Review: Robowar (1988)
(aka Robot da guerra)
Directed by: Bruno Mattei (as Vincent Dawn)
Starring: Reb Brown, Catherine Hickland, Massimo Vanni
Written by: Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi
Music by: Al Festa
Country: Italy, Philippines
Available on: Blu-ray (Severin Films)
IMDb
In Robowar, Italian ripoff hero Bruno Mattei takes his shot at Predator (1987), and he really, really goes for it. I mean, he didn’t have Stan Winston on board, so the “predator” here is more like a dude wearing the suit from The Wraith (1986) that they fished out of a dumpster in Tucson, Arizona. But other than that slight discrepancy, Mattei is about 80% of the way to a carbon copy here, an impressive feat even for someone whose career was propelled by shameless cash-ins. Imagine literally any scene from John McTiernan’s flick and there’s a good chance it’s been recreated beat-by-beat in Robowar but stripped of any context, nuance, or logic that made it work initially.
This is about a platoon of wonderfully nicknamed commandos that are deployed to the Phillipines for some reason and they end up being stalked by Omega-1, a robot created to kill that’s gone unsurprisingly AWOL. I honestly can’t remember if any of these soldiers were ever told why they were being dropped in the jungle, because they all seem shocked when the find out they need to kill a “robot” in black leather chaps and spray-painted BMX gear that scats in a digitized little kid voice. However, the lack of directive doesn’t keep them from overkilling a lot of indigenous hooligans at every opportunity. No hyperbole: everyone they encounter is gunned down by all seven commandos firing their automatic weapons for approximately a full minute. Remember that movie Predator, the scene where everyone just brainlessly circle-jerks their magazines into the jungle foliage until there’s nothing left but gunsmoke and spent testosterone? That happens here every time a Filipino needs to die.
Back to the nicknames, because they’re incredible. The squad is called BAM, short for “Big Ass Motherfuckers” because … they have sizeable buttocks? Who knows. Natively Italian writing and domestic partners Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi likely meant “Bad Ass Motherfuckers,” but they’ve got that special way with the English language that results in lines like “You walk like a ruptured duck” that don’t mean a goddamn thing. The screenplay forces grown men to bellow in agony terms of endearment like “Papa Doc” and “Ditty Bopper” when their comrades perish at the hands of Charlie Sheen. It’s also quite obvious Fragasso and Drudi have no idea how military personnel actually function, but they sure love themselves some fucking hand signals, man. There are fingers flashing all over the place and apparently it all just means “scatter randomly.”
The story here is sadly bogged down in long sequences of macho-tromping through the jungle to unclear destinations while a score that alternates between shitty hair metal and cuts that sound lifted from Contra wails in your ears. There are breaks on occasion for “infrared” predator vision, during which Omega-1 garbles repetitive nonsense in binary (drinking game: guzzle every time the robot utters “receive”), and the occasional gooey gore gag. Though Mattei rarely shows the carnage in action, he isn’t shy about reveling in the aftermath of Omega-1’s crappy paper towel tube lasers, which features a lot of smoking, melting man-meat that looks quite convincing. But it’s not enough. Mattei and co. take their jobs a bit too seriously here, largely succeeding at producing a dollar-store version of their inspiration without as many of the WTF trappings you’d normally find. This middling Mattei is likely dampened by a predominantly American cast that doesn’t have the magnified sense of melodrama of their paisans across the Atlantic.
Overall rating: 4 out of 10
