Line #3 Film/DeathMachine


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/death_machine.jpg]]
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3	A 1994 low budget SciFiHorror film by the director of ''Film/{{Blade\|1998}}'' and ''Film/TheLeagueOfExtraordinaryGentlemen'', Stephen Norrington, who also worked on special effects for ''Film/{{Aliens}}'' and ''Film/SplitSecond1992''.
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5	The film concerns a near-future {{Mega Corp}} known as CHAANK Industries, which deals primarily with weapons. At the center of the story is a conflict between the new Chief executive Hayden Cale (played by Ely Pouget) and the resident genius mad scientist Jack Dante (Creator/BradDourif), with a group of pacifist humanitarian eco-warriors and other executives thrown into the mix. Then there is the titular death machine which closely resembles what a terminator based on Alien queen anatomy would look like. There are also child experiments, brain-wiped combat vets and combat exoskeletons all for good measure. Finally, the story itself plays out in the office of the corporation - a 50-something story skyscraper, providing a fittingly claustrophobic backdrop.
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7	In a nutshell, what you would get if you take ''Film/DieHard'', add some ''Film/{{RoboCop\|1987}}'' and ''[[Film/TheTerminator Terminator]]'', throw in a dash of ''Film/{{Alien}}'', and mix it with some Creator/SamRaimi-style humor on a low budget but with an eye for style.
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9	Not to be confused with the 1976 martial arts flick ''Film/DeathMachines''.
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13	!!This film provides examples of:
14	* ActionGirl: Cale. The only other major female character in the whole film is her secretary, and she disappears by the middle of the first act.
15	* ActionSurvivor: Cale, again. Just an executive with jack in weapons knowledge, just spraying and praying and succeeding in fending off the Warbeast.
16	* AttemptedRape: Dante wishes nothing more than to get in Cale's panties by any means necessary. Cale fights him off repeatedly, including nailing his hand to a shelf with his own knife.
17	* AwesomenessByAnalysis: In a comedic fashion. When death machine confronts two heavily armed protagonists ready to open fire on it, from its POV it assesses their threat level as being "00:000%" Once they start firing it promptly begins to reassess.
18	* {{BFG}}: And how! Huge machine guns designed for the Hardman project, carrying an obscene amount of ammunition, but with no apparent way to reload so they have to be discarded as they run dry.
19	* BigLabyrinthineBuilding: CHAANK Headquarters.
20	* BunnyEarsLawyer: Jack Dante is one of the most horrifying man-children ever put on screen, but he's so good at creating the kind of weapons CHAANK wants that the more amoral executives try to tolerate him. The deconstruction lies in that by the point the movie starts he's screwed up a bit too much for his projects to still be considered practical. However, he's so unstable that everyone’s afraid to fire him. This leaves Cale (the OnlySaneEmployee) to make the call to bite the bullet and confront him, learning the hard way why nobody else had the guts to do so.
21	* BottomlessMagazines: The guns seemingly go on shooting for minutes at a time.
22	* CharacterDevelopment: Hayden Cale gets to confront her own guilt over her past, but only in the UK DVD cut.
23	* ClusterFBomb: Pretty much everyone swears at one point or another, but Scott Ridley loves this trope.
24	* CombatPragmatist: As an inexperienced fighter, Cale isn’t particularly concerned with the aesthetics of a fight as long as it gets her out of danger. In her fight with Dante, she is shown going for both his eyes and groin in an attempt to get him off her.
25	* CoolButInefficient: The titular Death Machine, aka Frontline Morale Destroyer aka Warbeast - scary looking bipedal robot with ''Alien''-esque spin-capable head and huge claws, designed to track by fear pheromones. Supposedly would be helpful in scaring the bejesus out of the troops on the front line. Either by way of being a prototype or simply bad design it has exposed hydraulic lines all over it, and can only track you if you are scared in the first place.
26	* CorruptCorporateExecutive: Everyone at CHAANK. Except for Hayden Cale, obviously.
27	* CyberPunk: Evil Mega-Corporations, secret weapons projects, killer robots, the heroes are (in one way or another) trying to uncover the truth, a dark and stormy night. Yeah, fits all right.
28	* DarkAndTroubledPast: [[AccidentalChildKillerBackstory There is more to Cale than meets the eye]], which Dante uses to try to convince her to give into his demands. Similarly, his drive to pursue Cale in the first place is shaped by his own upbringing as an orphan.
