Behold the 'Alien/Aliens' rip offs. They were big in Italy in the 80s and some were actually worth watching as they were different takes on the classic story. Even worse they all had the same title, 'Alien 2.' (not kidding, there were several Italian films with this title) The worst by far was the one taking place in the Venice sewers where Italians dressed like Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, and Bill Paxton, used pump shotguns which did not actually fire anything, eject shells, or even produce muzzle flare at NOTHING! Footage of cheap puppets was added later.'Pandora Machine' makes the above film look like 'Citizen Kane!' 'Pandora Machine is as bad as it gets! Take refugees from a scifi convention with air soft guns, filming with a camcorder in their parents' basement.Much like the cheap pump shotguns which fired nothing, ejected no shells, and produced no muzzle flare, these kids' air soft guns also do NOTHING! They're not even real looking guns! The dialogue is truly as bad as it gets. "I'll shove this gun up your fxxx hole!" Get ready for 90 minutes of that.Other scenes which show just how juvenile these film makers are is a gratuitous out of place girl on girl kiss.Clearly this whole film is merely the result of kids with air soft guns, a camcorder, and a free weekend while their parents' were out of town.

According to the box, this movie is about the future, where privatized police crack down on dissidents through the use of high technology and omnipresent surveillance devices. There's a serial killer on the loose and somehow, he, she, or it manages to evade all of the gadgets that are supposed to make dystopia safe for the proles.Well, that's what it says on the box. The movie, on the other hand, is so poorly written, so badly directed, so pitifully shot, that the only the only thing I could figure out about the story was that it was wasting my time.This movie was not only held back by its micro budget, but by the absolute lack of talent in any of the departments.Save your money and rent something else.

Roger Ebert once said that the star system for rating movies is a sliding scale. To give this movie high marks doesn't mean that it's almost as good as "Silence of the Lambs" or "Star Wars", or even "Bladerunner" (which it resembles slightly). It's not nearly as good as any of those movies. I give it high marks because compared to other low budget (very, very low-budget) sci-fi movies, it's totally watchable, silly in a fun way, and just a little bit smarter than much of the genre in the way it deals with the question of the nature of sentient life. It's even slightly moving in a couple of scenes. Daryl Boling is a fine actor, and writer/director Andrew Bellware is an enthusiastic digital-age Ed Wood, without an allowance or an editor. One of the pleasures of watching this movie is seeing what someone can create without spending any money at all on production. Seriously, haven't you ever wished you could go out and make a feature-length movie yourself, with real actors? In this day of digital technology, who needs a studio, right? Well, here's an example of someone who did it, and all things considered, did it pretty well. Also, there is a tremendous amount of gratuitous nudity. No character wears clothing unless the plot absolutely requires it. I've rented other cheap sci-fi movies at Blockbuster, and they didn't contain ANY nudity.If you get your hands on this DVD, you must watch the bonus commentary track. It's very funny.

Another dystopian future, in which corrupt privatized police snoop everywhere and surveillance is universal. But a series of murders begin in which the surveillance technology doesn't work; the murderer/s don't seem to be human. The main character's most emotional relationship is with a holo-video of his departed wife. The intended effect seems to be Dickian (as in Philip K. Dick) paranoid moodiness, intensified by many of the scenes taking place through set surveillance cams; this certainly saved a lot of money by enabling stock shots to be used over and over again and gave the production a "techno" feel which can get a bit wearying, not unlike techno music. That being said, the whole is a competent student effort--very derivative, like all student efforts, but I would like to see more from these people.