A new review at B-Movie Enema is KILLDOZING ITS WAY INTO YOUR COMPUTERS!

Hell yeah, brother! It’s time for this oddball made-for-television flick from 1974. Look out! It’s Killdozer! Killdozer was first released as a 1944 novella by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon wrote a ton of reviews (somewhere around 400, which means I have written more, so take that, Mr. Killdozer), along with a bunch of short stories, and about 11 novels. He even ghost-wrote an Ellery Queen mystery novel. Ellery Queen was someone my oldest brother would read when I was a kid.

Sturgeon also wrote a couple of very popular Star Trek episodes in the 60s. The first was “Shore Leave” which featured members of an away team seeing a bunch of crazy visions like characters from Alice in Wonderland and damsels in distress. The second was a VERY popular one, “Amok Time.” This introduced the Vulcan mating ritual, pon farr, and the first time the phrase “Live long and prosper” was uttered. It was also the first episode to feature the Vulcan hand salute. Some other scripts he wrote that went unproduced introduced the concept of the Prime Directive, the doctrine that Starfleet and the Federation operated by when visiting new worlds.

Thirty years after the release of the Killdozer novella, apparently, the whole idea was in the zeitgeist all over again. 1974 was the year the Killdozer TV movie we’re going to be talking about shortly got released, as well as an adaptation of the novella in the pages of Marvel Comics. Yeah, the anthology series Worlds Unknown was a sci-fi series that was part of a staggered relaunch of anthology comics the publisher was keen to publish, like the second volume of Journey into Mystery (the first turned into the ongoing Thor series), Chamber of Chills, and Supernatural Thrillers. Worlds Unknown adapted science fiction short stories for the first six issues before rounding out the eight-issue run with an adaptation of the 1974 film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Issue #6 featured “Killdozer,” written by Gerry Conway and penciled by Dick Ayers.

A month after that hit the spinner racks, the Killdozer TV movie aired on ABC. It was directed by Jerry London. London largely made TV movies, but did have a couple of notable movies in his filmography. He directed the incredibly popular 1980 miniseries Shōgun. He later made the Burt Reynolds/Liza Minnelli comedy thriller Rent-a-Cop, which I’m sure showed up on Siskel and Ebert’s worst of 1987 list because almost all of Reynolds’ movies during that time did.

Starring in the TV movie was Clint Walker, a fairly well-known TV cowboy, starring in the long-running series Cheyenne. During that time, though, he was also in a lot of big-time movies like Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and later The Dirty Dozen. While he lived for another 20 years, his final role was as one of the toy voices in 1998’s Small Soldiers. Another recognizable face in this is Robert Urich. He is largely known as Spencer for Hire in the 80s, but he was a fairly major TV star throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s before passing away at a young 55 years old from synovial sarcoma.

But let’s head over to Africa and bulldoze up some strange meteorite and create ourselves a KILLDOZER!

The movie opens with a bright flash in space, soon followed by a red aura that then spits out a meteorite that heads directly for a small island just off the coast of Africa. Much later, after the island’s natural terrain recovers, we see a construction crew working on the very same beach we saw the heavenly interloper strike. This is where we meet Lloyd Kelly, played by Clint Walker.

Kelly is the foreman for the construction crew. Among his crew is Beltran. He’s not able to start up a giant bulldozer for the next part of the job because the main driver of said bulldozer, Mack (Urich), is kind of goofing off with another member of the team, Dutch. Dutch wants to explore some of the local area because he’s a bit of a history nut. The island, and some of the buildings still standing, were in operation during World War II.

Honestly, I don’t think any of that actually means anything to the plot. It just adds some flavor to the characters we will be following once the bulldozer becomes a KILLDOZER. It especially sets up a contentious relationship between Kelly and Dutch as Dutch sees Kelly as a taskmaster and has less respect for him as some of the other workers on the crew, Mack included. Some more flavor to the characters is that Kelly himself is not perfect. He’s a recovering alcoholic. Again, not entirely sure what that’s going to do in the actual plot aside from having built-in tension between the crew, but he is, and that’s a fact of the movie.

