Robot Holocaust

This movie made me cringe - and afterwords it left me feeling violated and empty inside. The script could have been made by a group of 11-yearolds, the acting was horrible. The FX were , on the other hand, very entertaining , but not in the intended way - the wall of sock-puppet "sewer worms" and the Spider leg made us burst out in laughter.

This movie is hard to watch even for die-hard fans of b-movies, and although I am glad that I made it though this piece of oozing garbage I will make damn sure never to do it again.

Favourite character: Garth the macho Conan-type barbarian :D

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.

After starting his film career making gay porn (under the pseudonym Joe Gage), director Tim Kincaid (not his real name either) tried his hand at low-budget sci-fi movies, turning out cheesy cheapo trash like Breeders (1986), Mutant Hunt (1987), and this dreadful post-apocalyptic garbage which still has more than a whiff of homo-eroticism about it: the film opens with some man-on-man action, as two warriors stripped to the waist wrestle to the death; there are some very phallic rubber-glove-puppet creatures called sewage worms that lunge at the heroes; Andrew Howarth, surely a Chippendales reject, stars as long-haired mute Kai, whose economical costume consists of a small banana hammock; and choice lines of dialogue include 'Is there a small knob at the tip of one end?' and 'I'm reaching behind you'.

Still, it's not all penis-shaped monsters and sweaty men grappling each other: Robot Holocaust also features really bad rubber robots, the most unconvincing matte painting that I have ever seen, a very attractive female villain played by Angelika Jager (seriously hot, but also contender for worst actress in movie history), a corpse-burrowing surveillance drone, the terrifying 'beast of the web' (a hairy rubber claw), cruddy mutants (who get decapitated), and a character called Neo who might be the saviour of the human race (sadly, not played by Keanu Reeves, but rather no-talent Kincaid regular Norris Culf).

Robot Holocaust is badly written tosh (requiring an intermittent voice-over to help with the exposition) that is occasionally so bad that it entertains, but is mostly so bad that it doesn't. After a couple more straight to video duds, Kincaid returned to the world of gay porn where one can only assume that his real passions lie.

2.5/10, rounded up to 3 for the scene in which a topless Angelika Jager enters a pleasure machine (Barbarella, anyone?), where she fondles a plasma globe proffered by two semi-naked gyrating slaves.

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.