SHOCKWAVE (2006)

SHOCKWAVE (2006)

Tagline: The Army Wanted Machines Smart Enough To Fight A War. What They Got Was An A.I. Smart Enough To Fight Back.

(Sci-Fi, Action, A.I. Gone Wrong) [R]

Note: This movie was also released under the title A.I. ASSAULT. 

Yeah, I used to fly gunships in the gulf war, Somalia, some other stuff.  

This movie starts out on a plane transporting military A.I. weapons that end up turning on and terrorizing the passengers. When the plane crashes a team of Navy Seals is sent to turn the machines off because the longer they are on, the smarter they get. 

First off, this movie is directed by Jim Wynorski who is basically a Roger Corman type who specializes in b-movie trash. As it turns out I watch a lot of b-movies, so I am familiar with a lot of his films including CHOPPING MALL, THE LOST EMPIRE, GILA! and THE WASP WOMAN. None of those movies are full-blown terrible and in fact, CHOPPING MALL is one of my favorite horror movies ever. You still have to go into these flicks with tempered expectations though, because, in Jim’s list of films he’s directed, there are some movies so bad sounding and also some adult stuff I wouldn’t watch even if it was a hostage situation. Sure enough, this thing is terrible in a lot of ways, but it’s oddly not the worst b-flick ever and it’s certainly not as bad as some of the reviews would have you believe.

One thing to note is that you can’t take this thing seriously. At the 17:39 mark, there is a mechanical tentacle that is attacking everyone on a plane and suddenly this lady just runs and jumps in the air, then falls to the ground. Nothing touches her and yes it’s hysterical, but I have a feeling this was just a really bad editing oversight and that the producers just didn’t give a crap or didn’t have the budget to fix it. 

Among other issues like shaky CGI and score, the plot is just pretty bad and the dialog is worse. The film introduces several characters just to kill them off a few minutes later. One of those characters is played by George Takei (STAR TREK) who shows up in this movie maybe because work was tight at that time? I have no idea. When it comes to acting this thing isn’t terrible though. The actors just weren’t given much to work with. Joe Lando is decent as Major Richard Tunney so I don’t have any real complaints there. Having said that I couldn’t stand him in FRESHWATER. That movie sucked so bad I didn’t even bother writing a review for it. We also get Lisa LoCicero who plays Susan Foster and is fine in the role. She is probably best known for a small part in RUSH HOUR 2. Hudson Leick plays Tiffany Smith in this and she is also okay. It does look like she stopped acting back in 2018. She is probably best known for the TV show “Melrose Place”. Then wrapping up the main cast we get Josh Coxx as Jack McKenna and like everyone else, he’s fine in this. Coxx is best known for the TV show “Babylon 5”. 

I think one thing that bugged me bugged me a lot about this movie isn’t that the A.I. machines had tentacles, but that they looked so much like stuff we’ve seen in the WAR OF THE WORLD films. Not necessarily the 1950’s classic, but other iterations after that. Just changing the design on these things to give us something closer to what we got in ROBOT RIOT or something like that would have made this movie feel less generic. Heck, even CHOPPING MALL designs from the 80s would have been some more awesome A.I. robots to go with here. 

I could probably spend some time ripping this thing, but quite honestly, I expected bad and this movie delivered. It’s watchable just because of that. There are also a lot of b-movies with characters that were far worse than these. If you are up for wasting your weeknight or Saturday morning watching b-movie crap, this is on that list of “barely watchable” films you might even get a few laughs out of. It also has a pretty crazy and unexpected ending. 

This one gets a 2 out of 7. No, the ending isn’t enough to rescue this one.

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