Robowar—Robot da guerra (1988)

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2021) I did not suspect that there was such a thing as a low-budget Predator rip-off. But there is. To be specific, Robowar could easily be retitled “That scene in Predator where they machine-gun the entire jungle—The Movie,” considering how often our characters unload their entire arsenal at innocent flora. The pretext for their landscaping has something to do with a soldier robot out of control (bringing in the mix either Robocop or The Terminator) but you know the routine no matter the justification: A bunch of good guys against one bad guy, this time in the jungle. It’s about as good as you’d expect, which is to say — not very. Behind the scenes, the film is a mixture of Italian filmmaking, Philippines production values (at a time when the Marcos regime was only too willing to help movies shoot in the country) and American actors. Not that it matters when bad filmmaking transcends international borders: Robowar is just terrible. Bad actors, bad script, bad directing from Bruno Mattei, and bad production values — you’ve certainly spotted the common denominator here. It does have a rough sense of fun in terms of bad-movie watching, but the bad pacing kills off any of the energy that such a production could have had. If you want to sit through Robowar just to claim that you’ve finally seen an Italian Predator rip-off, well, I’m not going to stop you. But there are better things to do.