The Sculptured House, designed by architect Charles Deaton, and located on Genesee Mountain near Genesee Park was featured in Woody Allen's Sleeper. Ironically, while Allen shot the exterior of the house to place the scene, the interior shots were done elsewhere as the interior of the Sculptured House remained unfinished until 2003. You can now rent the fully furnished house by the night, in case you wanted to recreate Allen's famous robot scene.

The movie may have failed to convey the raw emotion of the animated series, but the set producers at least had fun envisioning Æon Flux's dystopian future. We wouldn't mind a top that matched our sexy home décor.

Living the valid life. Gattaca set designers created a near future world where those with the right genes live within the créme de la créme of interior design. From Uma Thurman's floor to ceiling glass living room to Jude Law's modern and spare interior, we'd lengthen our legs and implant someone else's blood in order to clinch a deal with their realtor.

Before Battlestar Galactica's resident scientist got his planet nuked he sure did have a sweet pad. Oh yah, and Six wasn't a bad addition to the décor.

Most of the Batman movies have had amazing set design, but tended to age Bruce Wayne as he sat amongst his antiques. Peter Lando's work on the caped crusader's Gotham digs in The Dark Knight truly reflected Bruce Wayne's playboy lifestyle. How do we get invited over?

While the majority of the architecture and interiors in Blade Runner were a bit depressing, Dr. Eldon Tyrell's penthouse was a beaut, especially when you take into account the side hugging elevators you have to take to get up to the place.

The Island. Bad movie, great future tech concepts like this amazing multi-touch computer monitor as desk.

Sure living in Minority Report means you'll be arrested for a crime you haven't committed yet, but before they caught Tom Cruise was coming home to a sweet pad. Is that a ceiling full of skylights we see?

We mentioned it before and we'll mention it again. If digitizing books means we can make room for the Circuit transporter in Logan's Run we're all for it.

Probably O'Bannon's biggest contribution to science-fiction movies is his work on the screenplay of Alien, which started life as his script Star Beast. According to Empire Magazine, O'Bannon's script was the movie's first draft, although others later worked on the screenplay. And Empire says he brought over several of his colleagues from Alejandro Jodorowsky's abortive film Dune to Alien.

But prior to Alien, O'Bannon was co-writer and visual effects supervisor on John Carpenter's loopy Dark Star. And he also played Sgt. Pinback, as seen in the clip above. And O'Bannon worked on the original Star Wars, helping to craft those great computer graphics of the Death Star plans and the attack run — and according to this poster at IMDB, he's also in the movie, as one of the technicians in the Rebel Base during the Battle of Yavin.

After Alien, he wrote the great helicopter movie Blue Thunder plus two episodes of the spin-off TV series, and he wrote Lifeforce, "one of the movies that I still make people sit down and watch against their will," according to novelist Richard Kadrey on Twitter. O'Bannon also wrote two Philip K. Dick adaptations, Screamers and Total Recall. He wrote and directed the Romero-inspired zombie comedy, Return Of The Living Dead. And he worked on both the Heavy Metal comic as well as the movie, writing the "Soft Landing" and "B17" segments of the film. Some claim his work on the Heavy Metal comic influenced the visual style of Blade Runner.

O'Bannon changed science-fiction on film forever, and he'll be missed. [Empire via Ain't It Cool News]

Don't worry, Jason gets better... thanks to nanotechnology. In the last 20 minutes, he gets upgraded and becomes a cybernetic Uber-Jason, who looks vaguely generic and CG-heavy. But Jason X is mostly worth watching for the other characters, especially Kay-Em (played by Andromeda's Lisa Ryder), who tries on detachable nipples at one point because she wants to be more like other women. (This is before the above clip, where Kay-Em proves she has special talents of her own.)

The film also stars Andromeda herself, Lexa Doig, as Rowan, who gets cryogenically frozen with Jason.

Oh, and apparently Jason is sort of a zombie, because he died in the fourth movie. And I found this out from this great message board thread, which includes this fantastic story pitch:

I pitched New Line a new Friday 13th movie and it was AWESOME.

Basically, the remains of Jason Vorhees from the end of Jason X are drifting through space, and fall through a wormhole and end up back in the Cretaceous Era, so Jason starts killing dinosaurs and shit. BUT THEN another wormhole opens and the nanomachines pour out all over the dead dinosaurs, but because there's no metal they use bits of rock instead, so you've got like, half-rock, half-dinosaur things vs Jason, BUT THEN another wormhole opens and some pirates come through, and they get fucked up by the rockosaurs and Jason, but then an asteroid lands on them and everyone dies, BUT THEN the nanomachines reassemble everything so you've got a Pirate JasonDinosaur also with bits of asteroid stuck in him, that prolly has some alien shit or whatever, I dunno. BUT THEN another wormhole opens and out come some androids and some ninjas, and this is the moment when they told me my pitch was over and that I was being escorted from the building.

1.) Club Hel

Location: The Matrix's Mega City
What kind of Crowd? Usually the tie-me-and-gag-me types like to hang out in this leather clad-paradise, but it usually seems to have a regular crowd of rogue programs masquerading as werewolves, vampires and other paranormal anomalies.
Why you should give it a shot: Most people might be thrown off by the number of vinyl cows killed to make the fetish gear, but if you were smart enough to take the red pill, this is old hat.

