"Screamers," an enjoyably crummy adaptation loosely based on a Dick short story called "Second Variety," features a number of the author’s concerns including the unpredictability of artificial intelligence, the threat of nuclear devastation, and the nature of reality, but it’s housed inside of a crummy grade-Z sci-fi snoozer.
A war between a collection of miners and a united conglomerate results in a planet being blasted into oblivion and a race of "screamers" (intelligent, bloodthirsty robots that start out looking like killer Quidditch balls) evolving at an unprecedented rate. For such a threadbare production, the plot is unnecessarily convoluted and the screenplay, written by "Alien" scribe Dan O’Bannon around the same time he penned "Total Recall," had been stuck in development so long that it finally started to curdle. (It probably didn’t help that it was rewritten without his say long after the fact.)
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