RoboWar (1988) — Triskaidekafiles

ROBOWAR

WRITERS: Story by Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi
Screenplay by Rossella Drudi

DIRECTOR: Vincent Dawn

STARRING: Reb Brown as Marphy Black
Catherine Hickland as Virgin
Alex McBride as Guarino
Romano Puppo as Corey
Max Laurel as Quang
Jim Gaines as Sonny Peel
John P. Dulaney as Bray
Mel Davidson as Mascher

QUICK CUT: A group of soldiers is sent into the jungle to track down a mysterious killer whose origins will shock them to the core.

THE MORGUE

Marphy Black - The head of the commando unit that calls themselves BAM. He’s always there for his friends, a great soldier, and a good man.

Mascher - The man behind the Omega One project, a bit more devious than he seems at first glance.

Omega One - A robotic killing machine that absolutely will not stop.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back Triskelions! We are back once again, and this week out is this strange Predator knockoff that is also a little bit Terminator with just a dollop of Alien on top of it all. And if you suspected such a movie could only come out of Italy, you would be correct! And it stars bad movie legend, Reb Brown. Brace yourselves…

The movie opens up with a choppah flitting around, having taken some damage, and the pilots discussing "Omega 1" going haywire. We cut to said Omega 1 watching the credits, and doing his best Twikkie impression, until he gets as bored as the rest of us, and blasts them out of the sky.

With Omega Supreme confirmed to be out of control, the military assembles a crackhead squad of commandopes to go track it down. Hmm, sounds familiar.

The team is introduced in the most hamfisted form of slideshow exposition, and oh look, a whole jolly crew with jolly pirate nicknames. And the entire team is called BAM, short for Bad Ass Motherfuckers.

And gasp, surprise, secrets are being kept from the BAM squad, and the man in charge is going along as 'technical advisor'.

But we are finally shown the team proper, on a boat riding to Batu Batu and eventually "Ditty Bop" changes the music, and let's just say it's no Mustang Sally.

So they meet up with Mascher, he convinces them to let him come with them, get geared up, and sail off to the island nation of Wherevanesia.

They beach their raft, get ready, and start traipsing through the jungle. And let me warn you, there is a LOT of traipsing. The movie comes perilously close to 'rock climbing' levels of padding.

And...at this point, something absolutely hilarious happens, that ultimately has nothing to do with the movie itself.

Imagine going into battle, and this is your leader.

While watching movies, I'm usually doing some multitasking, and can get distracted. We all do it these days, right? Well I was doing it during my first watching of this a year ago, and when I flicked back to the movie, it was back to playing more credits.

And let me tell you, I was pretty sure this was precisely the exact sort of movie that would have either not been done with the credits yet over ten minutes in, or start doing more credits anyways. Blood Freak did it, why not RoboWar?

But it very quickly became clear that the movie was redoing scenes? Was it a flashback to five minutes ago? Did I accidentally hit something and go back a chapter? Nope, on my copy of the disc, there is a glitch of an entire 10 minute or so chunk of previous footage. It's just a simple hiccup of someone putting in the footage wrong or something, but it really threw me for about five minutes until I sorted it out.

And it is exactly the sort of thing that makes SENSE for a movie like RoboWar.

I swear, if the camera pans around, we will see the wreck of Oceanic Flight 815 off to the left.

Anyways, Quang senses danger and they all have their heads on a swivel. "Blood" blasts away at nothing in the trees, but he sure does clear away a bunch of local flora.

In the remains of the plants, they find a dead body, but it's not one of theirs, as it is stripped to the bone from being there for some time. They also find the corpse’s crushed rifle and things get suspicious.

Not Chuck Norris runs up to tell Smash Lampjaw that he saw a sniper in the trees, and they again try and take the thing out, but a little more sneakily this time.

Son of a bitch is dug in like an Alabama tick

Which eventually leads to Even More Gunfire. The BAMs are not a subtle team of mercs, not in the slightest.

Their target falls from the tree dead, but he's got more damage than they would have caused, so he must have run into their mission as well.

With that taken care of though, it is back to...Walking through the jungle!!

Every so often we cut to Omegavision, which is blocky and orange and has the resolution lower than the original Nintendo. And a weird thing happens. The *background music* gets muffled. Like it's not just music to us, but the CHARACTER IN THE MOVIE hears our heroes' theme music playing and is tracking them by it.