Anyway, I bet kids would have loved this TV movie back in 1974. All kids, especially and maybe exclusively little boys, love big trucks of some sort. It doesn’t matter if the big truck is a gasoline tanker truck, or a big rig, or a construction vehicle; little boys love that shit. I think it has something to do with the immense size and perceived power behind these machines. You ever wonder why so many Tonka trucks sold back in the day? Little boys wanted to pretend to demolish shit. The king of the demolition machines was the bulldozer. And add a little outer space corruption to the mix to turn that thing into a KILLDOZER? Oh yeah, that would have been the good shit to an 8-year-old boy watching TV the night this was on.

While Mack was making his bulldozer smash some shit at the construction site, the truck comes into contact with that space rock. Mack isn’t able to dislodge the strange-looking rock from where it was wedged into the ground. Kelly tells the younger guy to stand aside, and he’ll show him how it’s done. Kelly rams the bulldozer into the rock, which was humming before this, and after getting hit, it begins glowing, adding even more mystery to the geological curiosity.

The rock glows even brighter and transfers that glow to the bulldozer itself. Mack is burned by the glow and collapses. The crew takes Mack to one of the tents while Dutch complains that Kelly was doing Mack’s job and maybe even got him seriously hurt. Kelly is at least trying to call for a doctor to come to their camp to look over the young worker. Either way, the crew is not exactly excited about Kelly.

Mack asks to talk to Kelly privately, but Dutch asks him why he wants to talk to their joker of a boss. After all, it’s Kelly’s fault that he’s in the condition he’s in. Eventually, the team does leave the tent to allow Mack to talk to Kelly and tell him about the mysterious blue glow that came from the rock when the bulldozer struck it. With another member of the crew, Carl, eavesdropping from outside the tent, Mack asks Kelly if he saw what he saw when the rock started to glow blue. Kelly denies seeing anything, which does make sense because he wouldn’t have been able to see over the machine even while sitting up in the cockpit of the bulldozer. Kelly simply believes Mack is delusional.

Mack says that the blue light “jumped” into the blade of the bulldozer before he finally succumbs to his injuries and dies.

After Mack died, Kelly inspects the bulldozer to try to figure out what Mack told him. When he turns on the machine, it does seem to take on a mind of its own. Kelly is unable to control the machine with the controls in the cockpit. He ultimately disables the villainous bulldozer, but not before it tries to kill him.

Elsewhere, Dutch and Beltran bury Mack. Dutch is understandably upset. Mack was his really good friend. In fact, he said that he introduced Mack to his wife. The final member of the crew, a guy who goes by Chub, tells Dutch he’d better reel it in. If he goes after Kelly, it won’t do much good, especially to the memory of Mack.

Before turning in for the night, the crew has a drink to the memory of Mack. It’s here that we find out that Kelly is on thin ice with the company for being an alcoholic. Dennis offers him a drink and swears no one will report him for it, which only creates more of a divide between Kelly and the rest of the crew, who already think he’s 1) got a stick up his ass and 2) is responsible for killing Mack. In his own tent, he asks Chub to check out the bulldozer the next morning. He doesn’t want to say it was doing shit on its own, only that he wants Chub to inspect the machine thoroughly.

Dennis has a smoke next to Killdozer, and it moves on its own, nearly dropping its blade onto him.

The next morning, Chub inspects Killdozer. Chub can’t really find anything wrong, except for what Kelly did to disable it as best he could the night before. There was one thing Chub did find that is strange. It emits a faint, high-pitched, quivering tone. Kelly and Chub agree it might not be anything, but regardless, he doesn’t want anyone operating the machine.

Dennis confronts Kelly about the “blue light” that Mack told him about the night before. Kelly just says Mack was out of his head. Yet, Dennis tells Kelly that he could have sworn the blade moved on its own.

Oh yeah, speaking of Killdozer, Beltran, not aware of the order for the machine not to be used, starts it up anyway. Chub tries to stop him, but Beltran isn’t able to hear him. The machine basically operates on its own and crushes the crew’s radio, which is their only real way to communicate with anyone else anywhere in the area.

Killdozer, with Beltran powerless to stop it, takes off on its own into the surrounding field of brush and small trees. Beltran jumps out of Killdozer only for the machine to turn around and chase him while Kelly rushes to save his worker. Beltran tries to hide in a metal pipe, but… well, it doesn’t get the name Killdozer for nothing. It runs over the pipe and crushes Beltran.

