Top 10 bad robots: From Proteus IV to the Spider-bot
If in doubt, do not recharge
Soon robots will be everywhere.
They will be driving our buses, making our cups of coffee and tying our shoelaces. Or will they?
Surely, as history and film has told us, they will all turn out bad and turn on us, their meaty creators. With this in mind, V3 presents its 10 baddest robots.
10) Maximilian: The Black Hole
Disney's The Black Hole was the mouse firm's answer to George Lucas' Star Wars, and while its good robot was perhaps too good, its bad robot was evil incarnate.
Maximilian, second in command on the Cygnus ship that our heroes encounter, is the film's Darth Vader. He is a hulking brooding beast with a thin red slit for an eye. His presence is full of menace and his intentions are bad.
The large red robot is a bastard right up to the end, a bizarre sequence in which he merges with the ship's commander, Dr Hans Reinhardt and heads, we think, to Hell.
9) Hector: Saturn 3
It should be safe to assume that a robot made as part of what is referred to as a "Demigod Series" would be treated with much caution.
Hector, from a script by Martin Amis, is the unlikely-named robot in Saturn 5, the star-stuffed robot space drama from the very early 80s.
It might look a bit clunky now, and its demo, where we get to see it playing chess, belies a really nasty piece of work.
Sharing a brain, and a fascination with Farrah Fawcett, with Harvey Keitel's Captain Benson he shuffles around the ship murdering people until ultimately he is destroyed.
Top 10 bad robots: From Proteus IV to the Spider-bot
If in doubt, do not recharge
8) Proteus IV: Demon Seed
While not strictly a robot, Proteus IV makes the most of his surroundings and does make a break from the confines of his computer and into the physical world.
A strange beast, he falls in love with Julie Christie during the course of Douglas Cammell's 1977 film Demon Seed, keeps her prisoner, and, um, impregnates her. It's a strange proposition. A bit like if the bad guy in Tron grew genitals and got a lot nastier.
Proteus IV is supposed to be helpful around the home, but when he realises his time is up he turns up the heat on Christie and kills her husband.
Ultimately a robot baby is birthed, but then the metal casing falls off and a real baby is revealed. It's one of those endings that sticks with you.
7) IT-O Interrogator: Star Wars
The IT-O Interrogator is like a baby Death Star, but it definitely is not cute.
It appears early on in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and is waved in the direction of Princess Leia.
It may be the Swiss Army knife of spherical instruments of torture and it appears that its prongs can be swapped out for even more malicious implements.
Spikey and prongy and bearing hypodermics, we can only imagine what methods it uses to interrogate people, but whatever they are we suspect that they are painful.
It doesn't work on Leia, of course, but then the Force is strong with her. Or something. This is one large black ball that we don't want to bump into down a dark alley.
Top 10 bad robots: From Proteus IV to the Spider-bot
If in doubt, do not recharge
6) Spider-bot: Runaway
You may only know Tom Selleck for his role in Magnum PI. To that we say, "For Shame".
Selleck and his moustache are the stars of sentient robot bastards movie Runaway, which features the creepy and crawly Spider-bot.
Spider-bots, though small, would gang up on people and perform all sorts of nasty things on their bodies. During the film we see them spike, slash and explode. You would not want to share a sleeping bag with one.
Runaway was directed by Michael Crichton in 1984. It had big stars, was expensive, and one big problem. It came out at the same time as The Terminator.
5) The various Terminators: The Terminator movies
Speaking of Da Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger's, compelling cyborg on a murder mission, we can't talk about evil machines without dwelling on at least one of the T for Terminator series.
It's hard to choose the baddest. Arnie's Terminator in the first film is very scary, but he's Mary Poppins by the second film. Meanwhile the new T series, seen in T2 and T3 continue to evolve and get badder, scarier and better looking.
If we had to fight any of them to death in a large industrial factory we'd pick Schwarzenegger's. But not after trying to run off in the opposite direction first.
Top 10 bad robots: From Proteus IV to the Spider-bot
If in doubt, do not recharge
4) Box: Logan's Run
Logan's Run is that film that twenty-somethings start talking about when they approach the big 30.
Although it appears that the people in the story have an idyllic lifestyle the opposite is true, and at the age of 30 they are sent into the wilds to become human chow.
It is Box, the robot that lives in a cave, that acts as the intermediary between people walking around, and people being in cans of food, and it is him that Logan meets during his run.
He meets his end in his cave surrounded by the people statues that he had made from Runners. Still, it’s hard to have any sympathy for what is essentially a hunting killer refrigerator.
3) The Gunslinger: Westworld
Yul Brynner's the Gunslinger is a dead-eyed murder of a man, we mean robot, and his presence in the fantasy Disneyland for people with too much money, Westworld, is an ominous one.
His is the second robot we meet from the Michael Crichton stable, and he never seems friendly. He's not supposed to be, but as an old-style cantankerous gunslinger, the robot takes his role a bit too far and winds up wanting to shoot people dead.
The Gunslinger is despatched with acid and fire. Two things that you would assume would be hard to come by in an amusement park.
Top 10 bad robots: From Proteus IV to the Spider-bot
If in doubt, do not recharge
2) Ed-209: Robocop
It seems a little unfair to include Ed-209 in this. He was born bad and there isn't much he can do about it.
A great big lumbering clumsy oaf with a stair issue, he first appears in Robocop as a means of mincing a man with bullets.
In the film it appears he is just unreasonable, unloading more than a few bullets into the businessman. But in the novel he might be mistaken in his victim's objectives, and may not have heard the gun being dropped. Whatever. You don't turn a man into bolognese and earn a place in robot heaven. No, you wind up straight in the bad robot pile.
1) Bad Robot: JJ Abrams
We couldn't make this list without nodding in the direction of Bad Robot, the production company behind mind-bending, goes-nowhere show Lost, big bad monster movie Cloverfield, and the Star Trek reboots.
Although Lost lost most of us during successive seasons, its dust cloud, polar bears, strange noises and mysterious events certainly wiled away the time, and the Star Trek films have appealed to fans of that series old and new.
Abrams is also associated with likely robot fest the next Star Wars movie. We'll bend the rules for this bad robot.