Robot Holocaust (1987)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Taking a look at the muck at the very bottom of the cinematic barrel may not be fun, but it’s sometimes necessary if only to recalibrate the notion of a “bad movie.”  Despite cries and protests of movie critics and snooty cinephiles, Hollywood doesn’t churn out bad movies on a regular basis. The vast majority of what’s available in theatres is at least professionally made and watchable. There’s much, much worse out there—things like Robot Holocaust, for instance. It’s nominally a Science Fiction film in which our heroes go to rescue the father of one of their own and end up defeating a major villain. But that plot summary is the last halfway coherent element about the film, because the longer you watch, the dumber it becomes. Not that it takes much more than a few seconds to understand that this is low-budget tripe made by “filmmakers” limited by budget and competence. Issued from the infamous Charles Band production factory of terrible films and written-directed by Tim Kincaid, Robot Holocaust is perhaps a bit too obvious a target of cinephile ire — it’s one of the movies satirized in Mystery Science Theater 3000, and has thus been branded forever as a bad film. The thing is — they’re not wrong. Robot Holocaust is terrible. It’s dumb to the point of insult, badly designed, incompetently executed, and eventually becomes a pain to watch. The low-budget production values are obvious, and the script blends the worst elements of heroic fantasy with words borrowed from Science Fiction without understanding their meaning. I’m actually getting tired of the film all over again while writing about it, so that’s it for a review — bad film, worse than the worst things to show up in theatres. See it only to recalibrate and re-appreciate other films all over again.