Now there are two shallow graves of construction workers on this island.

You know what? I’m a big fan of the Transformers. There’s a Constructicon character named Bonecrusher. He’s a bulldozer. When Bob Budiansky at Marvel Comics was coming up with names for characters, I wonder if he floated the name Killdozer for that one. Damn… If I had watched this back in October before going to TFCon in Chicago, I would have been able to ask the man himself.

Oh well, my life is full of missed opportunities and what-if scenarios.

Something that has repeated a couple of times now in the first half of this movie has been Kelly talking about how important it is that they get their work done on time. At the start of the movie, even before Mack got hurt, he said that they only had five days left to finish the work they were hired for. After Mack got killed, he radios to the company to say that they will still be on time, but also maybe actually send someone to Mack’s house to tell his mother that he’s passed away. He doesn’t want a crummy telegram to be sent to her. I do think that the movie is being deliberately conscious to show that Kelly is almost singularly focused on delivering for the company at the expense of the actual workers who are doing the work. There’s something here that could be played with, juxtaposing the boss or middle management and the actual people being managed or bossed around.

Whether or not it actually does anything worthwhile with that is unclear.

What I do know is that Killdozer is roaming the island unmanned and thirsty for blood. Dutch wants answers for what happened and why two of his coworkers are in shallow graves in the sand. He also doesn’t want to hear nuthin’ about some goofy science fiction yarn about a glowing blue rock possessing a bulldozer and making it want to kill people. That’s the sort of shit Marvel Comics would publish. Chub says that he saw the bulldozer crush the radio as it took off with Beltran in the cockpit. He must have bailed out. They saw the treads that clearly indicated he was flattened by the thing. Kelly just tells them they have an hour of daylight left and work that still needs to be done.

I mean… There’s also a Killdozer roaming the island, unmanned and thirsty for blood. Don’t we want to go get that thing under control? If for nothing else, I’m guessing that is a hell of an expensive piece of equipment that the company would probably want back… right? Nahhh… It’s probably okay.

Kelly finally tells Dennis that the bulldozer was operating itself when it killed Beltran. It was pivoting and turning and chasing the guy all on its own. He’s largely unconcerned about it now because it is surely out of fuel by now. They have a job to finish, and it’ll be up to the company engineers to figure out what happened. Dennis brings up how the blue light and its self-operation sure seem strange, but neither wants to believe there’s some supernatural reason for it.

While the rest of the crew sleeps, Dennis goes and watches Killdozer driving itself around and running things over, and being a general nuisance. He confronts Kelly about it. How could two guys hallucinate the same strange thing? He gives Kelly a piece of the meteorite and says something alien is happening here. It sounds crazy, but they are obviously up against something they haven’t seen before. When the two of them plan to level with Chub and Dutch, Killdozer arrives and basically destroys their camp. Now it seems all four of the workers have witnessed the machine operating itself with some precision and some intelligence.

Dutch believes Killdozer is being remote controlled. Machines just don’t operate on their own, right? There has to be someone else on this island with them. Kelly plans to move everyone to higher ground while they try to figure out how to stop Killdozer. While inspecting the top of the hill on the island, Kelly and Chub find Killdozer following them, slowly but surely. So Chub comes up with an idea…

They’ll ambush Killdozer. They’ll draw it up the hill, and since Chub’s truck can’t make the gradient up the hill, he’ll ram Killdozer into a fiery situation. While Dutch is correct that fire won’t stop steel, Dennis says it will destroy the electrical system and the rubber in the wires and engine. That should finally stop the thing, as it was how Kelly could stop it previously. Dennis has some concerns about how they are planning to go through with this scheme, but Kelly decides to go ahead and start setting everything up.

Unfortunately, Killdozer ambushes them. This leads to Chub being killed in his very own plan. Killdozer runs into his truck and causes it to explode. So we get another shot of the shallow graves on the shoreline. While Dennis covers Chub with sand, Killdozer watches from the top of a cliff. Dutch is astonished that the machine somehow figured out what they were going to do before they did it and ambushed them instead. They all flee when Killdozer pushes large rocks off the cliff toward them.

