Robot Holocaust

With a title like Robot Holocaust, you’d expect to see a lot of robots, right? Well, not only is there a serious lack of robots, the only robots you get are really stupid ones. Is this really what the future hold for us? Our world ruled by sub-par intelligent robots? Is this the long lost sequel to Transformers? I guess I better start learning how to telepathically talk to machines before it’s too late.

It’s the epic story where a band of warriors, lead by the mysterious drifter Neo (whoa!), who rise up against the robots who have turned on their masters and taken over the world. It’s kind of like post-apocalyptic film meets action film meets road movie meets musical… or something like that. But really Robot Holocaust is a perfect case study in how important a budget is to a film production. In this case, you shouldn’t try to make an epic sci-fi action movie with less than a million. That is what the filmmakers tried to do here, and boy are the results catastrophic! This film is gloriously bad, right down to the b-movie bone!

It seems to have everything you desire in a b-movie: a dreadful script chock full of dumb lines, shoddy set and costume design, a horrible synthesizer soundtrack, mind-boggling special effects, astonishingly bad acting (one of the best things about this movie, the performance of Angelika Jager as Valaria is priceless!) and even worse directing. And there so much nonsensical shit going on here it’s incredible, and not in a it’s-sci-fi-and-they’re-making-up-words-so-it-must-be-cool way either: zombies come out of nowhere, humans can read robot minds, a mute in a loincloth has to disable a bomb, poison air that strangely some people can breathe, interpretive dance… It’s almost brilliant in its crappiness if it wasn’t for its lack of decent robots.

This is a problem many b-movies have: they promise something in the title but not deliver in the story. It’s like. Here they promise a film with a lot of robots, possibly fighting to the death. You gotta admit the title is pretty cool. Instead we get a group of humans looking to take back their world now ruled by the robots. In fact, the opening narration tells us these events take place after the forthcoming robot holocaust, so we’re let down from the start. And throughout the film you get to see three or four robots, and that’s it! What a letdown. There are more humans than robots here; that just isn’t right. I think there should be a mathematical equation for situations like this to assure a film lives up to is promise. In this case, it should be a 3:1 ratio; there should be three robots for every one human in this film. Then it probably wouldn’t be so disappointing.

Robot Holocaust reaches incredible heights of crapiness; just talking about what they pull off here can take up a few pages. But it falls short of brilliance for its serious lack of robots. You know what this film needs? A remake. Give it a bigger budget, better, smarter robots (and more), better special effects, better action, and it will… wait a minute; a story is about humans fighting back against artificial intelligence after they have taken over the world, an uninhabitable earth where humans are forced to live underground, humans are being turned into robots for fuel, a hero named Neo… holy shit! It’s already been remade! Whoa indeed!

Final Mark: 2.5/5



EXTRA CRAP
The Good: A lesson for filmmakers: if you want to make the city you shoot in ruins from a major war without any costly special effects, just shoot at tall buildings with dirt and garbage in the foreground. Trust me, it will work.

The Bad: With so few robots, how is it they act better than their human counterparts?

The Ugly: Sock puppets and plastic spider legs are really quite vicious.

In A Nutshell: Needs a lot more robots.

Useless Trivia: The man behind the costume for the villain robot Torque is Rick Gianasi, best known as one of our favourite b-movie hero Sgt. Kabukiman.

Favourite Quote(s):

• Jorn: I am but a simple man, Dark One. A man who is, clearly, no match for your powers.
  The Dark One: And yet, you breathe the poisoned air.
  Jorn: I have no explanation.
• Nyla: The first thing we do when we find one of you [males] is to remove your tongue...men chatter so.
  Airslave Fighter: Your cowardly bitch!
• Nyla: If we wake up dead, we'll know who to blame!