Killdozer

(1974) **

When JPX posted his review of Killdozer last year, I was so jealous that he thought of that before I did that I ran right out to my awesome obscure video store Eddie Brandt's and snagged it. They had it on dvd, but it's a weird dvd; the old Sci-Fi channel logo is stuck in the corner of the screen and when I tried to take screenshots they came out horribly squished. Some guy on a different blog griped about the SF logo on the dvd he bought in the store, so I guess it's just plain store-bought weird.

The reason I was so hot to see Killdozer is that I saw an ad for it way back when I was a kid. Maybe this was back in 1974 or maybe they rebroadcast it, but the closing image of the spot never left me, although I would learn that I misremembered it to an almost violent degree. As I recalled, it was a man sitting in the driver's seat of some regular, non-killing construction equipment, while behind him loomed the colossal bulk of Killdozer, completely filling the frame and clearly much larger beyond it. It was an impossibly-sized orange machine, like those that feature regularly in Thunderbirds, or like one of those huge bastards in the background of Avatar:


Clearly, Killdozer lived up to its awesome name.

The closest image I could find to match my impression was this:


I don't know what this image is promoting, but that is the mechanical monster that's flitted on the peripheries of my monster-machine dreams. Huge, science-fictiony, and out to get you. While I was looking for a picture that spoke to those dreams, I found the original scary take on the idea:


And here's the inevitable Marvel Comics version, in which Killdozer actually talks:


It's important to note that in both the previous pictures, Killdozer is shown to be most effective it its victims are already lying down. The real kicker of Killdozer is, of course, the true nature of the beast:


Yes, it's a bulldozer. Apparently my young brain added a lot of gloss to the terrifying final image of the ad: it's not colossally huge, it's not science-fictiony, hell, it isn't even goddamn orange. To be fair, it is the large-sized model of available bulldozer; the guys in the movie also have a regular-sized bulldozer, so you can see that Killdozer is a good... oh, 45% bigger. Way to go.

This is hilarious for two reasons: One, it's not really all that big. Two, it's pretty damn big -- as in heavy, as in slow, as in totally able to be evaded by briskly walking away. In one scene, a guy on foot parries around in front of Killdozer, trying to escape from its lethal sphere of influence. This scene is depicted almost entirely with closeups, because even the most casual glance reveals the utterly easy gettawayability. There's one long shot, apparently deemed "still scary" because the guy stumbles, and it completely gives the game away. In addition to the beleaguered editors, it's fun to watch the cast try to talk up the (cough cough) deadly threat they're up against. At one point they put together a daring plan and hop in their non-evil vehicles and tear away... but then the music swells and the camera swings over to Killdozer hiding behind some grass watching them. Yes, somehow a smoke-spewing machine that sounds like eight Harleys snuck up on them.

JPX brilliantly included the following clip in his review. Killdozer is bizarrely exactly like this.


The other delightful aspect of this seventies TV movie is the thick, syrupy, adorable/hateful man drama. Killdozer is padded out with stoic, squinty dialogue delivered with no irony whatsoever and with musical accompaniment applied in the manner of pancake makeup.

As in Yog, Monster from Space, the real villain in Killdozer is a malevolent alien intelligence in the form of blue light, possessing and making monsters of Earth's innocent crabs, squids and bulldozers. When it transfers from the meteorite it arrived in into the hapless bulldozer, the resulting flare badly burns one of our characters, and thus begins the man drama. While the boss and the doctor-ish guy seriouly discuss Is He Gonna Make It, the other three guys in the cast get in a heated discussion about why the boss was driving the bulldozer at that moment and not the burned guy (because union rule violations make for great horror). Later we hear much wheedling about how the boss is a recovered alcoholic and how this will look on his record, and the guy in the wife-beater get tediously maudlin about the good times he's had with the burned guy on other construction jobs on remote islands. Particularly he mentions the great times they had swimming (like, a lot), crescendoing in a boozily impulsive decision to go swimming right this very second -- and then I get the image that I'd clung to all these years:


But don't worry, clearly that wouldn't be a threat unless you sat there in the Jeep for two whole minutes, needlessly paralyzed by the unsurprising appearance of the killdozer that's been occupying all of your and your buddies' attention for the last 48 hours, waiting while it heaves and clanks towards you and kills you.

Despite its undisputably awesome name, Killdozer is not good. Not good at all. But the time you have watching it, that will very possibly be good. Perhaps very good.