Kenneth Johnson was a producer who had done much genre work – as writer and producer of tv’s The Six Million Dollar Man (1973-8), The Incredible Hulk (1977-81) – including directing-producing-writing the cinematically-released pilot film The Incredible Hulk (1977) – as director-writer-producer of V (1983), and later the Alien Nation (1989) tv series, and as director of all the various Alien Nation tv movie sequels in the 1990s. Kenneth Johnson is, to this author’s mind, guilty of far more heinous crimes against the genre than Irwin Allen ever was. While at least Allen has colourful schlock appeal amid a deadening pedestrianness and bad science, Johnson merely misses the schlock and adds a shrill, clichéd moral righteousness or an appallingly cute mawkishness. Short Circuit 2 was Kenneth Johnson’s first film designed direct for theatrical release – his only other cinematic film was the ill-fated comic-book superhero adaptation Steel (1997).

Short Circuit had a certain no-brain good-naturedness to it, but by the time of this sequel the cutsie robot and its smart-ass colloquialisms have become utterly nauseating. The film plummets to the depths in scenes with the robot Tarzan swinging on the end of a crane while squawking “I’m really pissed off” in its child’s voice, or twirling crooks at arm’s length going “whee”. It tries to get tough and we see it dressed up as a punk in bandoliers and mohawk or in warpaint like a street gang member. In other scenes, Johnson has it fall from a skyscraper window and sprout a convenient hang-glider James Bond-style to make it to safety. Listening to the constant barrage of smartass colloquialisms that all come delivered in a child’s voice become so annoying one wishes they could put an axe through the damn robot. And the sequences that Kenneth Johnson keeps setting up are ludicrous – there’s one where No 5 tries to aid Fisher Stevens as he goes on a date by feeding romantic lines to him via a street sign that is as laughable as it sounds. But it gets even worse – like the car chase with clues being given out with tv theme songs played on a musical calculator, which reaches some new kind of low in terms of lamebrained sequences in a film.

And the cutsie anthropomorphism, where ultimately whatever appeal the film holds derives from, is taken to ridiculous extremes – having the robot bleeding to death and a pseudo-dramatic attempts to bandage it up and use a fibrillator. (The anthropomorphism of such a scene is technologically ludicrous – haven’t these robot designers ever heard of memory backup? – while surely any damaged electronic parts could simply be replaced). Logic is conveniently ignored in what the robot can and cannot do in terms of its design – having it ascend trees, go down sewers and be able to reel a taxi in with a magnetic grapple despite it having no point of fixed stability. In having it squawkingly cracking jokes such as “My cousin was a Harley Davidson,” one sees that Kenneth Johnson’s real outlook is not merely a pandering to a juvenile audience but actually a cynical contempt for it. I can’t describe how much I hated Short Circuit 2.