Sorry, this movie sucks

Let's be realistic.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The craze for possessed-vehicles-on-the-rampage films encompasses all sorts of weird and wonderful mechanical machinery going berserk. Lorries, ships and cars in particular… but in this TV movie from 1974, the concept is rather intriguingly shifted onto a bulldozer. It sounds like a pretty terrible idea – in all honesty, there's no serious way of claiming that Killdozer is, in any way, shape or form, a great movie – but somehow the film generates a degree of entertainment value in spite of its silliness. There's something refreshing, admirable almost, about the way the whole thing is handled completely straight-and-serious by a cast and crew who seem to genuinely believe in what they're doing.A meteorite crashes onto an uninhabited island off the coast of West Africa. Many years later, a team of six American engineers find themselves on the same island, preparing the landscape for construction of an airstrip. When they use one of their bulldozers to clear some rocks out of the way, the vehicle – a Caterpillar D9 - comes into contact with the meteorite… and a strange blue lifeforce transmit from the rock into the bulldozer. Before they know it, the six workers find that the bulldozers has taken on a malevolent life of its own – able to move and steer itself at will and, more disturbingly, to attack and kill. The foreman Kelly (Clint Walker), an ex-alcoholic trying to use this job to patch up his battered reputation, finds himself trying to keep the group together while figuring out a way to escape from the titular killdozer.Killdozer is based on a novella by prolific sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon. It is a mercifully short film. These ideas always work best when the location is fairly isolated and the characters are narrowed down to a small group battling for survival. This is why The Thing From Another World (and its later remakes, both known as The Thing) work as well as they do, and within the killer-vehicle sub-genre it's also the approach adopted by the best of the bunch, Steven Spielberg's Duel. Killdozer pretty much sticks to conventions, but overall it works quite nicely. The performances are hardly the stuff of Oscar or Emmy nominations, but decent character actors like Clint Walker, Robert Urich and Neville Brand do their thing with typically rugged professionalism. It's not an especially scary film – it's very hard to make a hunk of moving metal truly frightening – but it's quite imaginative and succeeds in creating a little suspense in patches. The death sequences are generally quite disappointing – they lack the necessary build-up, that slow cranking up towards a cathartic moment – but in other aspects the film is rather good fun.

Killdozer (1974) ** (out of 4) A small construction crew working on a tiny island off an African coast come across a mysterious blue rock, which they try to move without any luck. Even worse is that this blue rock came from outer space thousands of years earlier and now it has possessed the large bulldozer, which is trying to kill the crew. This made-for-TV film is based on the Theodore Sturgeon novel, although it's worth noting that Stephen King came out with his short story "Truck" the previous year and you have to wonder how much of King's story he knew from the earlier one by Sturgeon. Either way, this here is a pretty bland film but then again, the majority of the films dealing with trucks coming to life are. I mean, there's really just so much suspension of disbelief that you can have without it just becoming downright silly and I think this film here just lacks any suspense to make it work. I also thought it was pretty boring as more often than not nothing is really happening and we're left with the characters sitting around talking and telling stories. This includes a running (bad) joke dealing with one of them constantly wanting to go swimming. Another problem is that the bulldozer doesn't go very fast so everyone could just run away from it but never do. The cast includes Clint Walker, Carl Betz, Neville Brand and a young Rober Urich but none of them can save the picture. KILLDOZER has a catchy title but sadly the film doesn't live up to much.

With a premise like this, it should have been funny, but alas, from minute one, as the awful font appeared, I found myself thinking that it was pretty lame.A Styrofoam meteorite plops down on a postage-stamp-sized island off the coast of Africa (not "a small Pacific Island during WWII", as Bill Leue wrote in his bewildering plot summary) where a construction crew, hacking out a base-camp for an oil company (not "building an airstrip" either, Bill) unearth said meteorite in the sand (There is also no "ancient non-material lifeform which has lived in the ruins of an ancient temple for millenia" either, Bill. What the hell movie did you watch? And what the hell is a non-material lifeform?) which proceeds to glow blue, and kill a guy, somehow. The blue glowing light thingie possesses the bulldozer, and it very, very slowly takes out another man on the crew, so dimwitted that he just simply sits in his jeep for nearly 20 seconds while Killdozer slowly meanders its way toward him, and *SPLAT*. It proceeds to stalk the remaining crew members, taking them out, very slowly, one by one. Killdozer even runs over their radio, eliminating any chance of contacting anyone with it. Who could they call, and what could they tell them? That they're being stalked by a bulldozer come to life? Clint Walker overacting outrageously, impersonating Clint Eastwood throughout the entire film is neither funny nor does he make a convincing hero. The "villian", Killdozer, was silly and, even if Killdozer had managed to kill the entire crew, so what? It would still be stuck, left to rust on that tiny little postage-stamp-sized island off the coast of Africa.Disappointingly dull and ultimately pointless.

Although I rated it rather low, I still actually liked the movie. A runaway Cat possessed by a rock from the sky. Nice plot line, eh? I was a heavy equipment mechanic for many years and know pretty much everything about bulldozers and how they operate. A diesel engine requires fuel and compression to run. While this dozer is running around killing people I always wondered why nobody just shot the fuel injection pump. It would literally stop in it's "tracks". "Shoot the injectors. It's helpless with out them!" (a take-off of a line by Professor Medford in the movie "THEM!") Maybe being possessed by the evil spirit of a rock from space, it didn't require fuel. I don't know. Still a good movie if you have nothing better to do...like stick your face in a fan. If I was channel-surfing and came across it, I would watch it again, though That's how sick I am..