2.) Holoband Clubs

Location: Anywhere you want, as long as your live in Battlestar Galactica's 12 colonies.
What kind of Crowd? The holoband clubs located in the virtual realm of one's mind make Club Hel look like a neighborhood bar. Teens go inside these illegal clubs to indulge in their most deviant desires, which at the very least involve kinky sex and at the very most include human sacrifice.
Why you should give it a shot: Should you meet an unfortunate demise, this is the best place to hide a virtual replica of yourself.

3.) The Snake Pit

Location: Blade Runner's Los Angeles in the year 2019.
What kind of Crowd? The world's social elite all cooped up together, smoking opium.
Why you should give it a shot: You can have fun spotting the replicants posing as bar patrons. Why stay at home, when you can witness an existential struggle over what it means to be human take place in your neighborhood bar.

4.) The Genetic Opera

Location: Repo! The Genetic Opera's Central entertainment featuring the Blind Mag.
What kind of Crowd? If you think that Los Angeles has a bad reputation for fake people, you obviously haven't been to a city where augmenting your body is as simple as going in for a haircut.
Why you should give it a shot: It's an opera, which is hardly a bar, but when you're high on the painkiller that everybody's hooked on, Zydrate, you don't really need a Rum and Coke to tickle your fancy.

Mute center around the disappearance of a young woman, and her partner, a mute bartender, who must face Berlin's gangsters to find out what happened to her. We spoke to Jones earlier this summer about the setting for Mute and why he's had Bladerunner in mind when constructing his future Berlin:

The only reason that I mention Blade Runner is because there's something about that particular film, where they really created a believable and realistic living breathing futuristic world. For all of the other films that have tried to do that I don't think anything has come as close the way Blade Runner has to creating something believable. Something that feels real and organic. It's like going to a real city and shooting a film there. You just get a sense that this place exists. [In] most of the science fiction films, it always feels a bit fake and a bit flat, but Blade Runner really didn't. That's the aspect of Blade Runner I'm hoping to capture. If and when I get the chance to do my film that I'm making.

According to the Liberty Films site, Jones plans to start shooting Mute in Berlin early next year.

[Liberty Films via /Film]

Stout, who also does many of the concert posters for Flight of the Conchords, has an ever-growing series of posters from classic and more recent films (and, for good measure, the geek-themed comedy series Spaced). Many of these posters were created specifically for the Alamo Drafthouse CInema in Austin, Texas to promote their "Big Screen Sci-Fi Classics." He also made the "Remember the Alamo" poster for the theater, which contains visual references to an absurd number of films across the genres.

[Tyler Stout via FFFFOUND!]

Split Second is sort of an uneasy mash-up of Blade Runner and Alien, but it gains a lot from having Rutger in the starring role. It's the dystopian year of 2008, and water levels have risen so much that huge parts of London are underwater. This nasty creature (which I'm not sure is really alien) killed Hauer's partner years ago, and ever since, he's been a bad cop, living on the edge, taking chances and sticking it to the man. His superiors yell things like "You're off the case, Hauer!" And he just keeps plugging along. Etc. The creature also rips out women's hearts, usually in the bathroom for some reason, and you can hear the bottled up screams of all its female victims come pouring out when Hauer tears its heart out.

One of the most immediate surprises about DADOES is how true it manages to stay to both the comic medium as well as the original book; I'd expected something more akin to an illustrated book, large chunks of type occasionally punctuated with short comic sequences, but that's not what you get here. Instead, Dick's writing is broken into caption boxes and speech balloons and, impressively, it works - Yes, some pages seem wordy, but not so much that they're unreadable; whether the distribution is down to letterers Comicraft, artist Tony Parker or editor Ian Brill, it's a great job.
Artwise, Parker does well. There are some moments of discontinuity from the text ("Long robes" become noticably shorter in his hands, for example), but not so much that it pulls you out from the story, and he handles the space and choreography of the page well. I'm less in love with the coloring by Blond, which gives everything a glossy, generic texture, but willing to let that go as a sign of my obsessive nerditry; it doesn't stand in the way of the visuals, and you could argue that it speaks to some theme of synthetic/fake nature from the story itself.

It seems pointless actually reviewing the writing, in a way; Dick's novel is very Dick, complete with the imagination and surrealism he always offers, and complaints about the lack of drama in the issue's close become particularly ridiculous when you remember that this is literally just the first 24th of the book and never intended to build to a particular cliffhanger that'd bring you back next month. What may surprise many, though, is full of information this issue is; even allowing for the amount of text contained in this issue, there's a lot of stuff to learn, and remember. Whether this will be off-putting for some more used to less-filled monthly comics, though, remains to be seen (It's interesting that the first issue comes with a short essay in back from Warren Ellis, and that Matt Fraction will be providing a similar piece in the second; fans of those writers definitely should enjoy this, if they're not already familiar with the book).
As a comic, then, it works - Surprisingly, and against expectations. But there's still a part of me that wonders why someone would choose to read this over just reading the original book, which gives the full story in one sitting, as opposed to over a 24-month period; as good as the visuals are, and as interesting as the comic is as an object, the question of "Why?" looms large, if unspoken, on every page.

The first issue of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is released tomorrow.

