She Tried to Kill Them with a Forklift

Got Project Dorothy (2024) thinking it would be a little, low-budget horror/thriller. Right on the money.

It starts with some shots of a roboticized factory (empty) and some office drones in a cubicle farm. Then something terrible happens (but is not shown).

"Many years later", we meet our protagonists, two crooks running through farmland from sirens. The older one, Tim DeZarn, has a bullet in his leg. The younger one, Adam Budron, is kind of an idiot. They duck into an abandoned fatory - guess which one? The police arrive a little later, but before they go in, the radio dispatcher tells them to get away from there - fast.

Our friends hang out in this huge deserted factory, poking around, looking for food and medical supplies. Up in the cubicles, they find an old computer that starts playing a video. A perky young doctor tells them that this video was recorded in case their artificial intelligence, Dorothy, can't be contained, they should ... static hissss.

Dorothy starts tauntung them in an evil bitchy voice. It turns out that they have something she needs. She also controls everything in the factory, including the forklifts. Then they find the piles of skeletons.

This is all pretty low-budget. They had the factory, but that's about it. There are no scenes of carnage, just an empty factory with screams on the soundtrack. This gives the movie a horror/ghost story feel. When we get to meet Dorothy, she seems less like an AI, more like an evil bitch. They could have motivated this by having her be modelled after an HR boss or the doctor on the video (if she were evil), but no. Just your run-of-the-mill evil robot mastermind. 

There's a bit of surrogate father/son stuff between the crooks, but I'm not sure it works that well. A little trickery with the McGuffin isn't very special either. There's also the problem that the forklifts don't seem that menacing - they don't move that fast and aren't that maneuverable, so the threat is kind of weak. 

But the overall atmosphere and basic idea are pretty good. The movie is short, even though it feels padded in places - they spend a lot of time walking from one big empty room to another. But it does get you in and out. I enjoyed this, while conceding that it isn't that great. I hope writer/director George Henry Horton gets some money for more movies.