Since newer generations of shit movie seekers might not be familiar with this one, let’s cover one of the “classics” in terms of poverty filmaking, one that indeed rivals the many horrible trashy exploitations movies we italians pumped out for the international market during the 70s and 80s, to a legendary degree. If you didn’t know, you would be forgiven in believing this was just another italian production with the usual combination of american actors and italian shooting locations.
Robot Holocaust has certainly that kind of aura to it, even more when it goes for the double whammy of having a sci fi story mixed the sword and sorcery bullshit… minus actual magic.
And i gotta say, upon revisiting it its still an impressive piece of legendary so bad its good shit, a relic from a past filled with movies like these that were so bad and poor in everything they ended up being accidentally funny, hilarious while being so bad it borders on being utright unwatchable shit.
For many of you, this isn’t anything new, at all, as the movie it’s pretty well known among older generations of crap cinema conosseurs, it’s “basic knowledge”, but Robot Holocaust deserves its place in bad movie history, and its legend it’s worth retelling over and over, even if it doesn’t involve Andre The Giant.
In hindsight it’s far from the poorer looking movie ever, without bothering good ol Mark Polonia (or the many homegrown filmakers who would kill for the budget of Robot Holocaust) we just need to only go back to 1979’s Star Odissey to see a similar brand of poverty rip-offs, just to remain in the territory of italian exploitation movies of that era that wanted to rip off popular sci-fi movies with ridiculously cheap budgets and unleash them upon (mostly) unsuspecting audiences.
But this time the catalyst for the rippin’ is not Star Wars, but good ol’ James Cameron’s Terminator.
and because a war against the machines wasn’t enough, let’s thrown in there the post-apocalyptic setting, i mean, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome came out the previous year, and you can tell they just started piling up cliches and ripping off everything they could, since we have the Mad Max style drifter main character that’s also able to survive in the world without having to rely on filtered air, and he plans to spark a rebellion between the human slaves more because he was kinda forced into saving them more than willingly save them like a proper hero, so again, the Mad Max elements.
And i didn’t mentioned Star Wars for kicks, because “Mark Moxx” here has a klutzy robot servant of sorts that follows him around, like a 30 dollar C3PO bootleg sans the R2D2 equivalent.
But wait, we have to have sexist Amazons in the pot, so throw that in, so we can steer this more into a “medieval fantasy” direction, despite the sword and sorcery angle not making any fuckin sense and obviously at odds with the gibberishy mix of Mad Max and Star Wars that i guess it’s the main “core” in terms of thematical relevance. Maybe.
The plot has that legendary crap quality of being a complete cliche, both simple and yet it manages to make less and less sense as it goes on, with the tinfoil of worldbuilding it has crumbling like a sack of potatoes after any kind of analysis, just turning to dust the moment at the very tought, so let’s be nice to it, it has been lampooned and made fun enough over the years (it’s also one of the early MST3K episodes), and given the minuscule budget at hand, Ed French, fx artist better known for its work on Full Moon Pictures joint, did a decent work, overall, some robots are nice enough.
Especially considered this was a Wizard Video production, as in another label funded by Charles Band, and unsurprisingly it was so cheap they reused music from frigging Laserblast, which you might argue fits better here than in its original movie it was composed for.
While it had been a VHS only movie for years, eventually some PAL versions showed up (including italian and spanish ones) on DVD, and in 2019 it received a Region A (locked, sadly) Blu Ray release by Ronin Flix. Now you can find it on Amazon Prime Video and – as a testament to my motherland’s legacy of bad movies – back in the day it received a theathrical release in Italy, under the title “I Robot Conquistano Il Mondo” (lit.: “The Robots Conquer The World”).
And the italian release also featured the bare breasted scene with Valaria in the Pleasure Machine fondling an electricy ball – one of those that were popular in the late 80s – held by a topless man and a topless woman, while cutting down a lot on the narration, which is pretty much a constant in the original version, but here is limited to the beginning of the movie.
And this is a shame because the depressed-ish sounding narrator is the source of some early laughs, with him doing the opening narration leading to the title drop… not after a pause that doesn’t feel emphatic but more like he’s reading the script for the first time and finding out this movie is really called “Robot Holocaust”, just repressing any laughter to actually say it.
But then again, it’s that kind of narration that overexplains shit to the point you’d think it was an accessibility feature for the blind (an unexplored market in the visual media business, for a reason) of sorts, and it really makes things even stupider given the already abundant amount of exposition dialogue that’s inevitably penned due location and budget limitations, so yeah, in its own way it’s part of the shlock experience, but i guess it being cut from the Italian version it’s quite indicative of the priorities of the distributors and such, as in cutting narration for “plot”.
Even more since, compared to the director’s previous film, Breeders, there’s not much nudity on display, though when there is it will be hard not to notice.
Still, it’s pretty much a classic shlock film, it could be even funnier, but even, the audacity and badness is enough to make a must if you want some dumb ass old shlock, though director Tim Kincaid’s later Mutant Hunt is supposedly a far more entertaining version of this, i wouldn’t known as at the time of writing i didn’t see it, but i am adding it to the list. That list.
As for Tim Kincaid, he would direct a couple of more shlock flicks (including the aforementioned Mutant Hunt), direct the Carrie Fisher top-billed black comedy She’s Back, then in 2001 he would go back to his career of directing gay porn movies under the alias of Joe Gage, which was his true calling as his latest adult feature is from 2017.
Follow your bliss, and be ware of any post-apocalyptic giant worms gloryhole puppets.
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