War Of The Robots (1978) Disc number two in Retromedia's optimistically named "Italian Science Fiction
Collection" is clearly the worse of the two. Just how much worse is it than War Of The Planets? Uh, about ten minutes worse. I had a hunch that this one was going to be a
bit more challenging to navigate than the other one (chiefly due to its
inferior cover art), so I saved it for last. I also thought that if I started
with the easier of the two, I might achieve some sort of immunity from this
one's bad effects, dubbing, story, and picture quality. (Thanks to Retromedia
for their presentation of what looks like a full frame tenth generation copy
taped off the late late show about twenty years ago - it really adds to that
whole "this set hosed me out of fifteen good bucks and three hours of my
fast-fading youth" vibe.)
You realize as soon as you're sitting there watching people in ugly jumpsuits
and silver boots
walking around a really big space ship that's furnished with nothing much more
than office
chairs and small black and white TV monitors that this is the sort of thing
that man hasn't
found a cure for yet. You almost wonder if Italians go into their movie
theatres with those
little surgical masks on and make frequent trips to the lavatory to wash their
hands, just so
they don't bring any Antonio Sabato Syndrome home with them. I mentioned the office chairs in this movie as I did in the War Of The Planets review, but I noted something additional about them in this film.
These are the kind of office chairs that have wheels on the bottom of them! I
wonder if NASA
has ever thought of that? That would make it really handy in those zero-g
situations because
your chair could roll around along whatever surface it floated to. I also
noticed that when
there was a scene requiring everyone to shake themselves to simulate an
on-board explosion that
these chairs also reclined and tipped a bit, only adding to the sense that a
terrific amount of
destruction was being done to the warp core or maybe the copy room.  With ten extra minutes to play with, this movie was able to really keep its
story going even
beyond the natural endpoint (minute 65 to be exact). Of course with ten extra
minutes to play
with, this necessitated the longest and least interesting and most technically
deficient
spaceship battle you've ever seen. I think the last fifteen to twenty minutes
of the movie
were devoted to guys in motorcycle helmets that had been painted with pointless
swirly designs
sitting in these ugly cockpits and looking around while the camera moved up and
down a little
to simulate space flight.
And while I'm talking about these helmets that they're wearing, can I ask what
the point of
them is? Let's assume that these helmets are just what they appear to be and
do not possess
any type of electronics gear or communication gear in them, because we all know
that they
didn't even have a chinstrap, let alone a wireless com system. That means that
the only reason
to be wearing these helmets (other than to protect Antonio Sabato from going
into the seizures
he surely started having after his agent "nabbed" this role for him) is to keep
the head safe
if you wreck your starship. I see two different scenarios. The first one I'll call the "busted windshield" scenario. That's when the
aliens chuck a space
rock through some part of your ship pelting your head with debris. If at some
point during a
big battle in space, your ship gets a hole in it and chunks of it start falling
in your lap, is
your helmet really going to be saving your bacon? Or are you just going to be
sucked into space
or if you're lucky you'll just blow up with the ship.  This leads me to my second scenario. This one I've termed the "Frank Poole
2001 World Tour" scenario. Frank of course is the guy who got ganked by HAL
in 2001: A Space Odyssey and floated off to an unremarkable TV career guesting numerous times in such
favorites as Matt Houston, Murder She Wrote, and Barnaby Jones. Let's say you've got to bail out of your ship. If you're in the Earth's
atmosphere, a helmet might be okay since there's a chance you could land on
something hard (like land) and survive. In space, you'll just float and
eventually suffocate or be ripped apart by little space particles flying into
you. Landing on your skull is the least of your worries. Keep in mind also
that we're talking about a space program whose spacesuits include the kind of
work gloves that farmers buy for a buck and a half a pair at the local Farm &
Home.
