10 Philip K Dick Movie Adaptations Ranked Best To Worst

What’s most interesting about Screamers is how it appears to have been made from bits of other, better films, most notably The Terminator and Blade Runner, when in fact most of its elements can be found in PKD’s story Second Variety, first published in 1953.

Screamers are robots that hunt their prey by burrowing underground, but these self-replicating machines have evolved to such a level that they can pass for human and infiltrate an alliance of miners on Sirius 6B who’ve turned against their corporate masters. As a lone wolf commander (Peter Weller) tries to escape the planet, he realizes some of his travelling companions might be screamers.

At its best, Screamers is one of the most entertaining B movies you’ve never seen, but it’s fidelity to the source material proves its undoing because the idea of machines mimicking human form was a lot more novel in 1953. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s ending, which Blade Runner fans will see coming from a million miles away.