Let's be realistic.

As Good As It Gets

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The potential for something very entertaining here is unmistakable. War of the Robots is a clear Italian rip-off of Star Wars. And it does amuse me to think of the people who unwittingly must have pitched up in cinemas in the 70's to see this on the back of that massive blockbuster. I'm not too sure if they would have been very impressed to be perfectly honest.The robots of the title are a group of hilariously silver suited androids that sport haircuts similar to Brian Jones from The Rolling Stones circa 1968. The Brian Joneses are the villains and they appear throughout the movie in laser gun battles and light-sabre fights. They are the best thing about War of the Robots. Because overall, this is an overlong yawn-fest, with way too little going on to excuse it's running time. As camp entertainment it's OK but there simply isn't enough decent quality cheese to make up for the tedium.Watch it for the Brian Joneses and then turn it off.

You know, it's like a Spaghetti Western, but with ray-guns.This film was made in 1978, after Luigi and Mario figured out there was some money to be made in this Science Fiction stuff. so what you have is a ripoff of Star Wars with no budget for special effects or sets or actors. But they did have a bunch of people running around in really tight spandex. And some gal with a butch haircut who wonders why the captain doesn't notice her. Well, because you have your hair cut like a boy, you silly thing! They even had their android soldiers wield something that looked vaguely like lightsabers.I still think we should confiscate Italy's entire supply of blank film, just as a precaution.

Robot Wars is the first Italian science fiction film I've ever seen. It makes their spaghetti westerns look like the best of John Ford. It's an obviously feeble attempt to cash in on the world wide popularity of Star Wars.A couple scientists are kidnapped off a futuristic space station by a race of alien cyborgs to help preserve these artificial creatures existence. Now maybe if they'd asked instead of taken in the true spirit of the United Federation of Planets, help might have been granted. But the aliens get grabby.The second problem is one of the scientists was doing some experiments involving the nuclear reactor and no one can shut the darn thing down. If the earthlings don't get their guy back, the whole station's going to blow up.The special effects are laughable, the aliens are laughable, the dubbing leaves a lot to be desired and the cast looks like they're going through the motions. I can't tell who acted worse the humans or the cyborgs.Robot Wars has a lot of unintentional laughs in it though. The Force was not with the producers of this film.

Professor Carr (stolid Jacques Herlin) and his assistant Lois (the luscious Malisa Longo) are kidnapped by an army of evil robots. It's up to stalwart Captain John Boyd (the hopelessly wooden Antonio Sabato) and his intrepid crew of space rangers to save them. Totally all-thumbs director Alfonso Brescia allows the pace to plod along at a sluggish pace and stages the action scenes with an alarming lack of skill and finesse. The tacky (far from) special effects, Silvio Fraschetti's cruddy, grainy cinematography, the rusty tin-eared dialogue (choice line: "So, you have a plan; perhaps you're planning on murdering everybody"), Marcello Giombini's goofy synthesizer score, the uniformly terrible acting from a dreadful cast, the bland, talky cookie cutter script, and the lousy dubbing all add immensely to the overall deliciously cheesy fun. Sabato makes for a singularly colorless and underwhelming lead. Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as the stoic Roger, Aldo Canti as the bald, benign Kuba the Alien, and Dino Scandiuzzi as the eager young Jack are all likewise pretty bad. At least the cute Yanti Somer as the gutsy Julie and the ravishing Longo as the treacherous Lois supply some tasty eye candy. Campy highlights include a couple of sub-"2001" spacewalk scenes, two uproariously pathetic "Star Wars"-inspired laser swordfight sequences, and the spectacularly shoddy protracted spacefighter battle sequence which serves as the film's less-than-thrilling climax. Moreover, the evil robot army is quite funny: they're a bunch of guys wearing silver lame outfits and sporting retro 60's British invasion band moptop wigs. An amusingly awful gut-buster.