As stated in previous reviews, Charles Band formed Wizard Video after being forced out of Meda (later Media) Home Entertainment. Band released several oddball exploitation films through this label, including Zombie, The Driller Killer, and The Boogeyman. In addition to acquiring the distribution rights for foreign cinema, Band made some in-house productions, including compilations and direct-to-video movies. Except for The Best of Sex and Violence and Psychos In Love, most of these were pretty dreadful. Enter Tim Kincaid, the New York-based adult filmmaker who transitioned to mainstream movies with Bad Girls Dormitory. Kincaid and Band made a deal where Tim would produce several low-budget genre films for Wizard Video, starting with Breeders. His next film for Band became arguably his most infamous for appearing on the second season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That movie would be the 1987 post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Robot Holocaust.
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Synopsis
Society has all but collapsed after a robot revolution that took place in the far future of 2033. The remaining humans are either slaves to the robots and their leader, The Dark One, or nomads roaming the wasteland. The Dark One is an advanced computer aided by the human Valaria (Angelika Jager) and the robot Torque (Rick Gianasi). A scientist named Jorn (Michael Downend) is imprisoned since he’s the only one who can stop The Dark One. His daughter Deeja (Nadine Hart) searches for someone to help rescue him and finds a drifter named Neo (Norris Culf). With his robot sidekick Kylton (Joel Van Ornsteiner), Neo agrees to help and gathers other drifters to aid them. With humanity’s fate at stake, our heroes must trek across the New York ruins to stop The Dark One. It’s man versus machine as the two sides clash in this robot holocaust!
Review
Much like his 1986 movie Breeders, Robot Holocaust sounds like it’ll be a fun watch, but it’s largely uninteresting. Granted, this one is less painful of an experience, but that’s saying little considering what we’re comparing. The biggest problem with this film is that most of it is either exposition dumps or characters just walking. What makes matters worse is that the characters could be more memorable, and the acting could be more exciting, though there are exceptions. On top of being gorgeous, Angelika Jager is the film’s highlight, as she’s chewing up all the scenery. Like before, Ed French’s effects work is decent, given the limited resources he had to work with. While some monsters look like cheap hand-puppets, the robots are pretty cool, especially Torque’s design. That explains why the Blu-Ray cover features him prominently despite not being the central villain.
Honestly, this movie is hard to review because there’s little to say about it, and I’ve covered almost everything. Another strike against the film is the constant narration explaining everything we see as if we’re blind. It makes Harrison Ford’s narration in Blade Runner sound profound by comparison, and that was a great movie. The film reuses music from other Charles Band productions like Laserblast, which is fitting since it was also on MST3K. I’d almost prefer watching that movie instead since it at least had stop-motion aliens, explosions, and Eddie Deezen. While it does get slightly more exciting in the last 20 minutes, it’s hardly worth the first 50. The movie clocks in at roughly 80 minutes and feels like the longest 80 minutes imaginable. Overall, Robot Holocaust is less “so bad it’s good” but more “so boring it’s bad.”
Buy Robot Holocaust from Amazon: https://amzn.to/43w5ZR9.
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