The movie takes place on a mining planet(?) there are two factions there at war. These factions have built these self replicating robot things that will come flying up out of the ground and cut the opposing teams shit to pieces unless they are wearing a braclet that tells the evil robot contraptions to back off.
Anyway the movie progresses to wear these robot things eventually learn to replicate themselves to look like humans. Aparantly the robots did this because the seasoned soldiers eventually learned how to recongnize these robot creatures from afar.
Definitely Screamers. Ok movie, but the short story it’s based on was really good and much more creepy. They just took the premise and ran with it too much.
Except that in Screamers the robots, hoping to play the sympathy card, also disguise themselves as cute but creepy looking kids, leading to a great scene where a squad of hardened Marines incinerate a group of children marching towards them over a sand dune. Oh, and they also disguise themselves - spoilers added for those who haven’t seen the last scene - as
teddy bears.
The whirly chompy gnashy little buggers that suddenly burst out of the sand and eviscerate people are the most fun, though.
The movie is based on the Philip K. Dick story “Second Variety”, and it’s been suggested more than once that this story, as much as Harlan Ellison’s “Outer Limits” episodes, was the basis for Cameron’s film Ther Terminator. The entire flashback (flash forward?) sequence with the humanoid terminators invading Reese’s warren in the future reads like an episode from the story. Why, indeed, would you want a robot that looked exactly like a human, unless you wanted to fool humans with it?
Dick is having an incredible posthumous career, but I notice that nobody is playing his stuff “straight” – it’s all changed significantly.