BlinkyTM
Tags: plot twist, sci-fi

Plot synopsis:
In the near future, where robotics have greatly evolved, Alex (Max Records) is looking for the normal loving family that he doesn't have - his parents (played by Jenni Fontana and James Nardini) are always too busy fighting with each other to worry about the effect on him. After seeing an advertisement for a domestic robot named 'Blinky', he asks his parents for one for Christmas, hoping that it will bring his family together as is shown in the advert. Blinky's advertisement and conduct at this point indicate that Blinky is specifically designed to provide friendship to its masters. After obtaining Blinky and playing with him for a while, shown in a home-video style montage, Alex feels disappointment in the fact that Blinky hasn't changed anything and his parents continue to argue. Eventually, Alex becomes tired of the robot and ignores him, even when Blinky persistently asks to play games.
After leaving Blinky to count down from 1 million outside in the rain in a game of Hide and Seek, Alex becomes frustrated and gives Blinky multiple conflicting orders, such as telling him to be still and at the same time cleaning up, as well as telling him to kill both his parents, himself, and everyone else in his rage, leading Blinky to malfunction. After Alex informs his mother about the glitched robot and that they need to buy a new one, she suggests rebooting him, and that Alex must clean up the mess he made or she will tell Blinky to ″clean [him] up and cook [him] for dinner". Alex reboots Blinky, appearing to have reverted to factory settings, and asking Alex "will you be my best friend?" Alex continues to ignore Blinky as normal.
Soon afterwards, Blinky starts to behave abnormally, such as showing up in Alex's room overnight, and continuing the count down from before. The next day the family dog appears to be gone, with Alex believing that the robot had something to do with it. Alex goes into another rage with Blinky, throwing an electronic tablet at him. The tablet simply shatters glass throughout the room, causing no damage to Blinky. Alex gets even angrier and blames the mess on Blinky, so Blinky retreats to the kitchen to 'clean', counting down from 10 and grabbing an electric knife from the drawers, proclaiming "ready or not, here I come". That evening, both parents are eating dinner at the table, with Blinky present and Alex's seat empty. As Alex's mother asks Blinky if he has seen Alex, the robot replies that he is right there at the table, and reveals that he has carried out the mother's 'command' from before: he has killed Alex and cooked him into meatballs, which they are now eating. The parents scream in horror as Blinky asks if he has "done good".
The police arrive at the house as Blinky is cleaning up supposedly the parents' blood. He lets two officers into the house, and shuts the door behind them. The last shot shows Blinky as he kills his next victim, himself and the camera covered in blood, as he carries out Alex's past 'commands' to kill everybody.

Review: A bit more subtlety would have made it better but the effects are very well done.
A boy decides he wants a robot companion like the friendly, smiling Blinky that he sees on the TV adverts.
His parents oblige and he finds himself with a great friend and servant who never tires and always does what he is told.
However, while the boy has this friend he has to see his parent's relationship deteriorate in front of him.This short film has a nice air in brooding tension and it builds it pretty well across the film.
The main selling point is of course in the area of the visual effects because for a short film these are very well done.
Blinky looks convincingly real for the majority of the time, but he also has a nice sense of menace in the way that all dead-eyed staring and smiling things do; he feels wrong even when he is so clearly just a loyal robotic dog of a thing.
So on this level it works but the problem is that the narrative moves us too quickly and the further it goes the more blatant it gets.
This is seen very quickly as the brooding menace becomes almost comic excess, whether it be the melodramatics of the boy yelling at the robot or final shots.
This disappointed me a bit because it felt like the leaps were too big and undercut the nice build up it had mostly done.It does still work for what it is and the visual effects are well worth a look, but at times it appeared much smarter and more subtle that it ultimately turned out to be, and it was hard not to feel like the journey was better than the destination..
Me and my robot.
In the future a child is given a pet robot by his warring parents.
Before long the neglected child grows tired of Blinky the robot and begins to play unkind games on it.
It all ends in tears.This was a decent enough, if unremarkable, little short.
The robot is easily the best character, although the child actor is incredibly convincing as an annoying little brat.
Mostly, this is a showcase for the animation of Blinky.
We also get to see an unusual scene where Blinky and the boy pass by another android in the street, with a future city-scape in the distance.