Finally, Blood steps on a trap, and it grabs onto his leg. It's a makeshift version of a beartrap, with spikes in two boards. Papa Doc patches him up, and the team limps along.

But fear not, if you thought their walking through the jungle days were over, there's plenty more, and they get right back to it!

Quang finds another few bodies, actually reused old ones but we'll let that slide, and Mascher runs into his toy wandering the forests.

Robowar flings a knife at his creator, and the coward runs off to the soldiers. He claims a guerilla attacked him though, although they find the buried knife suspicious.

Now that we've had all this action though, it's time to get back to wandering through the fog and trees!

They come across a bridge, and some locals try to make their way across and just get outright massacred as the BAMs save the woman with them.

Our heroes swath of violence gets interrupted when Robowar shows up, feeling left out. But he gets in a few shots with his lasers blowing up a few jeeps.

Since there's not much they can do about it right now, they resume trudging through the jungle aimlessly.

The girl they rescued gives her backstory which no one actually cares about, and eventually the men come across an encampment and decide hey, I know we're on a mission, but lets head down there and massacre every single person. Sure, they're probably all bad guys, but still.

Yes, it's padding. Yes, it's pointless and adds nothing to the plot. Yes, there are better, more creative, well shot versions of similar scenes. But I will take a pointless massacre over more jungle walking any day.

Also there are some hilarious action movie tropes in this, like shooting a wood hut and having it explode in flames.

It's not REALLY a Reb Brown movie until he shouts at the camera.

They get ready to leave, leaving Blood behind to cover their ass, and just as he's wondering who is gonna cover his ass, Robowar returns and shoots him dead. Leave no man behind?

It's clear it is not the work of the locals, but some sort of...hunter or Pred…oop, lawsuit. Robowar reveals himself to the gang and waves, so Not Chuck Norris gives chase.

Guarino gets taken, but not!George Peppard finds the trail, as well as someone's missing hand. Oh no, he's been disarmed.

They find some dog tags for General "Woodring" and say, do you remember him? Well NO, but any time you wanna clue us in...

But the hunt for Guarino continues, which means back to wandering through all the trees!

Which eventually leads to more shooting into the trees, and Papa Doc discovers the creature didn't leave behind blood. Not blood? It doesn't bleed?? Does that mean we CAN'T kill it?!

Hello? Yes, I’m looking for Amanda Hugginkiss.

Bold Bigflank tries to call in for help and gets nothing. So when Mascher shows up, he puts a knife to the weasley man's throat and gets some answers; he created the unstoppable killing machine, and now can't stop it.

To kill some time, we get a flashback to the BAMmers tour in Vietnam, with the aforementioned Woodring, who stepped on a mine, so they left him behind, believing him to be dead. In a few more years, Marphy will give council to a VelociPastor…

But back to more wandering through the forest, which they at least mix things up a bit by having them cross a river.

As he is crossing, Papa Doc says something has him, is not very convincing about it, and drags himself down the river.

For the rest of the movie, Mascher has been carrying a device that looks like he ripped it off the arm of a Predator, and at this point, Quang takes it from the weasel. Like it's a map on the Blair Witch trail, he throws it into the river.

Papa Doc somehow wakes up down stream, shouting for help, but Robowar shows up, so more chasing.

Doc actually manages to catch up with his friends, just in time for a robotic arm to grab him and drag him away.

They find MORE dead reused bodies, and Eat Punchbeef declares they are done running, it's time to fight. As opposed to what they had been doing so far.

Our heroes make a makeshift fort, choosing the battle ground, and Quang seeds the area with mines and tripwires.

They see Mascher with a device, and it can work as a 'death trigger' on Robowar. But it has to be very close, and line of sight.

It’s a watch. It’s a heart monitor. It’s an on off switch for your deathbot. The new Apple Watch, available this Valentine’s Day.

Robowar advances on them, stepping on mines, and suffering precisely zero damage from them. So Mascher hands over a cassette recorder, and heads out towards his toy, to buy the gang time to escape, if the kill switch doesn't work.

The deathbot crushes Mascher's hand, he picks up the kill switch, but gets surprised by his creator. The bot smashes him back, and Mascher lands right on a mine, going boom.

