Mr. Levine is correct. It is indeed Demon Seed, the awkward rogue AI movie from 1977 in which an AI becomes concerned for the environment and decides to spawn a superbeing kid, so it takes over a computer controlled house to, uh, appropriate the housewife, played by Julie Christie. It’s not quite as icky as it sounds, but it’s still a really dumb movie. The rogue AI manifests itself as a giant bronze d20, which can unfold, origami-style, and then fold up and smush people caught inside. At the very least, Demon Seed answers the question, “What would happen if a Transformer was less careful about transforming while someone is driving it?”
The 60:60 is a crossfade to Julie Christie, who is in the process of being brainwashed by the rogue AI.
That’s a simulacrum Julie Christie in the 40:40, by the way. The rogue AI can make onscreen digital versions of people. The 80:80 is Fritz Weaver as the inventor of the rogue AI.
The rogue AI is voiced conspicuously by Robert Vaughn. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to give a movie computer a famous actor’s voice. Do you really want your rogue AI to sound like the Man from UNCLE?
Reminds me of Star Trek III. Our introduction to the villain of the piece, the Klingon captain, is his disembodied voice over a communicator. Unfortunately it was the voice of Christopher Lloyd, whose voice as Reverend Jim on Taxi was very well known at time. So the audience’s introduction to the villain was the voice of Reverend Jim. This produced a big unintended laugh in the theater where I saw it.
Oh, it’s absolutely Rosemary’s Baby, right down to the finale. The director was a wannabe auteur whose previous gig was the trippy Mick Jagger movie, Performance. I’m not sure his sensibility translated very well into sci-fi, but it’s at least interesting.
I found it worth watching because I remember it freaked me out as a kid. I love revisiting that stuff. But it’s no Hardware. It’s not even a Saturn 3.
Probably not. Shame, the script for Performance is incredibly literate and intriguing in the themes it explores. He probably had one Jorge Luis Borges joint in him and that was that.
