldozer flares with blue light and goes dark. They put their ears to the blade and confirm it’s not humming anymore. Holvig says they could make it look like a construction accident killed the others, but Kelly says he’ll tell the company the truth when the supply ship arrives in two days. Holvig says he could get to like Kelly some day. (Likely just me, but I got an old-time “bitchy, self-loathing gay” vibe from this and several previous exchanges Holvig has with Kelly.) So the movie ends with the two least-likable characters alive. No jets come in to bomb the island as in the print story.

In the unlikely event this review rings a bell for anyone, it's lightly adapted from a long comment I did on the now-inactive (but still extant) Schlock-Value dot com #books blog. Yes, the user name differs: I use many different names online. If you've read other long posts from me, you might recognize my tone.