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TCM Morning & Afternoon Movies: ‘Robots’
TCM, beginning at 7:15 a.m.
This morning and afternoon’s lineup of films on Turner Classic Movies stars some of the most famous robots (or other types of sentient machines) in cinema history.
The day begins with Stanley Kubrick’s legendary 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Among its many iconic elements, the production introduces the HAL 9000 computer (memorably voiced with an almost sinister calmness by Douglas Rain), which runs the functions aboard a spacecraft headed toward Jupiter. Unfortunately, HAL ends up going a bit mad and nearly succeeds in his effort to kill all members of the crew. A somewhat kinder HAL makes a return in today’s next film, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the 1984 sequel to 2001 starring Roy Scheider, John Lithgow and Helen Mirren. Next up are two films featuring one of Hollywood’s most famous mechanical men: Robby the Robot. Check him out in his first and second movie appearances, Forbidden Planet (pictured) (1956) and The Invisible Boy (1957). After those is The Terminal Man, a 1974 adaptation of Michael Crichton’s
1972 novel starring George Segal as an epileptic computer scientist who agrees to an experimental surgical procedure to implant electrodes in his brain and control his seizures with an electrical impulse. Unfortunately, this fusion of man and computer leads to a deepening psychosis. Finally, Wes Craven’s 1986 sci-fi/horror film Deadly Friend is about a similar experiment that goes just as badly as the
one in Terminal Man. When a teen computer prodigy (Matthew Laborteaux) implants a robot’s hard drive into the brain of his teenage neighbor (Kristy Swanson), who has been pronounced brain dead, she recovers but soon begins a killing spree in their neighborhood. —