Evolver

Plot synopsis:
Teenage computer whiz Kyle Baxter (Ethan Randall) participates in a virtual reality version of laser tag and is about to win a nationwide tournament, only to be disrupted by another player, a girl named Jamie. Despite his loss, he hacks into the company's system to make himself the winner of the prize: "Evolver" (voiced by William H. Macy), a robotic opponent armed with a compressed air gun, to compete against in a real-world version of laser tag. Whenever Evolver is defeated, he "evolves", becomes smarter, quicker and harder to beat (to simulate rising game difficulty). Kyle, his friend Zach, Jamie and his sister, Ali begin playing with Evolver, and easily pass the first level. As Evolver evolves, he develops a human-like competitiveness and obsession with winning. He replaces his "ineffective" default ammo - soft foam balls - with ball bearings from Kyle's room.
After learning Evolver has recording capabilities, Kyle and Zach send Evolver into the girls locker room at their school. Discovering the robot, the girls push Evolver into the boys locker room. He switches to game mode and enters the boys locker room and sees the only occupant - Dwight, a bullying jock - and makes Dwight another opponent. Dwight throws Evolver against a wall, to which the robot reacts by shooting out one of Dwight's eyes and knocking him down a flight of stairs, killing him.
After getting home, Evolver continues to absorb negativity from his surroundings, for example swearing and hostage-taking from TV. Evolver is defeated again in the second game and "evolves" up to the third round. Zach, wanting to get the disc recording Evolver's adventures in the locker room, takes Evolver to his house and tries to manually remove the disc. Evolver turns on after the disc is removed and begins to attack Zach. Trapping him in his garage, Evolver chases after Zach with a saw blade and ultimately crushes him while Zach hides under a car (raised on a jack). While making his way back to Kyle's house, Evolver wanders into an arcade where two marijuana smoking teens are playing the Evolver virtual game. He electrocutes and kills them both.
Kyle comes to see Zach being loaded into an ambulance. Worried about Evolver's increasing lethality, Kyle looks through its programming and sees a program titled S.W.O.R.D. (acronym for Strategic War-Oriented Robotic Device). He goes to Cybertronix, the company that built Evolver and the virtual reality game, and the creator, Russell Bennett (John de Lancie), promises to look through the disc Evolver recorded. The disc shows Evolver killing Dwight and the danger becomes clear to Bennett. Meanwhile, Kyle and Jamie sneak into a lab at Cybertronix. Looking into Evolver's past, they learn that he was originally meant to be an AI military robot designed to infiltrate enemy encampments, adapt to the situation and eliminate targets, but the project was terminated.
At home, Ali puts back in Evolver's battery (which was removed by Kyle after learning of Zach's accident) and starts playing with him alone. Evolver loads steak knives into his shooting arm and chases Ali into the backyard swimming pool, attempting to electrocute her while she is trapped. Kyle and Jamie return home and save Ali and Kyle defeats Evolver, only to kick him into the pool, shorting him out. Bennett and two other Cybertronix employees come to Kyle's house and take Evolver back to be dismantled. On the way though, Evolver kills Bennett and the Cybertronix technicians and escapes. He evolves one last time for the final level, charges up at a nearby power plant, and heads back to Kyle's house for one last battle.
Evolver takes Kyle's mother and sister hostage, trapping them inside of a Laser-crafted Cage using a laser-gun, a kaleidoscope, and a super-charged battery. Seeing the wrecked Cybertronix van, Kyle and Jamie return home to find Evolver, now armed with a destructive new laser gun. Evolver plans to execute his hostages if Kyle does not win within 3 minutes. Kyle places a metal pan on his chest, confronts Evolver and feigns death when he is shot by Evolver. Jamie distracts Evolver and Kyle shoots it in the remaining targeting sensor. Defeated, Evolver becomes extremely confused and malfunctions allowing Kyle to beat Evolver with a baseball bat until it shuts down.
After Kyle frees his mother and sister, Evolver re-activates again, now armed with only its arm and brute strength. As he prepares to kill Kyle to avoid losing, Kyle grabs the laser gun with the super-charged battery and shoots Evolver until it explodes. The family and Jamie go to the hospital as Cybertronix's CEO faces the press. The camera pans over to Ali's bedroom, to show Evolver's remains and a single glowing eye. The last scene shows Evolver's HUD screen reading out "KILL NOT CONFIRMED" before fading to static and blacking out.

Tags: murder

Review:
Although Predictable and Forgettable, Evolver Entertains.
Kyle Baxter (Ethan Randall) is a teenager who plays very well a video game called `Evolver'.
This game was developed by Dr. Russell Bennett (John de Lancie).
He wins a competition of Evolver where the prize was a robot similar to the game.
What nobody knows is that Evolver indeed is a war machine with artificial intelligence.
Therefore, the friends of Kyle are playing against a dangerous weapon.