You're probably thinking that so what if these guys are wearing helmets for no
reason (you probably wouldn't think it was for no reason once you got a gander
at the guy with the awful Texas accent who puts on a pair of old cowboy boots
with his space jumpsuit whenever the captain leaves and puts him in charge. A
guy like that definitely needs a helmet!) so long as there's all these robots
at war! I couldn't agree with you more. I thought the idea of a War Of The Planets seemed a little far-fetched (once they got close enough, their gravitational
issues would pretty much fight the war for them) but this was promising to be a
robot free-for-all.There'd be armies of gleaming Terminator-style warriors
ripping each other's arms off, using their bionic eyes to do all sorts of
dastardly things, and guys blowing up in a shower of sparks and flying
wingnuts. How could any of that go so terribly wrong? Well, one way it could is if all your robots were wearing Andy Warhol wigs. And
if they had faces that were painted with gold face paint. And if they wore
shiny silver suits and insisted on using these toy ray guns that couldn't be
bothered to do more than flash a light and emit a badly dubbed zapping sound
whenever they were used. Oh, and since this was 1978, there was even a scene
with a big light sabre fight! That is to say, they whipped out these toy
swords whose blade kind of glowed or maybe just glinted or something. One of
the benefits of having a robot army (even one as sartorially challenged as this
one) is that it allows you to re-use the same eight or nine guy over and over.
Thus, a good portion of the movie is spent with these guys getting shot by our
good guy Earthlings. If you're a fan of guys with white pageboy haircuts
falling over and laying on the ground in a heap, you should enjoy about
forty-five minutes of this movie. These robots are really just the sissy-looking henchmen of a race far superior
to our own. They're far superior to us except that they have forgotten how to
procreate (one Earthman, a case of beer, and a Penthouse could fix that right up) so they kidnap an Earth scientist who is on the cusp
of figuring out how to create life. (Presumably we're talking about artificial
procreation - I don't think he would be eligible for a patent on the regular
way, but I could see where the research would intriguing.) In fact, he was so
much on the cusp of doing it that he had his atomic reactor turned on and
dadgumit but he's the only gomer who can shut the blasted thing off! Can you
say "deadline" and "suicide mission"? I knew you could!  Antonio Sabato and the ugliest space crew this side of the ugly space crew in War Of The Planets settle into their Budget Executive Leather Chairs (about $80 each online) and
fly off to find out where these pansy robots have fled to with their precious
scientist. Just to make sure that Captain Antonio Sabato would be interested
in the mission, they also kidnap his girlfriend for good measure.
In keeping with the tradition of horrid Italian space movies (established by
the now classic War Of The Planets I believe), there's a space walk that demonstrates just how far the Italians
came with their special effects since that movie. And exactly how far had they
come? Well, the effects aren't any better than purely putrid, but they are much
more comfortable showing off their lack of prowess in this department because
you get another space walk scene toward the end of the movie as well! Eventually, they land on a planet where the robots are, encounter a race of
freaks that the robots and their masters have enslaved and even make a new
friend of the slaves' leader. It sounded like everyone called him Kuva and he
was a bald guy that wore black eyeliner, which made me think that by letting
him join up with their crew, Captain Antonio wasn't missing his girlfriend as
much as we all thought he was. With Kuva's help, the crew finds the old city where the bad guys live and have
the scientist and Lois (Captain Antonio's gal pal) held captive. But they're
too late! It seems that the scientist and Lois have joined up with the bad
guys and she is now their empress! She may not be totally sold on that though
because she helps Antonio escape and agrees to stay on as the scientist's wife
if he'll agree to let the others live. They all end up on the ship flying back
to Earth, but the scientist gets killed by Lois and she takes a space walk over
to the bad guy's ship and Antonio is forced to decide during the climatic and
astoundingly lengthy space battle (known in the history books as "The Hundred
Years Space Battle") whether to shoot Lois out of the sky or allow her to shoot
down one of his own crew members. He wastes her, smiles a little and utters
the classic line "To hell with Lois!" I never figured out why Lois turned bad,
but she had bad hair so I wasn't overly concerned with her, just so long as she
got killed and stuff. This one is way too long to really recommend for its poor production values and
confusing story like you're probably wishing I would. It's just way too hard
to sit through to make it to the few amusing moments. Moments such as the silly
robe that the scientist wears when he's on the planet (did he think he was
Merlin or someone?) or like when a robot gets cut in half and you see a chopped
up dummy hit the floor complete with electronic innards sticking out that look
they were from some kid's build-your-own-radio kit he got from Sears. It is as
cheap and as rotten as you are imagining it to be, but it isn't nearly as fun
as you are hoping it to be. Just how low rent was this one? Well, let's just
say that at least War Of The Planets had seat belts on the office chairs!
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