METAL SHIFTERS is another low budget Canadian sci-fi oddity, this one happy enough to copy the likes of THE TERMINATOR and ROBOCOP. Some alien space bacteria comes to earth on a crashed satellite - courtesy of those pesky Russians and in a scene similar to THE BLOB - and has the ability to 'control' metal, shortly animating a random giant robot that just so happens to be hanging around in a scrapyard. What follows is a rampage of destruction.
The problem with this film is that it's all very family friendly and therefore not at all menacing. I was pleasantly surprised by the calibre of the CGI effects work, which is not to be sniffed at, but otherwise the film is largely dull. Too much of it consists of people running around and the robot getting blown up before joining back together again, and I could do without the family dynamics of the plot. Plus there's the usual curse of badly-written characters acted by below-par TV stars, which makes this a less-than-entertaining experience.
