There's also her mentor, The Scientist (Scrimm), whose recorded messages play on the same monitors and evolve from confident tributes to the rightness of the conflict to, ultimately, despairing admissions that the conflict has been based on lies and that the war is a catastrophe that spells doom for both sides.

In between, we get deliberately low-budget action, which amounts to sparks flying across the screen while killer machines that are, depending on the moment, either barely animated miniatures or men in cardboard suits of the sort that recall Santa Claus Versus the Martians shuffle toward a grim final confrontation.

Several lines of dialogue, to the effect that The Girl's people demonized the enemy while being guilty of the same crimes themselves, seem to establish that the whole thing is meant as some kind of post-9/11 War on Terror allegory. Well, there's no law against that. There have been and will be other 9/11 allegories, which seem to have replaced nuclear war allegories as the B-movie theme of choice. Just look at Cloverfield, for instance. But as certain failed presidential candidates have learned, a mere allusion to 9/11 is not compelling all by itself, and should not be mistaken for profundity.

Well-meaning, just not very good

The major attribute that prevents Automatons from receiving a low D or even an F as a letter grade is a visual aesthetic that for long sections succeeds in rendering as a virtue that which we would mock in many other low-budget films, by which I mean the impression that it was shot in somebody's garage. The Girl's pointless, lonely existence, creating death machines to send against an enemy that, by now, would leave her alone if she just stopped, is entirely enhanced by the cramped set, the shadowy 8mm black-and-white cinematography and the retro technology that fills her life between intervals of terror and restless sleep. This is also true during an attack on the enemy stronghold, an even more cramped bunker where the only room dividers seem to be lengths of plastic sheeting. You want a post-Holocaust vision? This craphole future is what it would look like. Kudos for that.

It would be easy to cut this movie, interminable at 82 minutes, to half its length or less and have the makings of an impressive short subject. Alas, a lot of its low-budget pretensions go a long way, and the power the film derives from creating locations that are intended to, and do, look like crap is spent when the rest of the movie also looks like crap. Yes, the boxy, deliberately antiquated robots do fit the context by looking like something a tech with limited resources would build in her garage, but that leaves the realm of wit and enters the realm of something you want to escape, in long, extended sequences in which the barely moving creations strike poses while flying sparks and zapping noises are supposed to simulate epic battle. (There's 10 solid minutes of this, near the end. Really.)

When the invasion enters the enemy bunker and resistance fighters take on the automatons in pitched combat, the staging is so inept that some of the defenders are obliged to position themselves within easy reach of the mechanical marauders tasked to kill them. There are thus a number of scenes with some enemy screaming no, no, no while standing in place and thus allowing the hapless guy inside the clumsy cardboard robot suit to catch up with him.

And, by the way? With the exception of Angus Scrimm, who does a decent job, the acting sucks.