There's a pervasive urban legend online that William Gibson went to see Blade Runner when he was working on his seminal Japanophile cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. And Gibson ran out of the theater a few minutes into the movie (or in some versions, just walked out) because he was so shocked by the similarites between that movie's vision of the future and the one depicted in his novel. (In some versions, Gibson is scared that Ridley Scott and co. are actually in his head.)

Gibson is quoted as saying:

Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns - all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information - said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.' And it was. It so evidently was.

Back in the early 1980s, Japan's ascendance seemed assured — there were a host of business books claiming that Japan had lost World War II, but won the peace through superior economic policies. Books like The Enigma Of Japanese Power by Karel Van Wolferen became unlikely bestsellers. Meanwhile, Japanese politicians like Ishihara Shintaro started flexing their muscles — Ishihara made waves with a book called No To Ieru Nihon, or The Japan That Can Say No (to the United States.)

But also, Japanese technology was clearly better, and Japanese pop culture looked cool. In the early 1980s, U.S. television started being flooded with anime programs like Robotech and Star Blazers0, and U.S. comics fans started discovering Manga. But the one-two punch of Blade Runner and Neuromancer was what settled it: for the next decade or so, Japan was how we viewed the future.

And given that the 1980s was a very neon-happy time in general, and the U.S. viewed Japanese cities as being splashy and full of neon lights, it made sense that Japanese influences crept into everything. Total Recall, for example, features Arnold Schwarzenegger running around a neon-drenched future cityscape, especially once he goes to Mars. It's not specifically Japanese, but it feels Japan-influenced.

In Back To The Future 2, Future Biff works for a mysterious Japanese businessman known as Mr. Fujitsu, and it's hinted that by 2015, Japan dominates the world's economy. (The film-makers pretty much come out and say this on the DVD commentary.)

In the Max Headroom TV series, the world is dominated by the ZikZak Corporation, which despite its non-Japanese-sounding name, is actually a Japanese company. And the dystopian cityscape (around a minute in) looks very Blade Runner inspired:

In the early 1990s, Marvel launched its futuristic "2099" titles, with Rampage 2099 and Spider-Man 2099 among others. And one of the things that was futuristic and different about the world of 2099 was the fact that Tony Stark's company, Stark Industries, had turned Japanese, and was now known as Stark-Fujikawa.

And the U.S. got its own home-grown anime program with 1991's Aeon Flux, airing on MTV:


Around that same time, we started to see a lot more Asian influences in animation, including shows like Batman: The Animated Series.

To some extent, any movie with "virtual reality" or "cyberpunk" influences kept bringing back a Japanophile vibe, like 1995's Virtuosity, which had one of its crucial scenes between Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe's virtual killer take place in a sushi bar:

And the politically correct, scrubbed San Angeles of 1995's Demolition Man was a blend of L.A. and Tokyo, in both its buildings and its fashions:

Famously, the cyberpunk trainwreck Johnny Mnemonic featured a whole slew of scenes and subplots that took place in Japan, revolving around the character of Mr. Takahashi, played by popular actor Takeshi Kitano. These scenes are still only available on the Japanese DVD:

Sadly, Japan's economic hegemony ran out of juice in the early 1990s, when their real-estate bubble burst (sound familiar?) and the country spent an entire "lost decade" mired in stagnation. The vision of Japan as future economic uberpower was replaced by a creeping irrelevance — but Japanese pop culture remained as influential as ever, maybe even more than during the powerhouse days.

And because nothing in science fiction ever really goes away, there are still plenty of examples of Japanophile influences in recent SF. Take Steven Spielberg's A.I., whose future city looks a lot like Tokyo. (Skip to 4:45 in this video):

The shiny metropolis of Coruscant has a very Neo Tokyo vibe, in Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones (go to around 2:40 in this video):

When we visit a future Batman, who's trained by an aging Bruce Wayne to wear a Bat-exoskeleton, in Batman Beyond, the future Gotham is covered with Japanese kanji:

Joss Whedon made waves with his show Firefly and the sequel movie Serenity, which take place in a sort of vaguely pan-Asian future where everybody peppers his/her speech with a kind of pidgin Chinese. (Although there are no actual Asian people around.) And this Fruity Oaty Bars commercial has a pronounced anime vibe:

And of course, Aeon Flux got its own live-action movie a few years ago:

Top image: Amazing Neon vista from Osaka, by PFC on Flickr.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown.

Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann is one of the most celebrated composers in Hollywood history, having scored classics from Citizen Kane to Psycho to Taxi Driver. He makes our list for his groundbreaking score for 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still (pictured above), with its prominent use of the theremin. After this movie, use of the eerie, otherworldly, electromagnetic instrument became the signature sound of sci-fi scores.

Louis and Bebe Barron

The Barrons took Herrmann's innovation a quantum leap further with their score for 1956's Forbidden Planet, which featured not a single traditional acoustic instrument. The husband-and-wife team's collection of all-analog burbles and bleeps sounds delightfully retro today, but the movie's all-electronic score was, at the time, controversial. Still, the sounds ideally complemented the tale of an isolated planet beset by an invisible monster.

