The second best unstoppable killer robot movie after the original Terminator. The competition is tighter than Jen Selter’s workout pants. Both movies are equally well-made on small budgets and both bring a pessimism that burns up the screen. Director Richard Stanley gets deep into this film’s post-apocalyptic textures. It’s all wires, metal, sand, dirt, fuzzy analog signals, old computers and human sweat. The toxins in the air jump into your lungs. In this world, surviving means scavenging and that means that one heads out to radioactive no-man’s-lands and digs in the dirt for artifacts of pre-war civilization to either use or sell. Solid gold dope Dylan McDermott isn’t one of those guys, but he buys a weird robot head off of one of them (a long-haired ghost of a man played by Carl McCoy of Fields of Nephilim; Iggy Pop and Lemmy Kilmister also turn up in small roles). It’s a gift for his sorta-girlfriend (Stacey Travis), an artist who’s fifty times smarter than him and is almost certainly sleeping with his spacey best friend (Stanley drops the hints like bowling balls, but never confirms). It’s nothing she’s ever seen before and she loves it. It’s perfect for the chaotic installation piece she’s presently making. She even repaints it (in American flag colors!) and makes it her own. And then it tries to kill her. And kill everyone else. Yep, awful boyfriend Dylan McDermott may as well have given her a bloodthirsty, mistreated pit bull. Turns out it’s a clever new top secret robot that’s designed to re-build itself after destruction and massacre any warm body it sees. It’s got claws tipped with poisons and is perfectly willing to gouge out a few eyes here and there. Richard Stanley gives us the action with ultra-stylized noir lighting, science-fiction’s often-cynical fascination with technology and horror’s fearless displays of painful irony and gore. Only the iffy resolution hurts this one. Everything else is as grimy and bleak as you want every sci-fi film with a cool poster to be.