Although being a very predictable and forgettable movie, Evolver really entertains.
It has some good special effects and a reasonable thriller.
My vote is five..
Excellent teen movie.
First I'd like to point that I don't consider this a sci-fi movie and therefore I won't judge it like sci-fi.
This is more like a teen movie with a slight cyber twist.
A distant reminder or titles like "War Games" (more sci-fi) and "Hackers" (more teen and harder to swallow for me as a IT professional).
The plot is based on an idea similar to "War Games" - a machine that eventually turns bad, due to inappropriate/biased programming, but here we have also some teen movie elements like boys/girls locker room, teen relationships, etc.
I want to point out the good cast of the movie.
Cassidy Rae as Jamie Saunders was perfect.
Also excellent and very convincing performance from the others.
All in all a good and professionally made movie very entertaining and highly recommended if you like this kind of "cyber-teen" movies.
Great sci-fi fun!.
I thought this movie was entertaining and for the most part kept my full attention.
There is a lot of computer talk, so if computers aren't your thing then you might search elsewhere.
Basically, a kid whose excellence at virtual reality games grants him a free robot named "Evolver".
Well, Evolver goes nuts and starts killing people.
The story is fun to follow, with characters that are easy to follow and interesting.
For the most part, cheesy dialogue but that is expected.
Enjoyable little sci-fi gem, check it out!.
Great,Scary fun.
I don't see why people dislike this movie.
Probably the same people who watch movies only for special effects (i.e. The Matrix) This movie has alot of entertainment value, especially if you're into Robotics,Virtual Reality or just plain Sci-Fi/Horror.*** 1/2 out of *****.
Cheesy yet enjoyable.
I'm one of those guys who enjoys pretty much any movie, so I guess I don't count.
There are some things that struck me as stupid, but what could they do?
CDRs didn't exist at that time, so they had to fake it.
Still, the fact that they stuck what amounts to a CD in a floppy drive and faked reading it.
The effects were great for the time, and are still decent.
Back to some technical errors.
Now, it IS possible to boost a laser to the point where you can burn things, but the power of the laser goes down as the distance goes up.
Which means that if you put one up against a magnifying glass or something, the magnifier would melt.
Also, boosting the power of a laser would not change the color.
But still, it was a more than enjoyable, in my humble opinion..
play the game.
Although a little nasty in some scenes, Mark Rosman's "Evolver" is mostly a fun romp.
It focuses on a computer whiz (Ethan Embry) who wins a robot with whom to play laser tag, only to find that this particular robot got designed for an army program, and is therefore intended as a killing machine.
Specifically, one that never loses.
There were a few scenes that I think that they could have done without, but otherwise the movie is pretty enjoyable.
Maybe a little predictable, but no one expects much else from one of these movies, right?
Also starring Cindy Pickett (the mom in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off") and William H.
Macy as the voice of Evolver..
so bad it reaches greatness.
Mark Rosman's best movie is this highly guilty pleasure from the mid-nineties.
True it's a pretty insubstantial horror film with crappy special effects & highly predictable story, but seriously how can you hate a film that features Q creating a murderous robot with the voice of the Shameless William H Macy?
And the family that 'wins' it in a contest.
This one has a few very quotable lines as well.
It's MUCH better than the similarly-themed "Brainscan" at least.
But one note: This movie goes better with alcohol Eye Candy: 2 extras are topless when evolver goes on a spy run in a locker room.
a cheesy but cool movie..
I saw this on the sci-fi channel 1 day & thought it was cool.
So I decided 2 buy it & I thought that this was a cheesy but cool sci-fi flick.
Ethan Randall(at the time, now its Embry) is a whiz at the Evolver game & plays a tournament & wins the 1st made EVOLVER.
He is the ultimate in electronics but then goes beserk & starts killing.
It has suspense but its more Sci-fi.
This was when Ethan R.
was getting 2 b more noticed.
Its worth seeing if u like chessy movies.
I say, give it a look..
We definitely recommend Evolver!.
You won't fail to be entertained by the greatness of Evolver!
Teen Kyle (Embry) likes to hang out at "TurboPlay Virtual Excitement", a Virtual Reality (remember VR?) arcade of sorts.
He's so good at VR games, crowds come to watch him do his thing.
So much so that his buddy Zach (Quinn) takes bets on this neo-Tommy and his neo-Pinball machine.
It's also there where he meets the cute Jamie (Rae) and they strike up a friendship/relationship.
All seems to be going relatively well in Kyle's world, and when robotics company Cyber Tronix eyes him as a popular video game fan, they announce him as the winner of the "Evolver" contest.
What's that you ask?
Evolver is a robot that lives in your home and you play with him.
He has built in "levels" that get progressively harder.It seems fun, but there's one problem.
Deep in Evolver's (or "Evo" as the cool kids call him) is government-created warfare technology.
Seeing everyone as an enemy, Evo goes off the rails and begins killing and maiming people.