Corey heads out to get the kill switch, and gets killed for his troubles. The remaining trio bears feet out of there.

At least, until Quang decides to stay behind to give the other two enough time so they can make an escape.

The last two make their way to the original hospital built on the island to catch their breath, resupply, and listen to the exposition cassette Mascher left behind.

And wouldn't you know it? He reveals that the man in the suit is actually Marphy's old army buddy he thought was dead, Woodring.

Virginia also goes to work making some napalm to use when they lure the deathbot into the hospital.

Do you like my Castle Greyskull playset?

Robowood lets the tape finish and his origin story be told, before he kicks the door down for the final confrontation.

Blast Hardcheese gets slammed around by the deathbot, but tries reaching out to the man inside the machine, calling out to his old friend, Martin.

It seems to work though, Robowar raises his visor, and we get a pointless flashback, of his dead body. But Dirk Hardpec screams, as he does, and shoves the robot away.

The girl throws the napalm on Robowar, and the pair run away as things go boom. And I gotta say, for something often referred to as the ultimate unstoppable killing machine, he kinda explodes like a total puss.

As the hospital goes up, our dynamic dorkos limp their way to the beach to catch their ride home and no wait, there's Robowar, not dead yet.

Bolt Vanderhuge fights his old friend, giving the girl time to swim out to the boat, and they somehow suddenly end up atop a waterfall in their fight. What is this, X-Men Unlimited #4 geography??

You are one average looking motherfucker.

They stand off against each other atop the cliff, Woodbot once again raising his visor, and begs his old commander to kill him and end his suffering.

He does it, he leaps off the cliff, and Robowar explodes quite nicely and falls off into the water below.

As the carcass falls over, we see the girl unsure about anyone's fate, and Touch Rustrod swims off into the credits.

Jebus, what did they do, BUILD the robot out of C4??

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: Looks pretty solid, all things considered. No real complaints.

Audio: Sounds fine too, although whatever the robot is jibbering about gets pretty garbled, thanks to the processing.

Body Count: WOW this movie rips through bodies, so let’s get to it!

1 and 2 - Omega 1 takes out the choppah about three minutes in
3 - Random white dude gets killed
4 through 13 - A bunch of locals get shot up by our heroes. Give or take. Geeze.
14 - The leader of the gang gets shot up.
15 - One of the soldiers gets knifed by Not Chuck
16 - Reb shoots a soldier
17 and 18 - And he shoots two more
19 - And a fourth.
20 and 21 - And uh, two more.
22 - Asher shoots one for a change.
23 24 and 25 - gunned down by the gang, so, uh…
26 and 27 - And two more but…wait, slow down.
28 - Asher takes down another, come on guys…
29 - Reb shoots yet another
30 - And another, geeze
31 - And another for Asher
...Oh fuck this, there's too many grenades and firing squads I give up. Restarting after the helicopter and only gonna count deaths of actual characters and not wholesale slaughter.

3 - Doc gets blasted by the creature.
4 - Garino gets dragged off.
5 - Papa Doc gets dragged off and skinned
6 - Mascher lands on a mine and goes boom!
7 - Corey gets marked
8 - Kwang gets blasted
9 - Robowar gets blowed up good.

Best Corpse: The best corpses are the dead bodies they find.

Blood Type - C: There’s some blood, a few mangled bits, but ultimately not much to speak of.

Sex Appeal: If you like bare arms and chests, you’re golden!

Drink Up! every time they start aimlessly wandering through the woods.

Video Nasties: The encampment attack is a good fun segment.

Movie Review: Y’know, for a knock off mash up of three different movies…this actually isn’t half bad. It is fairly coherent, thanks to being fairly straightforward. The plot holes are at least so ridiculous you don’t even care. The action is good enough, and the movie is well made, for this level of thing. It’s biggest flaw is all the padding, and all the pointless slaughter until we get to the meat. But it’s solid enough. Three out of five death watches

Entertainment Value: It’s an Italian knock off. Starring Reb Brown. And actors who look like far more famous people. The acting is so campy, they chew up so much underbrush. The action is ridiculously over the top. What a wild ride. It’s everything you expect this sort of movie to be. Four out of five Omega 1s.