Yeah, before when James Cameron made The Terminator, his first time of making a sort of film was none other than this one. Let's go to history. Cameron was a truck driver around the mid-late 70s (no kidding, it's true), but he was inspired by Star Wars so much that he wanted to make a short film, with his friends, to enter the movie business. He convinced several local dentists to invest of $20,000, wrote a screenplay with his friend, he make small robots (obviously for the stop motion animation) all by himself, studying how the effects work in Star Wars were and practiced the stop motion shots in his living room. It was that point when they were all finished. He tried to show the short to other studios that if he can make a feature film out of it, but it got backfired. However, he and his friend, Randall Frakes, did got a job to make miniature spaceships for Roger Corman's film Battle Beyond The Stars, and Cameron became one of Corman's visual effects specialists. Now...let's go to the short itself.There were some things that will later on be borrowed from Cameron's other films like a cyborg hero (T2: Judgement Day), a strong female protagonist (any movie he made), camera shot of what's the hero doing in a vehicle or a machine (The Abyss), and bio luminescence (The Abyss and Avatar). I'll say for a short that cost like so cheap to make, the effects were surprisingly good and the way they handled the live action bits and the stop motion bits, together, looked spot on. However, don't expect the quality or the acting to be amazing because the quality is VHS like and the actors aren't professionals, which does kinda show.But that doesn't ruined the short at all. For what it is, it's surprisingly good. You can easily find it on YouTube, so it's not hard to find it on the Internet. This is for the ones if they want to know more about the history of James Cameron and how he became to what he is today. For everyone else, it's at least worth a look.Score: 7/10

It's always tragic when a giant cleaning robot mistakes you for a pile of dirt. What's a fellow to do?That was the plot... It's not a comedy at all, and it's pretty good.This short is fantastic for three reasons: 1) For a 1978 film, it's brilliant. 2) For a student film, it's brilliant. It looks like a clip from a real (altough cheap) movie. 3) For a low budget film it's brilliant. The stop-motion technique is great, and camera-work which makes small robot models look giant is perfect.Only one problem. Ending... Not to spoil anything, but the trip is definitely way better then it's destination. Maybe it was budget or lack of ideas but everything else works just fine.Here, you can see the origin of Repley and her lift fork (Aliens 2; battle with the alien mom) or few ideas (concepts really) from Terminator universe and I don't mean the time travel.The short also has a great comic-book style intro that (somewhat unnecessarily) sets up the actual plot and is never referred to again.The budget is on the short side, but it does add some fine camp value and a slight resemblance to (different) J.C.'s Darkstar (btw, which would've been much better if it had a-n-y action to go along with it's snark).For fans of Mr. J.C. this is a necessary viewing.

James Cameron apparently got 20 thousand dollars from a group of dentists in order to get the funds for his first short film. It doesn't have much of a plot except that a man is being chased by a giant robot that moves a lot like a construction crane - or a creation from some other dimension (it's hard not to see this coming back in the climax of Aliens and to a smaller extent in the futuristic scenes of The Terminator). What the film lacks is proper acting (I think it's William Wisher, who went on to co-write some of Cameron's films, as the main male character) and actual quality dialog it makes up with dynamic action and very impressive production design and special effects. All of this is Cameron, done with a kind of care and precision and detail that makes it look triple, maybe even more, of how much it actually looks; probably why Cameron got to work for Roger Corman right after this. It's so impressive to look at, from the fighting of the robots and the solid edits, that you almost want to try and forgive the more primitive aspects of the production... almost. Overall though, it's a nice little diddy for fans.

I watched this James Cameron's short on Youtube (it was a happy surprise somebody had uploaded it!!) and it really wonder me!. I found out Jim had made this short by reading a Wikipedia article, but watching this robots in a struggle, laser beams and all that jazz, was surprising; it prove how much talented this filmmaker is. I agree with those commonplaces in Cameron's films mentioned before, and I'd add that there's a clear Star-Wars-like background; what's more, our hero bears a strong resemblance to Luke Skywalker in my book (No wonder Jim felt swayed to work in the movie industry after watching this George Lucas's film).