(Yesterday was my birthday. Happy birthday to me!)

Westworld is an old, bad favorite of mine. Directed and written by Michael Crichton, it stars Yul Brynner as an evil cowboy robot, which really should be enough to sell the movie all by itself. (Brynner is not exactly reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven, but you can see why the casting director thought of him.) A smirking James Brolin costars, along with a dark-haired, mustachioed man whose name I have not bothered to look up. Dick Van Patten also makes an appearance, camouflaged behind a pair of thick glasses that practically scream Lambda Lambda Lambda.

Westworld is one of a trinity of high-end resort parks that also includes Roman World and Medieval World. As you might imagine, Westworld is a town that has been built to look like the Old West. Tourists stay for a week at a time. They are given guns, and they get to kick around with robotic gunslingers and saloon girls, raising the sort of hell only available to the richest of weekend warriors. (The man with the mustache is the only working class tourist in the bunch—he's been saving for years!) But the safety is on—the guns the tourists are given know whether you are pointing them at a robot or another human, and they won't fire in the case of the latter. Supposedly. Likewise, the robots are programmed to "never kill a human," so if you challenge a robot to a gunfight you will always win. Does this remind anyone else of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? Anyway, the tourists eat this up—they make short work of their synthetic comrades (even the innocuous ones dressed as bankers and school teachers), and by the end of the first day Main Street is strewn with the carnage of innocent robots. There is a great, fantastically eerie scene where a maintenance truck rolls through Westworld that first night, collecting all the bodies and carting them back to headquarters to be repaired for the next day's duties. You know it's only robots that are piled up beside the general store like some kind of mass grave, but it's just plain creepy.

Predictably, the Brynner-bot goes haywire, as do all the other robots, and they begin to turn on the human tourists. This should have been obvious from the moment I told you Michael Crichton wrote and directed it. You can just imagine him sitting there explaining the premise to the producers. "Like, ok, so technology is normally a good thing, man, but if we go too far, you know—it's going to destroy us." What is Crichton's problem, anyway? I have never heard of anyone so knowledgeable about technology being such a huge Luddite. I myself have cloned dinosaurs from hundred million-year-old dinosaur blood, and the only inconvenience was finding a way to dispose of their enormous dino scat. Two T-Rexes (named Zeus and Apollo) stay on leashes in the backyard, happily gobbling up the live goats I toss from the second floor window. But I digress. Basically, the robots are tired of always have to throw the big fight. They begin to stage violent showdowns with the tourists, whose privileged lives have not prepared them for anything more threatening than a meeting with angry shareholders. They mostly scream a lot and then die.

The Brynner-bot is the most scrappy of all the robots, and while his kinfolk have settled down to enjoy the peace and solitude afforded by their massacre, he launches into a vendetta-driven manhunt. He has exceptionally keen eyesight, his handlers tells us, and we get to see this robo-vision firsthand—as he scans the horizon, the screen is filled with huge, blurry pixels. It looks like a big box of nothing, but we are meant to understand this represents acute magnification of items in the distance. You can see why I like this film.

Only one tourist manages to survive the massacre (hint: it's not the smirking James Brolin), and the Brynner-bot chases him out of Westworld and through the other two parks. This is kind of cool, especially the part that takes place in Roman World. With all the bodies and broken statues, the "fallen empire" imagery is ample.

This movie is hilarious. The last half hour of the film really drags, and it's oddly gruesome when it should have just been campy (still less gory than Death Race 2000), but it's worth a little discomfort to see the Brynner-bot in action. And believe me, next time you see a guy wearing a cowboy hat, you'll think twice before messing with him. (This movie sponsored by the Great State of Texas. It's a whole other country.)

Analysis: Robo-vision! Dick van Patten! You can't go wrong! (This film is not yet rated.)

P.S. You slackers better start sending me some home-spun slash fiction or I'm going to get angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry.