In the future year of 2030, a powerful organization called Unicom has seized control of the world after being driven to economic ruin following market manipulation ushered in by the computer age in conjunction with an ecological crisis where the Earth is now a scorched wasteland due to damage to the Earth's ozone layer. Tyson Keen (Paul Ganus) is a Unicom worker delivering freon to an independently owned TV station situated in an old industrial building whose owner, Lathan Hooks (Ralph Waite) has sympathetic leanings to a resistance group working against Unicom. When a heat spike is announced Lathan's granddaughter, Arren (Megan Ward), invites Tyson to stay. The group wait out the heat spike along with engineer Quinn (Bill Moseley), obnoxious tabloid talk show host Winston Wickett (Jack McGee), teacher Parice (Eva LaRue) and a few others, however when Lathan is murdered in the dead of night it becomes clear there's someone not human in their midst.
Following the bankruptcy of Charles Band's Empire Pictures, Band moved back to the United States from Rome to start Full Moon Pictures which specialized in the burgeoning direct-to-video market and forged a partnership with Paramount which thanks to parent company Viacom's holdings in Blockbuster made Full Moon (and sister label Moonbeam) titles a staple of Blockbuster shelves throughout the 90s. One of the final productions under Band's Empire was the Stuart Gordon helmed giant robot action film Robot Jox which was an expensive gamble for the Empire that ultimately sat on a shelf for three years until it was given a "fire sale" acquisition by Sony label Triumph Films and dumped into theaters in December of 1990 when the box office was dominated by Home Alone and Dances with Wolves. While the movie's box office was pretty paltry here in the States, Robot Jox most likely did good business on home video and the international market as Crash and Burn was marketed as a sequel to Robot Jox in Europe despite no shared elements with Robot Jox (save for the giant robot, but we'll get to that). Crash and Burn promises high concept sci-fi action in its trailer and box art, but is mostly just people stumbling around in dark industrial structures with maybe 3 minutes of the giant robot (if that).
The movie's world is a hodgepodge of post-apocalyptic sci-fi tropes that feel like they've been thrown in at random with the establishment of Unicom as a corporate/theocratic/totalitarian master that outlawed computers because of the market crash and robots because of the Book of Revelations (yes, seriously) coming off as pretty ridiculous and feels like the filmmakers couldn't decide on what kind of force controls this dying world so they said "meh, let's just stuff them all in there!" and called it a day. Then of course we have the production design which consists of what seems like an abandoned industrial plant given the barest minimum to be turned into a TV station and serving as the primary location of the movie for roughly 90% of the runtime. The movie then becomes a "locked room" murder mystery...that carries absolutely no weight since the trailer clearly shows who did what and why so the 50 minutes where our characters sputter around doing absolutely nothing is basically filler to get us to feature length. The movie does become a bit more enjoyable once the movie drops the pretense of being a mystery and allows the character behind the murder to cut loose and chew the scene, but it's pretty silly basically becoming a mixture of The Terminator and Freddy Kruger with just more budget conscious action scenes in the dark. And that giant robot featured prominently on the box art and in the trailers? A complete lie (kind of), the DV8 mining robot is brought to action for about 3 minutes during the climax to lift an antennae tower and crush an android with its foot before unceremoniously collapsing to pieces...people who bought this thinking it was a sequel to Robot Jox were most likely really disappointed.
Crash and Burn is a low budget slasher disguised as a sci-fi action film. The movie crimps from sci-fi films like John Carpenter's The Thing, The Terminator, and the Weyland-Yutani conspiracies from the Alien franchise and does the barest possible minimum to squeeze itself to 80 minutes and including only enough money shots to sucker in chumps with a trailer. Maybe this movie has value to riffers or a room with multiple people surrounding a coffee table covered with beer and pizza, but outside of that don't watch this movie.
Following the bankruptcy of Charles Band's Empire Pictures, Band moved back to the United States from Rome to start Full Moon Pictures which specialized in the burgeoning direct-to-video market and forged a partnership with Paramount which thanks to parent company Viacom's holdings in Blockbuster made Full Moon (and sister label Moonbeam) titles a staple of Blockbuster shelves throughout the 90s. One of the final productions under Band's Empire was the Stuart Gordon helmed giant robot action film Robot Jox which was an expensive gamble for the Empire that ultimately sat on a shelf for three years until it was given a "fire sale" acquisition by Sony label Triumph Films and dumped into theaters in December of 1990 when the box office was dominated by Home Alone and Dances with Wolves. While the movie's box office was pretty paltry here in the States, Robot Jox most likely did good business on home video and the international market as Crash and Burn was marketed as a sequel to Robot Jox in Europe despite no shared elements with Robot Jox (save for the giant robot, but we'll get to that). Crash and Burn promises high concept sci-fi action in its trailer and box art, but is mostly just people stumbling around in dark industrial structures with maybe 3 minutes of the giant robot (if that).
The movie's world is a hodgepodge of post-apocalyptic sci-fi tropes that feel like they've been thrown in at random with the establishment of Unicom as a corporate/theocratic/totalitarian master that outlawed computers because of the market crash and robots because of the Book of Revelations (yes, seriously) coming off as pretty ridiculous and feels like the filmmakers couldn't decide on what kind of force controls this dying world so they said "meh, let's just stuff them all in there!" and called it a day. Then of course we have the production design which consists of what seems like an abandoned industrial plant given the barest minimum to be turned into a TV station and serving as the primary location of the movie for roughly 90% of the runtime. The movie then becomes a "locked room" murder mystery...that carries absolutely no weight since the trailer clearly shows who did what and why so the 50 minutes where our characters sputter around doing absolutely nothing is basically filler to get us to feature length. The movie does become a bit more enjoyable once the movie drops the pretense of being a mystery and allows the character behind the murder to cut loose and chew the scene, but it's pretty silly basically becoming a mixture of The Terminator and Freddy Kruger with just more budget conscious action scenes in the dark. And that giant robot featured prominently on the box art and in the trailers? A complete lie (kind of), the DV8 mining robot is brought to action for about 3 minutes during the climax to lift an antennae tower and crush an android with its foot before unceremoniously collapsing to pieces...people who bought this thinking it was a sequel to Robot Jox were most likely really disappointed.
Crash and Burn is a low budget slasher disguised as a sci-fi action film. The movie crimps from sci-fi films like John Carpenter's The Thing, The Terminator, and the Weyland-Yutani conspiracies from the Alien franchise and does the barest possible minimum to squeeze itself to 80 minutes and including only enough money shots to sucker in chumps with a trailer. Maybe this movie has value to riffers or a room with multiple people surrounding a coffee table covered with beer and pizza, but outside of that don't watch this movie.