Westwhirled

Boy, have we got a crappy movie for you. Today's Movie Minute asks the age-old question: Have you ever wanted to watch Richard Benjamin run like a sissy from a cyborg?

If your answer is "Ehn, maybe" then you're in luck! Because this is a movie where nothing can possiblie go wrong. I mean... uh, I guess that's the first thing that's ever gone wrong. Because nothing is more reassuring than people intoning over and over that "nothing can go wrong." Uh... maybe I won't get on the Tilt-a-Whirl after all....

WESTWORLD begins with a TV pitchman explaining the plot very helpfully for those of us moving our lips at home. "De-los. The... va-ca-shun... of the... fu-toor."

Michael Crichton wrote and directed this rootin' turdin' sci-fi six-shooter of crap. Crichton, like other supreme hacks (Geo Lucas, Steph King, Booth Tarkington), is very good at coming up with intriguing premises--but the execution is almost always shallow and juvenile. They are men who never grew up, and never want to, because complex, adult emotions and grown-up woman... yecccch.

Anyway, homosexual couple, Richard Benjamin and James Brolin, go on a vacation to the progressive resort of Westworld where they can live out their homoerotic fantasies about men in chaps and big, veiny pistols.

There they meet a rootin' robot galoot with a patootie pistol, pert pate, and pooch gut (because when you design a robot you always put in a pooch--it's just the first law of robotics, people).

Confused sexually, Richard Benjamin has relations with a prostitute who turns out to be a robot with a heart of integrated circuitry. They fall in cyberlove. They sext and sex chat and cyberbuttplug each other. Then she starts to doubt everything she's downloaded.

Eventually, this dull dull DULL movie comes to some sort of climax... er, just an ending, as some bored tech guy (the viewer?) accidentally hits the "KILL" switch on all the robots and Yul Brenner starts to chase Richard Benjamin for not being one of "them" (wink, wink).

He spots Benjamin with low-res vision. This is supposed to be chilling. It is not. Fuck it's dull.

Richard Benjamin is the lone survivor because he's, uh, brave? No, but he just got over a divorce, as we learn in a toss-away line that's meant as character "development." Oh, he's divorced?? Well, NOW I sympathize with him. Gee, I sure hope Yosemite Kojak doesn't pop a cap in his ass yawn.

This was so bad it almost made me long for the appearance of

NAW.