Killdozer (1974)

Killdozer (1974)

Dir. Jerry London

On a remote beach near the coast of Africa six men clear a site in preparation for an airstrip build, but then cheapo FX = "funny looking rock" = Killdozer!

It's so damned stupid. The machine's top speed is, I don't know, about 12 kmph? A lame duck could outrun it, but still it manages to catch up to, and mow over, some manly men. It bides its time until the men are off guard. It then thunders trundles into the camp, belching black smoke as it goes, kills and retreats to hide in the grass. It's over twenty feet long, bright yellow and it hides in tall grass! Jebus!

Nevertheless, amazingly, it's not as bad as the name implies and I was genuinely entertained by it all. The characters are stock types, like a poor man's disaster movie, but the acting is better than a lot of the crap horror films that I've turned off in my time.

It's based on a short story by Theodore Sturgeon, the writer of Star Trek TOS's Amok Time (1967) episode, and the man whom Kurt Vonnegut turned into the fictional Kilgore Trout. I'm not joking when I say that I'd rather watch Killdozer again than anything James Cameron or Ridley Scott have shat out in the last two decades.

Wikipedia reports that the film got a comic book adaptation in Marvel's Worlds Unknown #6. Their film-to-comic adaptations are usually pretty awful, but I'd love to read it, nevertheless.