The War of the Robots (1978)

This is one of the most difficult movies I have labored to get through. I'm not trying to be witty when I say that War of the Robots makes Starcrash look like Revenge of the Sith. The effects are so poorly done that it's a wonder why this was even made. Much to my surprise, this is actually the fourth of five, yes five, of these sci-fi films made with basically the same cast. A group of android aliens kidnap a scientist and his assistant Lois in order to save their race. The androids are a group of thirty year old men dressed in silver jump suits with blond bowl-cut wigs. Antonio Sabato plays Captain John Boyd who leads the mission to recover the Dr. and Lois, whom he is enamored with much to the chagrin of his fellow crew-member Julie. The Julie character is very disturbing due to the abnormally butch haircut given her. Picture a junior high boy with great boobs. Disturbing anyone? By the way, in the future bras are nonexistent.Everything about this film stinks! Characters change allegiances then change back without any explanations whatsoever. The dialogue is about as enthralling as listening to a tax seminar. Even the name of the ship, the Trissi, sucks. I was trying to think of why they used such an odd name for the ship until I saw the ending credits. Yep, Trissi Sport supplied the costumes! The dubbing is horrendous as is most notable in one character that has the worst Texan accent ever. The music soundtrack is absolutely putrid. I've heard songs preprogrammed on an old Casio better than this. The weapons consist of flashlight guns with no lasers. At one point in the film the sound of the gun disappears making the scenes even more absurd. The final duel in space is even worse. At a mind-numbing one hour and thirty nine minutes I was reduced to a shell of my former self. This is truly the gutter of science fiction films. Avoid at all costs!

"Representatives of an alien civilization on the brink of extinction arrive on Earth and kidnap two top research geneticists in the hopes they can find them a cure to their problem. Looking to stop a potential alien invasion and rescue the scientists, a group of soldiers is sent on a mission that could decide the fate of two civilizations," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.Badly dubbed, from Italian to English, "War of the Robots" is about as complete a waste of resources as you can imagine. It stars handsome Antonio Sabato - if you want to see soap star Antonio Sabato Jr.'s father in an extremely cheap "Star Wars"-ripped movie. He juggles beautiful Malisa Longo and Bowie-coiffed Yanti Somer. The film's sound effects much have been recorded inside somebody's intestines.* La guerra dei robot (1978) Alfonso Brescia ~ Antonio Sabato, Yanti Somer, Malisa Longo

Wow! this is an awful movie. Made in the days when science fiction films were the worst film genre in the business, War of the Robots is an utter waste of time and the producer's nugget. In this story we have Antonio Sabato leading a crew of space people in an effort to rescue a professor and his knockout assistant - who Sabato lusts for - from the evil clutches of cinema's most laughable robots. If men in their thirties and forties sporting Buster Brown haircuts and silver jumpsuits is your idea of a menacing brigade of androids, then this flick is for you. Filmed in Italy, it was shipped to Hollywood and all th European actors had their names Americanized: such as Melissa Long and Lillian Lacy to cash in on the sci-fi hysteria.VIOLENCE: $ (The worst sci-fi shootouts are presented in this film, but keep in mind, they aren't shootouts in the usual sense. The laser guns simply flash light - they do not shoot laser beams or anything other projectile for that matter. The robots, who kill only one crew member, all die with a single flashing from Sabato's light gun. We also have "light sabers" that are basically plastic swords that illuminate. Watching Antonio slap the Buster Brown bots with this toy sword - and then laughing at the method at which the robots die - makes for unintentional hilarity).NUDITY: None. The makers knew they had to sex up the picture a bit so they chose to give random closeups to Lillian Lacy and her sizable bust. Her character, who has more screen time than the Commander, is never given a name but simply referred to as the Commander's assistant in the credits).STORY: $ (Absolutely inane! The professor and his assistant change allegiances as often as Pamela Anderson does husbands. In a future society, with everything run on or by machines, I find it quite ridiculous that the professor is the only man in the universe who can fix a reactor that presents impending doom to civilization).ACTING: $ (Antonio Sabato looks like he'd rather be doing anything other than taking part in this film but he grins when the script calls for it and issues the insipid lines of dialogue when asked).

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).