Although it isn't a sequence that has much relevance to the plot-line it's probably the most memorable moment in the film.
As short films go though, this isn't too bad.
The ending is quite amusing as well..
where to even start with this thing?!
so, "BlinkyTM" is a short "horror" movie by Ruairi Robinson that tells the story of a kid, who's hates his life and adopts a robot.
the kid starts slapping the robot around and tells the robot to kill his family and gets what he wanted.now, what i liked: the premise overall looked interesting.
ya know, kid adopts a robot and starts slapping it around, and robot goes in a killing rampage.
and it also had good visuals, it wasn't like any indie movie or something.
they had good cameras and good quality, and Ruairi's direction was alright.what i hated: everything else!
the dialogue..
oh god!
oh god!
the dialogue in this thing was really bad.
every line that comes from either the robot or the kid is either stupid or nonsensical.
and the pacing...
oh my god, the pacing!
this is thing that i hated the most in this movie.
There's mountains of time where nothing's happening, it's just a annoying little kid talking to either his parents or his robot friend and the conversation goes nowhere.
this makes the movie really disjointed and depressing.
all the kid ever thought was just "I want a friend; i feel lonely; i want you to kill my family".
this thing either had me laughing to tears or it had me falling asleep.
and there was almost no f***ing writing here either.
whatever script this thing had was probably written on a cocktail napkin.
i don't know if Ruairi Robinson was brain-dead when he made this movie.so, can i recommend this movie?
hell no!
there's no way i'm gonna recommend this horrid thing to anybody!
Quality special effects, good cinematography.
I couldn't help but crack up at the parts where Blinky was starting to go bad, I'd like to believe it's possible to depict a cute little robot going evil in a non-comical way, but maybe in this medium such a scenario just isn't possible and I should excuse the director.
It was a very predictable short and nothing too clever, but the special effects were top-notch and the acting was above average.
The idea behind BlinkyTM was unoriginal but the story seemed very fleshed out and set in reality compared to most other shorts of the horror genre, if you can even consider BlinkyTM "horror".
That's the main problem I had with this short: the absolute lack of horror aspects in it.
The film dragged on and that's saying a lot when talking about a 13 minute short; nothing really happened, 12 minutes were used to set the stage, and 1 minute was used for horror.The short itself--regardless of the lack of horror--was still well done, albeit riddled with clichés (fighting parents, neglected kid, takes it out on the robot, etc.) which make the film rather uninteresting.
It's definitely not a short you'll remember for years to come, it's very forgettable but the quality of special effects and execution of the short overall--even though lacking in the horror field--earns itself a generous 7/10 from me..
Don't let your child get spoiled..
This short is well made, great realistic visuals,and even though the gore factor is not present it will leave you with a bit of a sick stomach.
The story is obvious, boy gets robot, robot gets boring, boy plays cruel games with robot and acts like an annoying prepubescent tyrant with his electronic companion.
Blinky is indeed cute and lovable, but as we know this is not going to end well.
The performances are strong for the kid and his dog, and the short screen time for mom is also convincing even though rushed.
It is an easy watch and would recommend it to all parents who what a robot to cook for them.
Oh and if you don't want to spoil your child, keep them in the fridge..
Blinky TM.
I liked Blinky.
At first the kid gets Blinky for a Christmas present.
The thing must have costed a fortune.
It's a fully functioning artificially intelligent robot.
It's designed to keep kids company, and play with them.
You almost develop a warm feeling with this robot.
It does everything the child asks.The kid who was gifted it by his fighting parents, eventually goes nuts, and makes Blinky clean up after him.
He blatantly abuses the robot throughout, as he notices his parents fighting more and more.
Sooner or later, Karma kicks in, and Blinky gets even.This is a classic tale about revenge, and how you should treat others how you would like to be treated, even robots.
I think this was an excellent short film.
Who ever appreciates film as art will like this horror short.
I did.I won't tell you what happens, but let's just say the brat is in better taste by the end of this short film..
A visual effects demo, nothing more.
(www.plasticpals.com) I thought Blinky was decent, though it definitely couldn't sustain a full-length film.
Technically speaking it's a great demo, used as an excuse to show off the director's expertise with visual effects.
The story focuses on a boy's relationship with his pet robot during the break-up of his parent's marriage.
