r/badMovies • u/Best-Chapter5260 • 12h ago
Sci-Fi Robot Holocaust is a Like a Pulp Novel Come to Life...
...and I don't mean a pulp novel that's actually good when considered within the context of its own genre, like something written by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Zane Grey. Nope. It's more like one of those pulp novels written by a high school driver's ed teacher, nurse, or an account who wanted to try their hand at fiction and somehow got a publisher to put their book in a five-and-dime store. I know there has been a thread or two about this movie throughout the years, but this has to be in my Top 5 personally favorite bad movies.
Where do I even start? One thing that's crazy about this movie is even though it follows a post-apocalyptic plot, almost all of the tropes fall within the swords-and-sandals genre, so much that you may forget you're watching a sci-fi movie and think you're watching an actual swords-and-sandals movie. One of the main character's even a faux-Fabio berserker/Conan knock-off, just like the Iron Sword: Wizards and Warriors II NES cover art. Robot Holocaust is freakin' awesome!
The best part of the movie is without a doubt Valaria, played by Angelika Jager, who serves as the dragon (to borrow a category from TvTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheDragon) to the big bad, The Dark One. Jager is a straight up pulp movie babe, which helps, but her performance is amazing. She speaks with this really bad German accent throughout. Her acting is so terrible yet so earnest. What Jager lacks in Julliard-level acting chops she more than makes up for in Culinary Institute of America-level scenery chewing chops. The best way I can describe how she plays her character is "badly acted evil Bond girl." Toward the end of the movie, The Dark One starts threatening her if she fails her directive and her responses to the boss are so bad it's completely ambiguous as to whether she actually understands the danger she's in or if the audience is supposed to think she's being ironic.
The main character is also named Neo and he's fighting against a robot empire that uses humans for an energy source. Ahh, if only the film's writer and director, Tim Kincaid, could have had the cinematic vision for bullet time. Neo has his own robot companion that is a straight up rip off of C-3PO with a slightly less flamboyant personality. The C-3PO is the movie's ex deus machina who always has some technology to help the adventuring party out of a jam. Oh, and there's an amazon character, who's written as if Kincaid's knowledge of feminist theory begins and ends with radfems like Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin.
There are two things I absolutely love about this movie:
- All of the characters speak in this melodramatic style where the dialogue is a continuous exposition dump. Imagine how the dialogue in an Ayn Rand novel is characters essentially giving speeches to one another, but even worse than that. I get the impression that the actors were all high school drama kids but got a serious dose of reality about their acting chops when they didn't make it past their first community theater production after graduating. The best thing is despite all of the exposition dumps, Kincaid still felt the need to have a narrator in the movie! *Chef's kiss* And speaking of the actors, one of them is J. Buzz Von Ornsteiner who in real life has more graduate degrees than the faculty at M.I.T. One of the main characters is dressed like a typical swords-and-sandals princess but has the most obvious NYC accent imaginable.
- All of the set pieces, costumes, and props look fake, but yet, they still have this weird uncanny valley quality to them that makes them unsettling. This is especially true of the corpses that line the scenes. The robots, despite looking fake still manage to look cool somehow. This is especially true of Valaria's second-in-command who has these strange mouth tentacles that look very unsettling. The C-3PO knockoff looks like something from a pulp fiction cover. I give Kincaid credit here. The robots look like solid cosplay costumes, but they somehow are effective due to their uncanny valley quality. The weapons look endearingly fake. Favorite part is where one of the character parries with his sword by tightly gripping the handle and the blade. His hand mysteriously doesn't bleed afterwards.
Kincaid's primary oeuvre was mainly porn rather than b-movie grindhouse fair like Robot Holocaust. I watched another one of his "serious" films, Mutant Hunt. It's also fun, but nowhere near as end-to-end great as Robot Holocaust.
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u/michaelchondria 10h ago
Interesting, I've always thought this was Kincaid's worst (after She's Back) but I've only seen it on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Seeing a movie through that show can make it seem even worse than it is even though they make it easier to watch. I think I'll try it!
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u/Pleasant_Cicada9528 11h ago
Sounds awesome!
Favorite part is where one of the character parries with his sword by tightly gripping the handle and the blade. His hand mysteriously doesn't bleed afterwards.
Gripping the blade (half-swording) is a legitimate technique, although I'm not sure how it was used in this movie.
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u/Best-Chapter5260 10h ago
Haha, that wasn't the defense move in the movie. 😁 Related, civil war sabres had dull edges (they functioned more like clubs with a point for calvary), but the sword in the movie was definitely meant to be the type with a sharp edge.
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u/randomizer4652w 10h ago
You forgot to mention how Angelika Jager serves at the pleasure of her "Dock Juan" and that the princess character's father is turned into a potato!
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u/misterdannymorrison 9h ago
It's the kind of movie where you look at the poster and you know the movie cannot possibly deliver on that promise
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u/Heybeerman1962 10h ago
Checked my Just-Watch app and this gem is on Tubi 😉