War Of The Robots

I've spent all day trying to think of something positive to say about War of the Robots. Nothing comes to mind. Sometimes a movie is so bad it's fun, but this one is just tedious. The only way this movie might be worth watching is with a Mystery Science Theater commentary.

What's so bad about it? Ugh, if I list everything we'll be here all day! Let’s start with the fact that it’s Italian. I mean not the fact that Italians are involved; it's the dubbing. The problem with watching an Italian movie dubbed in English is that the mouths and words will almost match but not quite. To me that’s worse than Chinese movies where the mouths don’t come close to matching. When there’s an almost match, though it gets me to thinking that there’s a sync problem. Dubbing I can handle, but as an audio tech, out of sync bugs me.

It doesn’t help that the dubbing actors are horrendously bad. For some reason monotone voices are synonymous with futuristic to these movie makers. Even without the bad acting though, the pacing is terrible, the sound effects and music are near grating, and there’s nothing positive to overcome any of it.

What little plot there is revolves around a professor and a girl (never really figured out what significance she was supposed to have other than being the secret love interest of the hero) who are kidnapped by aliens who all wear identical blonde wigs. Maybe this is a Blondie appreciation race? If they had broken out in a chorus of “Hang each night in Rapture...” it might have improved the work as a whole.

Anyway, a rescue effort is mounted by the space station – namely the hero that wants to make smoochie-face with the missing girl.

Meanwhile his cute subordinate is making googly eyes at him and wishing he'd just forget about this whole damsel rescue. Along the way the rescuers make an unexpected alliance with other enemies of the kidnappers. The kidnappers need the human scientist to help them overcome their reproductive problem so their race doesn't die out, but the space station needs the guy back so he can turn off a machine of his before it blows everybody to bits. What follows is a series of illogical plot twists intermingled with craptacular action scenes. Seriously, I think the writers were so bent on having something unexpected happen that they didn’t really care if it actually made sense or not.

The special effects are downright goofy and the sound effects make them all the worse. The whole thing just comes across as painfully low budget. If you like ultra low budget sci-fi then this is the movie for you!

MORALITY:

This is a very tame movie. The violence is bloodless and cheesy.

The sexuality amounts to some unconvincing kissing.

Strong language is minimal.

There's a scene with some aliens with weird eyes that might freak out some little kids but if you let them watch Buck Rogers you can let them watch this.

SPIRITUALITY:

Robots can be aliens, too!

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Don't bother! Seriously, you're going to end up shooting yourself in the head with a ray gun if you try to sit through this.

#WarOfTheRobots