Jerry Goldsmith

Goldsmith's 1968 score for Planet of the Apes swung the pendulum back toward traditional orchestration for sci-fi movies. Well, sort of; his tense, percussive score (echoing Charlton Heston's attempt to hold onto his sanity) included a Brazilian instrument called a culka that sounds like hooting monkeys. Goldsmith would go on to write many other memorable sci-fi scores, notably, Alien (1979) and the majestic theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which would be reworked for TV as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

John Williams

With the original Star Wars (1977), John Williams became the gold standard of sci-fi composers. His Wagnerian use of leitmotifs created instantly memorable themes for the major characters, and his grand opening fanfare is so thoroughly evocative of the movie that it instantly transports viewers back to the sense of awe and wonder they felt when they first saw that imperial cruiser fill the screen. Williams has scored just about every film Steven Spielberg has made; his five-note theme for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) became a character in itself.

Vangelis

The Greek new age composer is best remembered for his electronic score for Chariots of Fire, but his work on Blade Runner (1982) was similarly stellar, a mix of electronica, noirish brass, and traditional orchestral sounds that matched the movie's polyglot futurism.

James Horner

Yes, now he's known for syrupy goo like Titanic, but he got his start as a scrappy Roger Corman factory worker (Battle Beyond the Stars, 1980). He soon graduated to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), where he expanded on Jerry Goldsmith's score for the first movie to include nautical themes (fit for all those Moby-Dick references in the script). His elegaic music surrounding Spock's death and funeral was an early sign of Horner's ability to create music tearjerking enough to make a Vulcan cry. (Genre fans will also recall Horner's memorable scores for 1983's Krull and Brainstorm.)

Alan Silvestri

Silvestri, who's scored nearly every Robert Zemeckis film, is a disciple of John Williams who has a knack for creating a grandiose sound that makes his patron's movies seem bigger and zippier than they are. Case in point: his first big job, the Back to the Future trilogy (1985/89/90). Heard now, it instantly evokes Marty McFly zipping along on his skateboard, or Doc Brown firing up the time-traveling DeLorean. Silvestri's other genre works include Predator, The Abyss, and both Lara Croft movies.

Danny Elfman

Elfman, whose work is so closely associated with Tim Burton that he seems to be the musical portion of the director's brain, combines a reverence for traditional movie orchestration with an irreverence toward classical melody, bred perhaps of his days as the frontman for Oingo Boingo. The result is a frenetic, jumpy, off-kilter sound that's nonetheless grand and majestic, a sound that makes Elfman's music instantly recognizable, not to mention well-suited to such Burton genre pastiches as Ed Wood (1994) and Mars Attacks (1996).

Basil Poledouris

Poledouris created stately, mournful scores for movies with rugged, damaged heroes (the Conan the Barbarian films) and lent a gravity to Paul Verhoeven's science fiction films (notably, 1987's RoboCop and 1997's Starship Troopers) that helped ground their deadpan satire in real human emotions.

Bear McCreary

The ubiquitous 30-year-old composer (who'll be performing the score from Battlestar Galactica this Saturday at a free concert at Los Angeles' California Plaza, as well as next month at Comic-Con) is the sci-fi scorer of the moment, thanks to his television work on BSG and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. His tension-filled scores, mixing traditional orchestration with less orthodox instruments (accordion, bagpipe, duduk, erhu), is completely integral to his shows; particularly BSG, where his Middle Eastern/metal rearrangement of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (familar and strange at once) was key to understanding the plot and characters.

Scott, along with his brother Tony and son Luke, are teaming up with the independent studio Ag8 to produce Purefold. Ag8 previously produced the British web series Where Are The Joneses?, which asked viewers to write and submit the further adventures of the title characters. Purefold will use a similarly interactive format, as it unfolds in five to ten minute shorts driven by reader input culled from the social aggregator site FriendFeed. Although the series will debut on the web, there is some hope it will ultimately make its way to television.

Purefold will take place in the time before Blade Runner's 2019 setting. The producers apparently aren't too concerned about the short span of time between now and the highly advanced future depicted in the film, what with its replicants, flying cars, monolithic architecture, and implied interstellar colonization. In fact,according to Ag8 founding partner David Bausola, the first episodes of Purefold will likely take place in 2011. Of course, setting the action only a couple years from now is one way to avoid having to show those flying cars and crazy buildings on a web series's budget.

The producers of Purefold don't have the rights to Philip K. Dick's original novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, which provided the basis for Ridley Scott's film. As such, the series definitely won't be featuring any of Blade Runner's characters or specific situations, although I'm still holding out hope we'll finally get to see what's so damn unbelievable about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Or C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate, for that matter.

What Purefold definitely will have, however, is product placement, as RSA Films is bringing in a number of advertising and marketing agencies to help secure funding for the project. Considering what happened to companies that had their logos prominently featured in the original film, such as Bell, Pan Am, and Atari - they all went bust - I'm not sure if that's really a good idea.

As much as this all sounds a bit bizarre, there is one aspect of Purefold to be unreservedly excited about. Ridley Scott has said he will be releasing the series under the Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can repurpose, remix, and even rerelease the episodes as they see fit. Scott is the first major Hollywood director to embrace Creative Commons in this way. So, even if Purefold is ultimately just a forgettable oddity, it might be the start of something much bigger.

[The New York Times]

Upon mentioning that original director Ridley Scott had screened Duncan's current flick staring Sam Rockwell and "seemed to like it as well." We asked more about Duncan's next rumored film that was said to be inspired by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Speaking of Ridley Scott, you mentioned earlier a desire to make a Blade Runner-esque sequel set in a futuristic Berlin. Can you tell us more about that?