29	* DeadlyClosingCredits: In the last thirty seconds before cutting to the closing credits, Jack Dante is enclosed in an inescapable vault to be either torn to pieces by his Warbeast or blown up by the bomb he impulsively activated.
30	* DeathFromAbove: A minor character gets crushed when the Death Machine decided to jump down from the top of the building.
31	* {{Determinator}}: Cale, Dante, and Yutani all seem to have an inability to quit in the face of impossible odds, although Dante is so partially because he’s delusional. Getting impaled through the leg, cutting out their own biomedical implant, getting shot in the shoulder, shot in the knee, stabbed through the hand, and just getting beaten up in general hardly slows anyone down though they are clearly in pain.
32	* TheDogBitesBack: When Dante is trapped in the containment vault with an active bomb, the Warbeast he’s been terrorizing his coworkers with the whole movie, and [[TheKidWithTheRemoteControl no warbeast remote]], it is [[AloneWithThePsycho implied he died]].
33	* DoubleEntendre: Jack Dante loves these: "I showed him my thing... and it killed him." And let’s not forget how much he wants to “interface” with Cale.
34	* DramaticThunder: The weather during film's main events.
35	* ElevatorActionSequence: Using an external maintenance elevator, Warbeast trying to get in, and desperately shooting the ropes to get the hell away ASAP.
36	* EveryoneHasStandards: Cale's drive to fire Dante (and subsequent CharacterDevelopment in the extended version) stems from her inability to condone the horrors CHAANK has been diving into, even though she was previously an obedient corporate drone.
37	* EverythingsBetterWithSamurai: Yutani, the stoic who has a Japanese flag motif tattooed into his face and carved into his hair, quotes one of the founders of Buddhism, and generally has Asian-influenced mannerisms.
38	* EvilTowerOfOminousness: The CHAANK headquarters building.
39	* ExtendedDisarming: Dante wears a black leather trench coat that conceals 8 handguns, a few knifes, brass knuckles, nunchaku, throwing stars... and a rubber chicken for good measure.
40	* FiveSecondForeshadowing: An executive that Cale replaces has met a grizzly death from a Great white shark attack, according to the autopsy... inside the corporate headquarters. And his body had synthetic lubricant on it.
41	* FreudianExcuse: Invoked by Cale, who speculates that Dante's insanity comes from being orphaned as a child.
42	* GoodIsBoring: Dante's outlook on things. "Entropy. You know? Order into chaos. Certainty into instability, growth into decay. Sometimes I just like to pile up my bricks so that I can just knock 'em down again, and that's the good bit." (picks up a pencil) "Look, this is order. Straight, true." (snaps pencil in half) "Wouldn't you think that's more interesting?"
43	* HandCannon: Combined with MoreDakka and BottomlessMagazines-One of the Hardman guns that fires explosive rounds. It is even painted in black and yellow OSHA stripe!
44	* IHaveYouNowMyPretty: Dante spends most of the film trying to achieve this with Cale. When he finally does, it doesn’t go as well as he’d planned.
45	* MadeOfIndestructium: The titular warbeast that can survive missiles, explosives, and jumping some 70 stories onto a dude and hard asphalt and the final containment vault which is said to be nuke proof.
46	* MadScientist: Jack Dante. A sex-obsessed stalker with a creepy crush on his company's (female) executive, tasked with creating war robots in his "vault", walls of which are plastered with pornography, action toys and monitors playing violent cartoons.
47	* MegaCorp: CHAANK, of the CyberPunk "absurdly inhumane" type.
48	* MechanicalMonster: Warbeast. Skeletal Alien-esque abomination with huge teeth in permanent chomping mode, equally huge arms with WolverineClaws, [[MadeOfIndestructium ludicrous durability]], fear tracking and comically small feet.
49	* MoreDakka: Protagonists really let loose with that one when they get their hands on some weaponry not loaded with blanks.
50	* MurderersAreRapists: Jack Dante has committed sexual assault at least once by the events of the movie. His on-screen behavior towards Cale shows just how much of a sex-and-violence-junkie he is.
51	* NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast: The Warbeast is classified as a '''Frontline Morale Destroyer'''. That description ''alone'' could destroy morale.
