Evolver

Just as teenaged Kyle Baxter (Ethan Randall) is about to land the top score on the Evolver virtual reality arcade game--and thus win a home version of the game's robot--an equally accomplished player, Jamie Saunders (Cassidy Rae), joins in and distracts Kyle so much that he loses. Kyle's friend Zach (Chance Quinn) convinces him to hack into the scoring computer to alter the numbers, and Kyle soon receives the Evolver robot, which engages players in progressively more difficult "war games" and can learn about and adapt to its surroundings. The early games are harmless, but when Kyle and Zach sneak the robot into school, it gets away from them and, unseen, kills bullying jock Dwight (Tim Griffin).

Kyle and Jamie, whom he has befriended, suspect Evolver might have been responsible; their suspicions are confirmed when it gravely injures Zach, and Kyle discovers that it is a modification of a discontinued war machine project. After he rescues his sister, Ali (Nicola Nassira), from the malevolent robot and disables it, Evolver's creator, Bennett (John De Lancie), arrives to take it away. But when he starts to work on it during the trip back to his lab, the robot crashes his van and heads back to Kyle's house, where it traps Ali and their mother, Melanie (Cindy Pickett), inside a laser grid. With Jamie's help, Kyle manages to outwit Evolver and blow it to pieces.

EVOLVER was written and directed by Mark Rosman, who made his film directing debut with the above-average slasher film THE HOUSE ON SORORITY ROW (1982). As in that film, he here tries to put a new spin on timeworn youth-horror standards; in HOUSE he applied touches of surrealism, while here he adopts elements of the recent computer-as-threat vogue in film plots. While EVOLVER is a better example as such than the likes of the previous year's ARCADE (which also featured John De Lancie), it doesn't transcend the subgenre either. For every intriguing idea or scene (such as Evolver getting in touch with its violent roots by watching TV news), there's a dumb, formulaic one, as when Kyle and Zach sneak the robot into school so that it can take pictures in the girls' locker room.

The Evolver itself is a well-realized creation, with fine mechanical effects by Steve Johnson, and Rosman orchestrates its mayhem with panache. The actors are appealing even if their characters are formula-bound, and the technical credits suggest a theatrical release (which it was originally intended to be) instead of the direct-to-video product it became. (Violence, nudity, profanity.) leave a comment