I still want to do that film, and I'm still hoping to do it, and have it be the next film I do. It's not Blade Runner 2. I have no claim on that at all. The only reason that I mention Blade Runner is because there's something about that particular film, where they really created a believable and realistic living breathing futuristic world. For all of the other films that have tried to do that I don't think anything has come as close the way Blade Runner has to creating something believable. Something that feels real and organic. It's like going to a real city and shooting a film there. You just get a sense that this place exists. [In] most of the science fiction films, it always feels a bit fake and a bit flat, but Blade Runner really didn't. That's the aspect of Blade Runner I'm hoping to capture. If and when I get the chance to do my film that I'm making.

Now is the script done for this film?

Yes it's been done for awhile. I actually wrote it before I did Moon. The script has started to go out to actors. So if I can get a cast, and if Moon goes well and people have the faith to invest in me to another film then that's the film I'm very much hoping I'll do next.

Since characters are very important to you, what type of characters and actors are you looking for, for this film?

I think it's really just a matter of coming up with believable humans, you know rounded people. People you actually believe exist. One of the great things about Mute, which is the title for this next film... First of all, there's more than one person [as in Moon], but also there's a couple of villains in there which I'm really excited about. They're so different than anything you've seen. I hope I get the chance to make the film because they're going to be very unique, you're not going to have seen anyone like these two guys before.

What are we dealing with here with these villains: Machines? Aliens? Mutants?

No not at all. No aliens, nothing like that. It's a very human story, it's about normal, normal people having to live in this future city. Science fiction is more of a backdrop, in some ways, than you might expect. But I like that, because ... if you allow [science fiction] to be in the backdrop and not be what it's all about, then the humanity is what you're really concentrating on and looking at. You see why people are the way they are , and how they've maintained their humanity in these science-fiction settings. Or the opposite, why their humanity starts to be eroded. When they started to lose their humanity because of the world that they live in, and that's what this film is going to be about.

Did you spend a lot of time world-building for this future vision?

Yes, I think so. Again, trying to learn from films that I love, like Blade Runner, there are certain things that they did, and certain things that I wanted to do, that they didn't do, where you really create a living breathing environment. Just giving some ideas of where culture might go. Giving you ideas about kinds of restaurants or things you might see in the future that don't exist yet. I had a lot of ideas on that front that I wanted to incorporate into this world.

Can you share any little world bit with us, anything unique from your future?

Nope. [Laughs] You'll have to wait and see!

We're very happy the Mute script is going out to actors. If it's as grounded in clever writing and character-building as Jones' Moon, then I'm even more excited for this very hush-hush film. Until then go check out Moon on June 12th.

It's inevitable, in general, that when we finally create self-aware machines, they'll want to destroy us — as soon as they realize humans are remaking Melrose Place, the robots will realize they have to remove us from the Earth for the good of the universe. But the robots we build to be our sexual playthings will be especially determined to slaughter us. "You want me to be the naughty bondage nurse again? Affirmative — as long as this time, I can tie you down and examine you from the inside out."

So here's our list of sex robots who turn lethal. Note: We're not listing killer robots who just happen to be sexy. To win a place on this list, a robot has to have been built for sex, and then turned lethal. Feel free to debate our choices below. As it is, it's perhaps not that surprising to realize that the sexbot who goes on a killing spree is a more common trope than you might expect at first.

Pris in Blade Runner.

She's really our poster girl — designed to be a "basic pleasure model," for use on the military colonies, she instead uses her amazing gymnastic, acrobatic and erotic skills to become the ultimate assassin. At one point, she almost decapitates Harrison Ford with her incredible thighs. (The Replicants are clearly artificial life forms, even if they do obviously have organic components. Feel free to debate whether Pris is a sexbot.)

April in Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Uber-dweeb Warren Mears builds April to be the perfect girlfriend: she never cries or acts needy, but she cares about everything he cares about. And she's ultra sexy and eager to please. Too bad that when Warren gets sick of her and decides to toss her aside for a flesh-and-blood girlfriend, she becomes violently jealous and attacks Warren's new girlfriend, and anyone else who gets in her way. "If I can't [love Warren] what am I for?" she asks. The answer: slaughter! And mayhem!

Cynthia in Batman Beyond, "Terry's Friend Dates a Robot."

One of Terry McGinnis' fellow high schoolers, the nerdy Howard, programs a robot (in the shape of a beautiful woman, of course) to be his girlfriend because he's sick of being considered a loser. When he makes her personality "100% loyal", the robot interprets this in the most brutal form possible, attempting to kill any possible competition for Howard's attention.

The Sexoids in Ghost In The Shell.

It seems kind of obvious to me: If you don't want your sexbots to rise up and murder you, don't call them "Sexoids." It just doesn't sound like a very sexy name — or cool, for that matter. The Sexoids pretty much turn to murder every time they pop up in Ghost In The Shell, but especially in GITS: Innocence, it's all about the Sexoids murdering their owners.

The Stepford Wives.

This is sort of a different case: They don't turn on their owners. Instead, these women designed entirely for pleasure start their jobs off by killing the flesh-and-blood woman they're replacing, at least in the original movie version. (In the book, I think the husbands kill the original wives.)

