Robot Holocaust

What a despairing film. Dress actors in furry rags, place in suburban wasteland, set cameras rolling and hope for the best. One can only imagine e the thanks the cast gave when their characters were killed off by sockpuppets, thus sparing them further humiliation in this dullfest. This rivals Monster a go-go as the best cure for insomnia ever made. Oh God - how can I fill up 10 lines explaining how overwhelmingly bored everybody looks in this movie? Whiney crappy plastic bungling robot who annoys everybody both on and off screen, Giant spider reduced to a single giant hairy leg pulled by string, actors desperately trying not to look at the camera while mumbling off dialogs...

I can't say I wasn't warned.

After all, MST3K's writers -- who week after week subjected themselves to the most putrid scrapings from the bottom of the cinematic barrel -- made a running joke out of this one. That's often how people deal with a particularly traumatic experience.

And this movie really delivered the hurt.

I wouldn't exactly call the general level of acting here "wooden" -- because it's positively petrified. Angelika Jager (Valeria) is a revelation: calling her style "robotic" would imply something far better than the actuality. It's not over-acting so much as anti-acting: Ms. Jager's got an undeniably beautiful instrument, no argument there at all, but it's as if she's trying to play it with her big toes. Whether it's dialog or body language, she literally never misses a chance to come across as stunningly awkward.

And it's not as though there was even one mildly competent actor in this mess, to throw her transcendent awfulness into stark relief; she manages that feat quite well on her own, thank you very much.

But I pile on.

There's no point in going into the details of the ridiculous story, inane narration and preposterous dialog, but rest assured, it's all here, along with "sewer worm" hand puppets who look like Ollie the Dragon with a terminal case of the mange, a giant spider (well, they could only afford one leg), robots, mutants, amazon warriors and badly choreographed fight scenes.

And of course his Moldy Avocado-ness, the Dark One (or "Dak Wan", in Valeria-speak).

Annoying rip-offs include a C3PO clone who fails miserably to provide any comic relief, as well as a score which lifts a theme from Bernard Herrman's music for "Mysterious Island" and then beats it to death.

By the way, one thing the other reviewers seem to have missed is that according to the opening narration this nonsense is supposedly taking place on a colony planet. (That's why the air's bad and they had to import a bunch of robots to do the work.) I guess the colonists were so homesick for the mother world they had to create a painstakingly accurate replica of early 1980s New York City to live in. Or maybe these futuristic Pilgrims were a splinter cult of Scientologists who regarded John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever" as their prophet.

Whatever. If given the choice, I'd prefer to be repeatedly bludgeoned with the Manhattan Yellow Pages rather than endure another viewing of this movie, but aficionados of 80s' trash might get a laugh or three out of it. Just be forewarned that this isn't your average, everyday, grade-Z chunk of post-Apocalyptic cheese: it's a steaming, radioactive pile of cinematic Limburger.

Movies like this really will rot your brain.

Director Tim Kincaid made other entertaining and campy films in NYC during the 80s like BREEDERS and BAD GIRLS DORMITORY (a favorite) but neither of those contain a performance as memorably bad as Angelika Jager. Speaking English with a heavy (French?) accent and trying to be menacing while wearing a long feather boa in her hair, Jager gives a performance of transcendant awfulness that should be treasured by bad cinema addicts the world over. Just try to keep a straight face as Jager tries to actually act while trying to remember her lines as us in the audience try to even understand the nonsensical dialogue through her heavy accent. Amazing!

All right, there's no way to sugarcoat this. The plot was ridiculous, the premise was ridiculous, the acting was unconscionable, the effects were laughable and all of the outdoor scenes appear to have been filmed in New York's Central Park. That having been said, there was something about this movie that I couldn't walk away from. Maybe it was the atmosphere, or maybe it was the evil super-vixen or the amazon wenches.

Anyway I'm not one to sit on the margins and criticise without pointing out a few redeeming qualities, so here they are.

A violent off-shoot of the women's lib movement is portrayed in a wilderness setting (central park, of course), and all of the masochistic young men out there will be very impressed. Furthermore, some of the scenes in which certain characters lose consciousness are amusingly dramatic (you'll note that I write dramatic, rather than convincing).

All I can say is that some people like B movies and I'm one of them. If you're one of them too, then give it a go. Cheers, Mr Kincaid. This is one for the ages.

Angelika Jager, eh? What a woman! Alas, the sad fact is young Angelika is the only reason this film is worth even half-watching – and even then only if you're a heterosexual male – because everything else about this film is total trash.

Angelika plays Valaria, the sidekick of the Dark One, a deep disembodied voice who issues veiled – and not so veiled – threats to his lovely assistant as the cartoon power station in which he resides is visited by a young hero called Neo who is – well, to be honest I can't quite recall why he's there. Wants to free humankind from the Dark One's tyrannical grip, I think; something like that, anyway. The fact is, the rank amateurishness of all aspects of this film quickly had me sinking into a kind of stupor, from which I would only emerge when the lovely Angelika was on screen.

Now I can't claim that the lovely Angelika is exactly an actress of quality – in fact the truth is she could easily be out-acted by a toothpick – but she possesses the kind of luminous beauty that makes such matters irrelevant. Anyway, it would be impossible to possess such beauty and acting talent – it just wouldn't be fair. Angelika has a sulky, sensuous mouth and a sexy French accent identical to Valerie Kaprisky's in Jim McBride's 1983 remake of Breathless and, although she can't act for toffee, there's something Bergmanesque (Ingrid, not Ingmar) about her that is quite enchanting.

Not that her lack of acting talent singles her out for criticism in this cast of nobodies. Everybody looks as if they're envisaging in their mind the words as they appeared in their script, and very carefully repeating each one, completely forgetting to add any kind of emotion into their lines. The guy who plays the heroine's father has only one expression throughout, regardless of whether he's watching two gladiators scrapping, describing his boffo invention, facing the terror of coming face to face with The Dark One, or being slowly absorbed by the aforementioned Dark One – who actually looks like a slimy green egg – so that only his living head remains. That expression is one of expressionless boredom – an image that will probably be mirrored by anyone who sits through this rubbish.

This gets one mark for Angelika's sultry looks and no other reason