52	* OurWeaponsWillBeBoxyInTheFuture: The Hardman project guns look like they were designed by a comic book artist of TheNineties, huge, with ''warning OHSA striping'' all over, no sights, absurd ammo capacity but no visible magazine wells and a demented firing rate.
53	* PoliceAreUseless: ...........Merciful God, '''yes'''. Remember that scene from that one ''Film/DieHard'' movie where John [=McClane=]'s call is dismissed for no reason at all? Yeah, that happens. Not only that, but seemingly right after that useless desk sergeant (Who does some RecklessGunUsage with a Colt Python) dismissed Raimi, another police officer shows up and begins threatening Raimi and Cale, apropos of nothing, and shoots Cale in the leg. Also apropos of nothing. ...What. The police also somehow deduced the guy who was murdered inside a building died from ''shark attack''.
54	* PoweredArmor: A surprisingly realistic depiction, with an exoskeleton very similar looking to current prototypes such as HULC, although with addition of vision system that doubles as Cool Shades.
55	* ProductPlacement: The film was co-produced by the JVC Victor Corporation, and all of the TV monitors and camcorders appearing in it are JVC products.
56	* PsychopathicManchild: Dante, played by Brad Dourif [[{{Typecasting}} doing what he does best]].
57	* PsychoPrototype: The film opens with a roadside diner that looks like it's in a middle of a warzone, with everybody around and inside of it killed by a runaway Hardman. Comments by the recovery team indicate that it is a rather common occurrence with this project.
58	* RoboCam: Warbeast's POV, that also uses arcade game sound effects, directional arrows and big flashing messages for currently performed actions.
59	* RoboSpeak: A subversion. One of the eco-warriors donning a powered exoskeleton after a complimentary combat brain-wipe starts violently yelling out every word in a rigid drill sergeant-like tone, but coupled with Franchise/RoboCop-like manner to move.
60	* SealedEvilInACan: Dante's deadly invention becomes temporarily out of his reach when Cale terminates his employment and seals the "vault" housing the Mechanical Monster.
61	* ShakyPOVCam: The Warbeast's RoboCam looks like a demented music video.
62	* ShoutOut: Numerous and obvious, such as [[ShoutOutThemeNaming character names]] ([[Creator/JoeDante Jack Dante]], [[Creator/RidleyScott Scott Ridley]], Creator/JohnCarpenter, Creator/SamRaimi, [[Franchise/{{Alien}} Weyland, Yutani]]) and direct quotes such as Raimi's [[Franchise/{{Terminator}} "I'll be back"]] complete with Austrian accent, that leaves the other characters baffled. Also before opening fire on the Warbeast when they encounter it on the rooftop, Yutani growls out "[[Franchise/StreetFighter Shoryuken]]!"
63	* StalkerWithACrush: Jack Dante crushes on Cale, which manifests in his turning up uninvited in her office and doing a deep dive into whatever pieces of her life history he can find. She ''starts'' grossed out and becomes much more horrified as she learns just how far he’s willing to invade her personal information.
64	* SuperPersistentMissile: Seeking missile, that found its target through a virtual rat maze of a utility hallway, having to make 90-degree turns along the way, all in Raimi Vision.
65	* SuperSoldier: The Hardman project. Unfortunately, it's AwesomeButImpractical and has an unpleasant tendency to drive the recipients insane.
66	* TechnoBabble: "a quad matrix of googol-plactic memory co-processors"
67	* TheJuggernaut: Warbeast. Almost completely impervious to gunfire, falling from absurd heights and explosions.
68	* ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill: In attempt to slow down the impending doom protagonists decide to trigger the fire alarm and close the blast doors all over the building. Anybody got a light? "Not me... But I do have a thermic detonator". Dante also seems to get quite the kick out of people being ripped to shreds by his robot.
69	* TooKinkyToTorture: When Hayden Cale points a gun at Jack Dante, not only isn't he afraid, but he's aroused and says so.
70	* UncomfortableElevatorMoment: Involving Yutani stoically ripping off his own underwear via atomic wedgie to give Cale something to patch his wounds with.
71	* UnusualEuphemism: "[[DonutMessWithACop Holy donuts!]]", says the useless cop as he sees he will be crushed by several tons worth of psychotic robot. Also LameLastWords.
72	* WearingAFlagOnYourHead: Yutani has a Japanese flag ''tattooed on his face''.

Context Film / DeathMachine