Terror filled Mondays!

This week (entry 12!) in Terror filled Mondays comes to us from the futuristic year of 1970. It was a predecessor of movies like WarGames and Terminator. There are a couple of other movies from around this time I’ll be focusing on in future entries, it just seems like this was a good time for scifi movies.

This week’s movie closes with this chilling speech:

This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours: obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos.

Sure there are movies prior to this that deal with technology run amok but, I can’t think of another movie before this that dealt with the prospect of a human created artificial intelligence taking over the world. Even though some of the stuff looks a little cumbersome given the small size of things today, it still works on a level (and hard to believe it’s 37 years old now).



A nice little tidbit that came up in the trivia section of the Wikipedia entry was the similarity between the Colossus emblem and the AOL logo. As prevalent as AOL may have been at one time, its day seems long past so, comparing it to Colossus now seems a bit trite.


The most interesting thing I found out when I was looking around for material for this week’s entry is that Ron Howard is doing an updated version! Seems like all those old favorites from the 70’s are getting recycled these days.