The sexbots in whatever movie this is:

Some guy on Metafilter remembers seeing a classic 1970s movie about "Crazy SexBot Women Who Kill." With buzzsaws coming out of their breasts, even:

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s I remember seeing a movie on local TV that I did not understand (I was a somewhat-sheltered little kid in those days). All I remember is that there were women in the movie who were robots or androids of some sort (perfect human replicas a la Blade Runner), who killed at least a couple of men via sex. I remember one scene pretty clearly in which one of these women had her breasts sort of start spinning like small buzzsaws out of her clothes, killing whatever guy was with her. Another scene I really vividly remember had one of these fembots straddling a man (on the floor, I think, with both of them mostly clothed). The man was enjoying himself at first, "Oooooohhhh, ahhhhh," and then he started to scream and shriek. At the time I had no idea what was going on, but later on when I learned about the birds and the bees I realized that the bot-woman must have killed him with her vagina (something buzz-saw-y like the other chick's breasts).

What movie is this guy remembering? Or did he just smoke too much LSD back in the day?

Sylvie in Bubble Gum Crisis 5: Moonlight Rambler.

Someone is murdering vampires in MegaTokyo, and it turns out to be a pleasure droid named Sylvie, who's harvesting vampire blood because her fellow sexdroid Anri was injured escaping from a space station. Sylvie needs the vampire blood to repair Anri and help her remain fully functional. "Without it, she'll be forced to hurt people, like me," Sylvie explains. Why did you do it? asks Priss. "I wanted to be free... like you," says Sylvie. (At about 6:55 in the video at left.)

The Lucy Liu Bots in Futurama.

The Charlie's Angels star is just one of the celebrities illegally held by Nappster. Then the corporation placed Liu's personality into a blank robot so Fry could date her. When his friends exposed Nappster's scheme, they unleash a murderous wave of Lucy Liu Bots to kill all the witnesses.

Maria in Metropolis.

Okay, to be fair, her purpose was always fairly deadly. But she starts out being a bit of a pleasure droid before she gets down to some serious evil — in her early scenes, she does a weird, hyper-sexual dance for a bunch of leering aristocrats.

Freya in Saturn's Children by Charles Stross.

Poor Freya — she's designed to be sexually attracted to humans, but we're extinct. What's a sex robot to do? She takes part in an illegal smuggling operation, smuggling "pink goo," or organic cells — and of course, she has to do some killing along the way. Because that's the smuggler's life.

Verlis in Metallic Love by Tanith Lee.

Lee's 2005 sequel to her classic Silver Metal Lover brings back Silver, the former "pleasure robot," now renamed Verlis. He starts a new love affair, with a young girl named Loren. He's designed to be the ultimate companion, charming and talented — but he and his seven fellow robots also have deadly gifts, like creating weapons out of their bodies and turning themseves into giant dragons. As SciFiWeek puts it, "Constructed as beautiful playthings, they are instead deadly powerful creatures who regard humans as lesser life forms and a threat to their existence." And they have plans to throw off their corporate shackles and achieve "world domination."

Silver in Tomb Raider: The Man Of Bronze.

According to this third Tomb Raider novel, Silver is "a pleasure bot," programmed to seduce women. But over the centuries, he's gotten warped and is now determined to wipe out his rival Bronze, no matter whom he has to kill along the way. What does this have to do with raiding tombs? Don't ask me.

The Sexbots in Buttobi CPU.

In this Japanese porn anime series, a man meets a sexbot who becomes very attached to him. But then, for some reason I've never been clear on, another sexbot shows up and starts trying to kill him — maybe out of jealousy. In any case, this being a hentai video, he has to give "his" sexbot a powerup to fight the other sexbot, by inserting his genetic material into her rear data port. Yatta!

Aphrodite IX.

She's a sexbot who's reprogrammed as an amnesiac assassin, and she's the star of her own Top Cow comics series. Soon to be a major motion picture, apparently.

The Fembots in Austin Powers.

Okay, so they're pretty much programmed to kill. But they also seem to be programmed to please, at a fairly basic level. Consider Miss Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley), who spends the first movie slowly getting romantic with Austin Powers, before being revealed as a murderous fembot in the first couple of minutes of the sequel.

Amazing Blade Runner-inspired photos by Dani*Dune (More at the link.)

Additional reporting by Alasdair Wilkins.

It's the "uncanny valley," the mysterious place where robots become lifelike enough to trip some of our systems for detecting fellow humans... but there's still something wrong with them. And the scariest killer bots often nestle malignantly smack in the middle of the uncanny valley, waiting to freak us the fuck out. Does this make them deadlier than other killer robots? Only if fear paralyzes you and makes it harder for you to strategize.

We're comfortable with robots as long as we can easily tell they're robots, and there's something abstract and mechanistic about them. But once a robot looks enough like us, but without all of our human mannerisms and foibles, we suddenly become uncomfortable. You can see it in David Byrne's singing robot, Julio. And in the guy who made a robot version of his girlfriend (left). (And she didn't dump him, why again?)

We've already charted the relationship between a robot's human likeness and how evil it is. But I'd argue that the scariest, and therefore most effective, killer robots are the ones which fall into that nether zone between artificial-looking and totally human. Just look at Masahiro Mori's famous chart. The "uncanny valley" refers to robots that remind us of corpses and zombies. So it's partly the stiffness and jerky motion, as well as the feeling of deadness, that creep us out.

