Automatic (1995)

Some time in a weird-ish near future that features roombas which use a moray eel technique, silver-faced butler robots, and the J Series Automatics, combined servant/bodyguard androids who for some horrifying reason we are never made privy to all look like Olivier Gruner. I’d rather prefer flying cars, thank you very much.

Nora (Daphne Ashbrook) is working for the company making the J series as something like an executive assistant. When her direct superior attempts to rape her – all men who aren’t androids are pretty rapey in this one – she is rescued by one of the J’s, J269. Alas for him and Nora, he accidentally kills the rapist while kicking him in the face. When he hears of the incident, Goddard Marx (John Glover) the company’s boss, decides it would be a catastrophe for the image of his already ailing company (the film never explains why the company making ubiquitous Grunerdroids is ailing, though I suspect it’s the lack of face variety), and does the logical thing: contain Nora and J in the otherwise empty (it’s night) company building and hire the band of – also rapey – mercenaries of one Major West to murder them, too.

It turns out that J’s rather great at murdering mercenaries right back, though.

John Murlowski’s Automatic is a surprisingly fun piece of 90s action SF, making rather a lot of good decisions. Not necessarily the kind of decisions that make for a deep and thoughtful little movie, but certainly the sort that makes for a fun direct to home video action movie.

It starts with the traditional method of getting away with a martial artist/actor lead who has little talent for the second half of his job description by letting him play a character whose woodenness is actually kind of the point, avoiding the need to have him emote above his abilities and focus on what he does well. Which is mostly looking good when kicking, though clever staging and dark lighting does manage to make Gruner, who may be a great martial artist for all I know, but certainly is a mediocre screen fighter at best, look perfectly believable and effective in the film’s series of not at all Die Hard inspired action sequences.

Ashbrook is the Carl Weathers to Gruner’s low budget Schwarzenegger, the low-profile but effective pro who goes out of her way to make Gruner’s performance more relatable, while also being allowed to do slightly more than the female damsel in this sort of thing usually is. The rest of the cast is involved in various kinds of scenery chewing, Glover never having met a script with a corporate asshole he couldn’t milk for fun, Kober making all kinds of nasty faces at everyone, and everyone else reacting in kind to all this.


Because low budget action movies not made in Hong Kong never can afford quite as much action as they need to fill their runtime, there’s not just the need for bad guy scenery chewing and a plot twist that screams “I have read Philip K. Dick!” but also weird and wild little ideas to keep an audience away from boredom. Those, Murlowski (and the script by Patrick Highsmith and Susan Lambert) has down pat, filling Automatic with all kinds of goofy, silly, wild and woolly little bits of worldbuilding that suggest something has gone very wrong with this world, like the jump scare roomba that would kill people with weak hearts en masse, ideas like a company that can build androids but only uses one face and body type, and so much bizarre day to day technology, like the little automatic thingies on desks that do things like pop up a full cup of tea in a couple of seconds, or lower the photo of rape company man’s family when he goes about his nasty business. It’s all very tongue in cheek but in such a friendly and companionable way I felt charmed by it rather than annoyed.