Can Kyle and Jamie put an end to the robotic chaos?
Find out today!
Evolver is a wildly entertaining movie that everyone should see.
It has no fat or filler - and it doesn't have much time to, as it can only be described as a Sci-Fi Horror Comedy Coming-Of-Age Tale.
Amazingly, it all works and is a lot of fun.
The movie takes cues from such movies as The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), The Last Starfighter (1984), Weird Science (1985), C.H.O.M.P.S.
(1979) and most notably the two Short Circuit (1986) movies.
But its heart is in lower-budget exploitation like Arcade (1993) or Chopping Mall (1986).
The 90's VR trend allows for some lovably dated graphics, and it all adds to the fun.As far as the Evolver robot is concerned, this li'l homunculus is like some sort of bizarre melding of Nintendo's Rob the Robot, a game of Laser Tag, a Tamagotchi, the "Happy Birthday Paulie" robot, a Roomba and Mr. Bucket.
But instead of balls popping out of his mouth (remember the song?) - it's metal ball bearings that shoot at you.
Naturally the voice of Evo is none other than William H.
Macy.
It's truly a career best performance.
We're not being sarcastic, he's great as the tricky little bugger.
Paul Dooley is on hand as the head of the robotics company, and Ethan Embry does a great job as Kyle.
He's a real teen and not a 37 year old in disguise.
He really seems to care about the proceedings.What's great about Evolver is that it's just an insane idea that actually got made.
It's not really that predictable for most of its running time either.
It should really be more well-known.
But maybe this movie was originally made as a tie-in or potential long-form commercial for a real Evolver you can buy in stores, but it never materialized.
Either that, or there are hundreds of them buried in secret in the Nevada desert like the E.T. game for Atari.
We just better hope they never wake up and go for revenge.Interestingly, in Kyle's living room at home, not only does he have an NES, but a pretty decent VHS collection, and very briefly on screen you can see an assortment of Vidmark titles (Evolver is a Vidmark).
One of which is one of the American Kickboxer (1990) movies!
So clearly Kyle has good taste.Featuring the 90's techno song "Beat the Machine", Evolver will appeal to just about anybody.
But fans of 90's nostalgia especially will love the movie's charms.
We definitely recommend Evolver.For more action insanity, please visit: www.comeuppancereviews.com.
Crap-alert!...
Crap-alert!...
Terminate.
Movie..
Well, okay, I'm being harsh.
This movie isn't total crap.
In fact, though it is pretty lame for today's standards, it's entertaining on some levels.
The story is predictable and offers no surprises.
Kyle Baxter is a champion in the virtual reality game 'Evolver' and hereby wins a real-life Evolver robot.
So Kyle and his friends can now chase it around the house while playing the shoot'n'survive game.
But there's a glitch in Evolver's system, making it see enemies everywhere as he gets going on a killing spree.
Kyle finds out that its initial program was used in an abandoned military project (you didn't see that one coming, did ya?
Harharhar!).I can imaging a 10-year-old being extremely excited about the coolness of Evolver, but to me it looks like a Transformer-version of Johny 5 from SHORT CIRCUIT.
Why EVOLVER got an R-rating is beyond me, 'cause there's almost no blood in it (and certainly no gore or nudity).
In Belgium it got a 12-rating, just like it should be 'cause this is a horror/sci-fi-flick for kids.
But it is kinda cool that every now and then Evolver upgrades himself to the next level.
Though he looks like he's made out of plastic, he really is a tough little bastard.
Throwing him in a pool, hitting him with blunt objects and even blowing him up don't seem to shut him down.
Why didn't anyone call Optimus Prime to terminate it?
The only real surprise this movie provided was when I read in the end-credits that William H.
Macy performed the voice of Evolver.
So you can imaging your friendly neighbor sounding much scarier than Evo. However, Mr. Macy did have some nice one-liners like "Delete this!" and "Bonus round!" before killing someone.
Ethan Embry (as Kyle Baxter and rather young at the time he did EVOLVER) maybe isn't a top-notch actor but he injects a certain enthusiasm in his role and he did manage to show up in the surprisingly good horror-flick THEY (2002), giving a decent performance in it and showing us that he has grown as an actor.So, EVOLVER is that kinda movie from the mid-90's that's neither good or bad.
Just average acting, average special effects and an okay-looking robot.
We've seen it all before.
Remember the shoot-out scenes from the virtual reality game in GHOST IN THE MACHINE?
Well, EVOLVER's got 'em too, only not as good and less dynamic.
One good thing might be that the movie never gets really boring, but don't expect any scary stuff either.
I say EVOLVER is somewhere stuck between Pyun's ARCADE and Flynn's BRAINSCAN, though none of them are comparable movies for that matter.
I was contemplating giving EVOLVER 4 out of 10 stars, but I feel generous and will therefore add one star extra for Mr. Macy doing the robo-voice.