Here are some examples of how robots that seem like dead humans, or humans lacking some "spark" of life, are scarier than other kinds:

Battlestar Galactica:

For my money, the "skinjobs" in BSG were actually pretty scary and intense in the first couple of seasons, when they seemed the most inhuman. For one thing, in a sense, the "skinjobs" are dead, since we keep seeing them die and come back. The famous scene where Caprica Six is tossing Starbuck around is partly so awesome because Six's abnormal strength also makes her seem more jerky and suddenly less human. In later seasons, the Cylons started to seem more and more like regular humans, and even lost their ability to resurrect.

Alien:

Just check out this scene with Ash, the creepy android whose secret corporate agenda is not terribly human-friendly. He even looks sort of like a zombie, with weird fluid coming out of his mouth:

Doctor Who, "Robots Of Death":

I'll be writing more about this 1977 storyline later on this week, but I would be remiss to leave it out here. The eponymous deadly robots in this story are deliberately designed to look cold and unresponsive, so we're not really surprised when they "suddenly" go all red-eyed and start strangling people. But the true genius of this story is that it verbalizes just why people are so terrified of lifelike robots: it's their deadness. The newly invented disease "robophobia" (or Grimwade's syndrome) takes this fear of corpse-like stiffness and pushes it to its farthest extreme.

Blade Runner:

Let's accept, for the moment, that the artificial "Replicants" are actually robots in some sense. (It's kind of vague in the movie, IIRC, and they definitely have a biological component.) They're stronger and smarter than regular humans, but they're also closer to death, because they have an in-built expiration date.

The Terminator:

You can't get more zombie-like than the original T-800, played by Arnie in his prime. Arnie has never been stiffer, and deader-looking, than when he plays this unstoppable murder machine. Especially once he gets some face damage, and he starts wearing those sunglasses, so he has absolutely no expression whatsoever. You shoot him and blast him, and he keeps getting up... because he's already dead. Not to mention, he turns into a walking skeleton, which doesn't hurt, either.

Westworld:

OMG this is the clincher as far as I'm concerned. Yul Brynner is the walking dead in this movie. Look at his frozen expression and how it slowly turns into a rictus smile when he says "Draw." Now I'm going to have nightmares of him singing "Shall We Dance" while dismembering people:

Star Trek, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

This is is the classic zombie-bot strategy: have one robot who clearly resembles a dead guy, and give him a creepy name like Ruk, or Krob, or Glop, and then nobody will notice that the rest of you are all zombie robots as well. Just look at Dr. Korby's stiff, jerky motion and empty eyes. Even Shatner looks more deathlike after he's a robot:

I, Robot:

There was a lot wrong with this Will Smith Converse All-Stars vehicle... but one thing it got right was the fact that its deadly robots look totally like ghosts, pale and almost translucent... and they have the nearly-but-not-quite human expressions as well:

Eve Of Destruction:

Those staring eyes. The way she flirts and laughs with absolutely no real expression. The way she covets people's fashion items. She is a hot dead lady, and she's out to kill you. Her only means of showing emotion is to make her eyes even bigger and buggier. It's up to Gregory Hines, that dancing fool, to put her back in her box. Which sounds a lot dirtier than it probably really is:

The Bionic Woman's Fembots:

Like Eve in Eve Of Destruction, the "fembots" in Bionic Woman are dead girls. They're blank-eyed, stiff and heartless, and there's something just "wrong" about them, even before their faces inevitably fall off:

What makes Boom! Studios' new series unique is that every word that appears in there is from the novel - There're no additional scenes or abridging to make sure that each issue ends on a specially-constructed cliffhanger, just the story as Dick wrote it, illustrated as a comic by artist Tony Parker. Don't believe me? Here're the first five pages:

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep launches in June.

LexCorp (DC Comics)
Hailed as one of the largest, most diversified multinational corporations in the world, it also happens to be founded by Lex Luthor, who runs it with his characteristic ruthlessness. The list of cities and countries where the corporation has holdings is basically as long as the list of cities and countries on Earth, and the number of companies controlled by LexCorp is almost as long and just as varied. Unfortunately, as of One Year Later, with Lana Lang acting as CEO, the corporation seems to be heading towards bankruptcy. The "No Helping Superman" rule still applies to all employees, however.

Primatech (Heroes)
The Primatech Paper Company of Odessa, Texas is the first Primatech facility the show introduces us to. Of course, they do a lot more than just make paper—They capture and "study" folks with enhanced abilities, but, really, what they do best is operate in a moral gray area. A very dark gray area.

Blue Sun (Firefly and Serenity)
While it's still unclear exactly what the corporation does, it seems pretty implicit that it isn't good. Although most of the Blue Sun products seen on the show seem as innocuous as coffee cans and crackers, River's actions, such as ripping off their labels on food and slashing Jayne with a knife when he wears their logo, suggest that there's something more going on. Some suggest that there's something in the food, but the stronger hypothesis seems to be that Blue Sun is somehow connected to the experiments done on River and is perhaps working with the Alliance.

Merrick Biotech (The Island)
Merrick Biotech's business is keeping clones of their customers around, just in case said customers should need a transplant of some kind. Basically like the ultimate life insurance, right? Except for the fact that it's illegal to allow the clones to be conscious and sentient, which, of course, Merrick Biotech lets happen and lies to their clients about. Therefore, the corporation has an entire population of fully-conscious human beings living totally unaware of the fact that they're basically just an organ farm. And that's just not cool.

