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.
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.