Subj : Robot Holocaust (1987)
To : All
From : Arelor
Date : Tue Feb 28 2023 06:03 pm
Hello, moviegoers! I know you missed my awesome movie reviews, so here I am with yet
another film! This review should not be considered a regular one, however, because I
want to think it is a warning to prevent uncautious people from making the same
mistake I made and watching this garbage.
I believe myself unable to command the English language with proficency enough to
convey just how awful this film is, but for the good of humanity I will try my best.
Robot Holocaust's sorry excuse of a plot takes place after the Robots rebel against
humanity, enslave us and take control of the planet. In order to operate their power
production facilities, robots keep human slaves working day and night, feeding their
power plants. It order to ensure the humans can't rebel, the robots control the air
slaves breath. They have the power to supply or deny fresh air to the workers, so
thoughts of rebellion are impossible, until some underground scientist and his
daughter create some technoawesome implants that allow humans to survive without fresh
air. When the robots learn this, they capture the scientist and hold him for
interrogation. It is up to a bunch of human misfits to sneak into the fortress of the
Dark Master, the supreme AI, and save him or die trying.
It looks like a good enough plot for a B-Movie, doesn't it? That is just what I
thought myself. Let s see what went wrong.
For starters, the screenplay development is so badly done you'd think the filmakers
were all from Italy. They can't convey the core plot points via screenplay, so they
resort to exposition infodumps. I am not against infodumps as a matter of principle -
for example, Star Wars would drop an infodump at the begining of each movie to get the
story going - but the issue here is it is obvious they need to dump the information on
the unsuspecting viewer every three minutes because they can't figure a way of giving
us core information on the go.
This translates in many scenes in which we get voiceovers explaining things that would
have been self-explanatory with proper planning. For example, if your Sci-fi world has
mutants and you want to elaborate on the nature of the mutants, you have two options
for conveying the idea. The first one is to casually introduce the subject in some
scene before mutants are encountered, posssibly via some dialog ("I am scared of this
place. My uncle told me there are mutants about. They were all radiated by The Bomb
and turned into cannibalistic monsters!") The second one is to just throw the mutants
at the heroes as soon as they enter the forest and have a narrator tell the audience
"There were mutants in the forest".
I hesitate to classify the acting as atrocious, because I fail to see any acting in
this movie. I have not done any research, but I feel tempted to bet many of the actors
and actresses had never participated in a film in which they were all dressed and not
boinking each other before.
Robot Holocaust tries to capture the athmosphere of Sword and Sorcery movies and add a
cyberpunk twist. Robots and mutants are torn asunder by barbarians wielding cardboard
swords. It could have worked if the scenery and the customes didn't look purchased in
some post-carnival sale in which retailers were trying to get rid of all the customes
that hadn't been sold because they were so fucking bad. The sword fighting was
atrociously filmed, and the mutant monstruosities were so cheaply made I doubt they
spent more than ten bucks on the whole thing.
All in all, the only Holocaust in this movie is the one you will get if you broadcast
this over mainstream media and have people watch it. I guarantee most of the
population will commit suicide two minutes into the film, not because of the pain of
watching the movie itself but because of the pain of knowing the Universe is such a
dark place that the laws of physics allow movies like this to be a possibility.
Don't watch. You have been warned.
--
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