Kronos

This is the one with a huge square-shaped robot-thing threatening Earth - different from the standard monsters or aliens which usually threaten us in these kinds of films. It begins with a 5-mile asteroid hurtling towards Earth; it ends up in the ocean off Mexico, but doesn't cause the devastation we might expect. At the same time, a trucker is possessed by a ball of electricity - an alien we assume - which then transfers to a scientist, who then is obviously possessed. The main characters (Jeff Morrow, from The Giant Claw, as a scientist, Barbara Lawrence as his girlfriend and George O'Hanlon as a fellow scientist) go to Mexico to see what's what and, the next morning, see that this 100-foot high cube-like robot has appeared on shore. For the rest of the film, we see this thing move as these pistons which function like legs move up and down...
Visually and conceptually this is an unusual idea for a film of this sort - it's a trip to watch this thing move across the landscape and the idea is that it's here to absorb all our energy; it reaches a power plant, for example, and extracts all the energy. The highlight is when the military try an atom bomb against this thing. But, for some reason, the resulting execution of all these ideas is not that exciting. Maybe it's just that monsters and/or aliens are just more exciting than this type of contraption. It's a widescreen picture and looks bigger budgeted than the norm for these sci-fi pics, but it's almost as if Kronos also absorbed some energy out of the film itself. There's too much screen time for the parallel plot of the possessed scientist. BoG's Score: 5.5 out of 10.