This film was ahead of its time in its style – the claustrophobia and (well, relative) realism in the portrayal of terror in an underground research lab predated The Andromeda Strain by about 15 years. And the final revelation (WARNING: SPOILER) that the robots have run amok because of devious signals being sent to them by this unseen spy plane overhead was a canny prediction of the emergence of computer viruses (a similar idea was explored in the 1960’s sci-fi novel Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney). This movie very conspicuously avoids all of the ’50s sci-fi cliches and seems to have been made for thinking adults instead of teen-agers. The cold war paranoia does not detract from this, many of the best suspense films of the era used the cold war as a back drop – the Manchurian Candidate and The Chairman are at least two I can think of. This is a much smaller scale, low budgeted film, but it deserves a viewing and some respect too.