Dennis thinks they need to figure out a way to destroy the thing. They need to take the fight to Killdozer. Kelly thinks they should keep running because they can stay ahead of the thing. But every time they stop, Killdozer isn’t too far behind. After finding a decent place to stop and rest for the night, the next morning finds Dutch finally snapping. He takes off in the crew’s Jeep and says he plans on going swimming. Long before he can reach the shore, he runs right into Killdozer. When the Jeep won’t restart, he’s a sitting duck for the killer machine.

So that leaves just Dutch and Kelly. They plan to use the industrial shovel to fight back against the possessed bulldozer maquina y maquina. By the way, that is what Dennis’s job is on the crew, he’s the best shovel operator, so it’s like he was born for this fight. Dennis is able to position the shovel under Killdozer’s blade, but the shovel is soon disabled when it tries to get leverage to, I suppose, flip the bulldozer.

Kelly now agrees with Dutch. You can’t kill a machine. They have to figure out a way to kill the thing inside Killdozer that is operating it. They decide to use the generator to shoot a shitload of electricity into Killdozer. So Kelly lures Killdozer onto a metal grid they’ve laid down and connected to the generator. When Killdozer rolls over it, Dennis throws the switch. Whatever the force was that was controlling the machine emerges from the blade and eventually disappears.

And that’s it. Killdozer is killed. Dennis tries to figure out a way to create a way to convince the company that the guys died in a landslide. However, Kelly says they need to tell the truth no matter what. They’re just happy that they survived the scary experience.

This is a curious little movie. It’s from that wonderful time in television history in which the TV Movie of the Week was kind of an event. There were a lot of thrillers and horror movies that were released in this format. For the more serious dramas, those got miniseries. In one regard, this 75-minute thriller is fun because it’s a movie that takes itself very seriously, but it’s about some sort of alien force that possesses a bulldozer and decides the only thing it wants to do once it becomes sentient is to kill people. That’s kind of hilariously simple and the right kind of goofy for people like me.

On the other hand, this movie kinda sucks. Sure, it’s only 75 minutes long, but you still want a little more excitement or a quicker pace than this movie really gives itself. You get a lot of situations in which people come into contact with Killdozer, get killed, and the ever-dwindling cast then needs to go on the run to get away from Killdozer. The majority of the second half of the movie was just that. It might work as a short story and a comic book, right? As a movie, it is lacking.

As I mentioned earlier, there is some interpersonal drama going on here. Dennis clearly knows Kelly has a drinking problem and is on thin ice with the company. There’s a nihilism to Dennis too. He’s snarky and always says something that comes off as negative. Okay, you got something there. It works as an additional element to the animosity that Dutch has for Kelly. Dutch doesn’t take things as seriously, so he just sees Kelly as a bossy pants. It doesn’t help that he took over the bulldozer from Mack, which led to Mack eventually getting mortally wounded by the alien rock thing. So the first half of the movie does a great job of having this blue collar frustration operating as an undertone. There’s little to no reason to believe that Kelly didn’t push this group really hard for the last however many days before the movie even started.

So what starts as a fun idea of having people getting killed by an alien possessed literal Killdozer with an ever-growing intelligence turns into a kind of boring movie that never really lives up to some of the ideas it has already baked into the script. This is a bad movie, but a not-fun kind of bad movie. That’s a bummer. With a title like Killdozer, you should get wacky with this. It should be like that movie with the killer tire that just rolls around killing people. It doesn’t have to be as goofy as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but I think we deserve more silliness than what we got.

But if I want a lot of life to my really bad movies, holy shit, do I have the right movie to right this ship after two pretty dull stinkers. We gotta call the motherfuckin’ Village People to lift our spirits. Oh yes. Some people may ask why they had to get their own movie. Some people might ask if they had to get a movie, could it at least be timely to when they were in their peak? Well, the answer to both questions is “Abso-fucking-lutely not, bitches!” Come back next week for a review loooooong overdue here at B-Movie Enema when I finally try to make heads and tails (which sounds like the name of a bar you’d find some of the members of the group when they were forming) of Can’t Stop the Music.

Will it drive me to have an out-of-body experience to the point that I possess a bulldozer and go on a rampage? Find out for yourselves in seven days!