After two months in cryogenic sleep, a rescue mission composed of seven crew members arrive in Sirius 6B to investigate an SOS distress signal sent from the planet. Sirius 6B was assumed uninhabited after the annihilation of humans by the weapons screamers created by the scientist Orsow (Lance Henriksen).
On the arrival, the team led by Captain Andy Sexton (Greg Bryk) is informed that in seven days, the planet will be blown by a severe storm that will destroy any survivor and they need to leave the planet before the event. Sooner they meet humans in a military outpost that battle against them and the team spends the night in a facility. They find hundreds of deactivated screamers and during the night, Sexton sneaks out and charges one screamer to download its hard disk with all the information about the lethal weapon. On the next morning, they return to their spaceship Medusa and learn that s screamer has killed the watcher Soderquist (Jody Richardson) and stolen the battery cells. Now they must contact the hostile survivors the get any battery cell that might be available in the planet. When they succeed in contacting the survivors, they learn that the screamers have evolved to a state-of-art generation with human form.
“Screamers: The Hunting” is an entertaining B-movie made for television with the king of the genre Lance Henriksen. I had glanced at the unfair reviews in IMDb and only yesterday I decided to see this film with the lowest expectation.
However, the story is very reasonable, with action, good special effects considering that it is a TV movie and a predictable rip-off “Alien” in the end. The rescue team is probably the clumsiest ever, since the team members commit only mistakes and misjudgment of the situation and leads themselves and the survivors that have been living in the planet for many years to death. How the screamer has entered in Medusa is a good question. Why one member of the squad walks without his tab is another good question.
Anyway, if the viewer likes B-Sci-Fi films with action, he or she will probably enjoy “Screamers: The Hunting” despite the flaws in the plot. My vote is six.
