ASSASSIN

ASSASSIN (1986)

A government agent, played by the guy in the Fedora in the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Richard Young) named 'Robert Golem' goes into a CIA office, kills a bunch of people and steals some files. He is a robot assassin created by the CIA, and he's gone haywire. Robert Conrad, ex-CIA is asked to

come back and stop this Robospook before he starts killing congressmen, senators and other important people like that... This really isn't a bad little movie. If you can find a decent DVD that isn't total crap. This is the main problem, the DVDs that are out there for this movie are like poorly transfered VHS Rips from the internet, with really bad sound. So I got the orignal VHS, which is also hard to find since most of them are cheap-ass tapes recorded in EP, or SLP mode. Terrible.

Robert Conrad is perfect in this TV Movie, also starring Maddy Hayes' Dad as the CIA controller. There's a back story, and we have a female scientist who created the 'Golem' terminator and is a love interest for Robert Conrad, but the terminator guy gets all the action in this movie. He can trick desperate women into helping him out when he's in a jam and on the run from Robert Conrad, he is 'fully functional' and women find him handsome, he's got it all. He needs to plug in to charge his batteries every 24 hours or so, and he keeps his battery charger handily inside his chest. He plugs his little thingie and charges his battery through his eyes. Pretty neat. He even makes himself some armor plating out of some metal to reinforce his vulnerable parts. He's a clever robot that can hack an ATM machine by mimicking acoustic modem sounds and I have to say, I didn't want to see him go, but he is after all a Killing Machine.

Only the government would build secret terminator killing machines of course, and of course they're going to go berserk at some point. Robert Conrad does a pretty good job of expressing cynicism about the project. The production value is TV-Movie of the week, but this Terminator guy jumps out of 12 story windows and survives, and there is a bit of action gunplay. The government conspiracy angle is interesting,and overall, as a B-movie which doesn't rely heavily on ripping off every movie about robots and cyborgs, yet is inspired by them, its not bad at all. I like this movie, and I wish I could

find a perfect copy of it. If you're looking for a decent movie about a killer robot, this really isn't bad if you know where to get a decent version.

There's a few nice little tricks and gimmicks, and it does indeed actually have a plot, and the actors pull it off. The ending isn't phenomenal, but ends with a big explosion. If I was given this movie to make, I'd have changed the ending of the script because it is kind of cheap, and not exactly all that inventive. It does employ the use of 1970s beeping 'computer banks' and other TV movie cliches, and Robert Conrad should have had a more physical part, more stunts or shooting or something, but he's also a thinking man, and a cynical smart guy, so he carries it through. This wouldn't be a bad film to remake really, whomever has the rights to this film should certainly look into it. It wouldn't be all that expensive either, and it does have a fairly decent little plot to rely on. Most killer-robot and cyborg films attempt to use Arnold lookalikes all the time, or at least big guys with big muscles, and I like the idea that this robot is fairly tall, but a charming and smart robot who is very resourceful and hard to kill and not necessarily because he is invincible but intelligent. There's a lot one could do with a story like this on its own, and though killer-robot movies are aplenty, the object of doing a remake is to do something better, unfortunately the purpose of remakes today is to cash in quickly on an old name brand, not resurrect good stories.