La Guerre des robots

Poor dubbing, special effects, and acting- oh my! This is truly one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Clearly made in Italy and then dubbed over in America to hopefully make more more money, this is a horribly done copy of Star Wars. The "story" is as follows: A "Brilliant" professor and his "Brilliant" assistant are kidnapped by some guys with Blonde wigs on. Some space station attempts to save them. Hilarity ensues. Every once in a while, a bunch of colors will flash across the screen for half a minute. This movies is probably best to avoid if you experience seizures. Actually, this movie is probably best to avoid no matter what.

War of the Robots is a much better film than its sickly half-sister Cosmos War of the Planets. Both feature likable actress Yanti Sommer and the same Italian directing and production team, and some of the scenes could have been freely interchanged between the two films. Both films attempted to cash in on the brief resurgence of action / sci-fi ushered in by Star Wars: A New Hope, and probably did not do particularly well. I would imagine that seeing them as a double feature at a drive-in might have made for a very entertaining though somewhat grueling night.

the plot of WOTR is much more interesting than what passes for a plot in Cosmos War. Both involve a multinational crew of earthlings attempting to combat somewhat inept, impolite and amazingly technologically underdeveloped intergalactic travelers who, of course, don't really look or behave very differently from bad humans. In this case, however, the aliens are mostly robotic, bleach-blond 20-25 year old young Italian men who all look as if they just auditioned to replace Brian Jones in the rolling stones. Jones died in the late sixties, just like the fashion sense this movie espouses. Everybody wears psychedelic clothing, despite the very uncomfortable form-fitting plastic leotards donned by the space ship crew. The ship itself is one of the more realistic ships I have seen in a space adventure. It is an awkward, odd-looking thing, resembling neither an F-15 nor a winged space-Corvette.

The war begins when the Brian Joneses kidnap a slightly megalomaniacal college professor who seems to have a singular genius for mechanical and electrical engineering, nuclear physics and genetics. One or all of these specialties have allowed the professor to create a device which now threatens to destroy a fairly large city back on earth, and the professor and his really annoying though apparently brilliant research assistant are charged with the task of creating artificial life for the Brian Joneses' masters, an aging race of paraplegic immortals. The captain of the earth ship, who has a personality which hybridizes Captain James T. kirk and Han Solo, is in love with the annoying research assistant and on a mission to save the earth from the professor's machine by bringing him back to earth to disarm it. Along the way, they free a slave race of cave-dwellers and take their leader, played by Aldo Canti (easily the most likable character in the film), as a new crew member. The plot takes a few twists before it devolves into the usual race against time. Had it been more carefully executed, and had the special effects budget equaled that of Ms. Sommer's salary, the film may have earned a rating of 6 or so from me.

The cinematography, directing and editing are all OK. The script is pretty silly most of the time (especially with the overdubbing) and the acting is all over the map. The weakest moments are, unfortunately, the ludicrous action scenes. None of the actors, with the possible exception of Ms. Sommer and Mr. Canti, are physical actors, and the fight scenes are poorly choreographed to say the least. Oh! and the much maligned soundtrack??? I LOVED IT!!!

this is a fun little film for B sci fi buffs, with little merit for anybody else.

Have you noticed that about half of these Italian sci fi movies have people sitting at their panels on the space ship, wearing helmets, and talking with their backs to us. Then there are the silly costumes and antics of the aliens. This film goes to some really low levels. It's about an intervention to save one space culture from another. There are two female leads competing for the attentions of the space hunk. There are a group of silly aliens who keep getting recycled (I'm sure there were only about five actors) and shot. There's a shirtless leader who doesn't dress the way the rest do (he looks like he may have just escaped from the gay pride parade in New York). I don't know. Do things like this make money for their producers. There is nothing here to maintain interest other than the cheese. I've seen so many of them that they don't entertain much anymore. Skip this one.

Call me crazy, but I found "War of the Robots" to be a campy charmer. While the plot--involving a crazy professor and an "empress" (who looks like Zora Kerowa's evil twin), a league of blind alien beings, and a league of Aryan robots--is negligible, the film possesses a low-budget spirit that carries it quite a ways. Sure, it feels like a rip-off of "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Dark Star," and even "Cave Dwellers" (which came a few years later), but it's low-budget fun in the same way that playing with "A-Team" action figures was fun when I was 5. That, and the atrocious special effects, lousy dubbing, chintzier sets, and sci-fi tropes (ray-guns that are really nothing but souped-up flashlights) makes "War of the Robots" especially juicy for a MST3K-style skewering with a group of friends (one wonders how this avoided the Satellite of Love).

Professor Carr (Jacques Herlin) and his attractive assistant Lois (Malisa Longo) are abducted by silver skinned aliens in bad wigs, who are later revealed to be androids ruled by a wicked empress intent on ruling the galaxy. Rather inconveniently, the professor is the only person alive with the know-how to prevent the potentially catastrophic explosion of a malfunctioning Earth satellite, and so a perilous rescue mission is quickly launched, with Captain John Boyd (Antonio Sabato) in command of the spaceship Trissa (the name of the company that provided the film with its funky PVC space suits!).

Never ones to ignore a trend, opportunistic Italian directors quickly jumped on the late-70s sci- fi bandwagon, churning out some amazingly horrendous films in the process; one such effort was The War of the Robots, a pulp sci-fi stinker that clearly aimed to mimic both Star Wars and Star Trek, but which missed the mark in almost every way imaginable, providing none of the spectacle, excitement and technical wizardry of those particular films, but plenty in the way of unintentional laughs as Boyd and his brave crew spout ridiculous 'futuristic' space jargon, are repeatedly duped by obvious traitors, and do battle with wave upon wave of inadequate androids that possess all the fighting prowess of a bath sponge (whether it be with a gun, a laser sword or a space-craft, the robots seem incapable of killing their enemies).

Other silliness includes a couple of pathetic space-walks, a Texan character with a distinctly un-Texan accent, a minor character called General Gonad (snigger), the dullest space dogfights imaginable, and a sub-plot that sees shapely crew-member Julie (Yanti Somer) holding a torch for Captain Boyd, who remains oblivious to her obvious charms until the film's heartwarming finale, when he finally realises that, despite a rather unflattering Ziggy Stardust haircut, she is a total babe (as are all the women in his crew, whose PVC space suits appear to be a tad tighter than those worn by their male counterparts!).