Fatboy Industries (The Middleman, TV series)
In the final episode of the series, Wendy Watson is transported into a classic example of a Mirrorverse, where the megacorp of Fatboy Industries is a totalitarian presence, having taken the place of the government. Unfortunately, the morality of Fatboy in Wendy's real world is still unconfirmed, as there's a hint of "more than meets the eye" to both the corporation and its ambiguous founder, Manservant Neville. (This is underscored by the fact that the rest of Mirrorverse turns out to be not so very different from the real world.)

Buy n Large Corporation (WALL•E)
While maybe not inherently evil, the Buy n Large Corporation did govern Earth (perhaps much like the Mirrorverse Fatboy Industries) and did a very poor job of it. Even if rendering the planet uninhabitable wasn't exactly the gameplan, Buy n Large's role in that happening probably makes it a worse corporation than most of the others on this list.

Tyrell Corporation (Blade Runner)
The Tyrell Corporation produces the replicants, lifelike androids designed to the work deemed to dangerous and demeaning for humans, and is named for Dr. Eldon Tyrell, the founder and genius inventor of the replicants. While it's debatable how truly "evil" the Tyrell Corporation is, there is a definite sinister quality to their dealings and it's nigh impossible to deny that they definitely smack of "evil corporation."

Veidt Industries (Watchmen)
A lot of what was said about LexCorp could be repeated here. Once again, the ruthless ambition of the corporation paired with the questionable morality of its founder leaves us wondering how much to trust this (powerful, financially successful) corporation. Meanwhile, the impending release of the film was paired with a Veidt Industries commercial contest, leading to all sorts of fake '80's advertising:

Weyland-Yutani (Alien franchise)
Perhaps the gold standard of evil megacorporations, Weyland-Yutani's main gig is merciless profiteering, no matter what (or who) needs to be sacrificed in the process. (Fun fact: Their logo can be seen on some of the weapons in Firefly and they're said to be a client of Wolfram and Hart in Angel. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that Joss Whedon wrote Alien Resurrection.)

Cyberdyne Systems Corporation (Terminator films)
While the corporation is said to be benign in the first two films, manufacturing parts for bigger companies, they then make the mistake of creating Skynet, a system of artificially intelligent supercomputers that control (among other things) nuclear missiles. This was not a smart move. In fact, it's just un-smart enough to warrant Cyberdyne's inclusion on this list.

Yoyodyne (The Crying of Lot 49 and V. by Thomas Pynchon)
Yoyodyne is a defense contractor that's described in The Crying of Lot 49 as "a giant of the aerospace industry," and a few characters in the novel work for the company. While the morality of Yoyodyne isn't firmly sealed either way, the thread of conspiracy woven throughout the work suggests that it isn't all it seems. (The name "Yoyodyne" is mentioned, as you might remember, in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.)

Earth Protectors (Up, Up, and Away, 2000 TV movie)
Ostensibly a group designed to teach middle schoolers the importance of environmentalism, Earth Protectors' favorite method of persuasion is brainwashing. And while handing out CD's brainwashing kids into recycling isn't a completely bad thing, brainwashing the parents to rob banks is another thing entirely. (Actually, brainwashing in general? Not recommended.)

Omni Consumer Products (Robocop)
Described as dystopian and inhumane, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) is an example of military capitalism taken to the extreme, until the corporation no longer cares who gets hurt or killed as long as the PR stays good. OCP is depicted as having its fingers in almost every branch of life, as long as there's money to be made from it. One of their strokes of genius comes from running both criminal organizations and a private police force, thereby ensuring a continued demand for both crime and justice.

Soylent Corporation (Soylent Green)
It's 2022 and the world is overpopulated and hungry. Who better to step in than the Soylent Corporation with their rations of tasty wafers known as Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow? Well, okay, they aren't that tasty, but thankfully, Soylent's come out with a new flavor: Soylent Green. Much more delicious. So what's the catch? Well, we all know what Soylent Green is.

GeneCo (Repo! The Genetic Opera)
After an epidemic of organ failures, GeneCo steps in to give transplants to those in need. Benevolent, right? Well, sure, until the boss, Rotti Largo, gets permission to repossess the organs of people who renege on their payments. And once a corporation is taking out your insides, the benevolence is kind of gone.

In an interview with Erin McCarthy from Popular Mechanics Jones talks about his next big feature film and says he's going to try and harness that old Blade Runner feel:

It looks like I'm going to be doing another science-fiction film next. I love Blade Runner, it's one of my favorite films, and I've always been really… depressed that there was never — not a sequel, because I don't think it's right to make a sequel about Blade Runner, but no one's really tried to make a film which was set in the same kind of world or had that same kind of field. So that's what I'm doing, a big-city mystery story that takes place in a future Berlin.

Good, it's about time someone tried to tell stories like this again. We're starved for noirish world-building layered into a mystery, and if anyone can create an interesting society it's Jones. In fact if he wasn't doing this, we would ask him to.

The article also includes tons of details about Moon, including the answer for why Jones put the helium-mining base on the dark side of the moon, when there's more helium on the near side. But be warned: if you haven't seen Moon the interview is full of spoilers.

Right now Moon is playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Cleveland International Film Festival, and the Philadelphia International Film Festival, and it'll have a limited release in theaters on June 12th.