You'll have to venture into spoiler territory (and past the break) to get my full thoughts on it.Alex, played by Max Records (Where The Wild Things Are), knows what he wants for Christmas: a 4 foot tall humanoid robot named Blinky.
Alex is initially overjoyed, but he soon becomes bored of it.
Unable to provide any real comfort or support, the robot is revealed for what it really is: a machine incapable of true compassion or friendship.
Alex's anger towards his parents leads him to command the robot to kill his family, and when the robot malfunctions it complies.Unfortunately, both the script and the acting aren't very good.
We're never given a scene where the parents sit Alex down and explain they are getting divorced, so we don't see Alex's world really fall apart.
It would have helped to show that Alex was an unpopular kid at school to further highlight his isolation and dependence on the robot, while also engendering some sympathy from the audience.
Instead, we're given a brief scene where Alex and Blinky are carrying groceries – what's the point?
Well a fancy robot walks by, and that seems to be it: to show off more special effects.Sure, the attention to detail on the robot and some of the near-future background elements is nice, but it fails as a film.
If you're interested in robots it is probably worth the 12 minute running time, but personally I can think of a dozen ways this could have been better.
As a fun aside Blinky looks quite a bit like LG's robot mascot (both feature bulbous heads and are entirely computer-generated)..
Could have been better.
If you look past the horror/violence elements from this 12-minute short movie, there really is not that much left.
A boy gets a robot as a gift, but after spending some time with it initially, he quickly loses interest and starts mistreating his new pal.
The fact that he asked for a new one when old Blinky seems broken shows that the boy definitely had a touch of sadism to his character.
He does not simply lose interest and stops caring, he wants to keep humiliating the robot.
But revenge is a dish best served cold.
In cold metal robot-style here in this short film.
The writer and director is Ruairi Robinson from Ireland and he made this one 10 years after his Academy Award nomination.
The lead actor is Max Records and he was already a bit of a star when this was made due to his turn in Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things Are".
There's some drama in here, some horror, some humor even (the scene with the war robots with the actual danger being Blinky), but none of the aspects were really fascinating enough to let me recommend it.
However, I did like the early parts with all their fake harmony and music, even if there was something really scary and eerie about the robot from the beginning.
All in all, I hoped for more though.
Not recommended..
"No problem!".
One of the things I really liked about this short was how it, before rushing headlong and irrevocably into horror territory, does an effective enough job with the few more dramatic scenes of establishing why the kid is so lonely and messed up inside that he would treat the poor little robot helper like complete s**t until he eventually scrambles its circuits and causes it to turn homicidal!
When I first watched it I thought that the constant mistreatment had somehow bred some kind of resentment in the robot against the boy, what especially make me think that theory was the definite 'tone' with which it says "Look at the mess you made." But I suppose the most credible and obvious reason it turns murderous would be simple "user error." It did get left out in the rain, was given multiple conflicting commands, the order by the kid to kill everyone and probably the mother's "If you make a mess like this again I'll have him clean and cook you for dinner", creating an order 'stack' so that when it rebooted, it was simply doing what it was told to as perceived orders from the family.
The robot was the only real intelligent character in the story!
The robot's design was eerie because it looked so innocent, like it had a permanent sweet smile on its face.
It looked like a cross between Wall-E and R2-D2, and I honestly had no clue that it was a CGI creation, it looked like it was really there to me.
It is such a wonderfully chilling moment when it grabs the meat carver from the kitchen drawer and says "Ready or not, here I come!" And that sure is one helluva nightmarishly grisly twist!
The moment is all the more disturbing because it's slightly humorous by the cheery matter-of-fact way in which it informs the astonished parents!
It's more effective in that it's what the robot was implied to have done, not what was shown.
I think the ending would have worked better if they'd have just left it with the door closing instead of showing the unnecessary moment of gore which I found a little tacky.
It just goes to show you, don't ever take out your troubles on someone that's only there to help and wants to be your friend, even when it's just a machine.
Alex would have been just fine if he'd only respected Blinky, but the constant abuse made a monster out of it.
Very good, it seamlessly blends elements of family sci-fi and horror into a wicked short which combines the creepy terror of the killer robot with the more old-fashioned macabre horror of cannibalism.
That horrid little brat was a creep, he asked for it!
Not too many problems that I personally can think of with this short, it delivers the goods.
Later!