Somewhen post-doomsday: robots have taken over the world and humans are
scattered through the wastelands. The Dark One, a kind of supercomputer
enslaves the humans he can get his hands on, gasses those he cannot. But
wait, there is an old man, Jorn (Michael Downend), who is able to resist
the Dark One's gasses, so the Dark One has his second-in-command Valaria
(Angelika Jager) and her sidekick Torque (Rick Gianasi) kidnap him, to
torture the secret of his immunity (it's a newly developed device) out of
him. He won't talk, of course. In the meantime, Jorn's daughter Deeja
(Nadine Hartstein) and the rebel Neo (Norris Culf) organize a rescue
party, consisting of such diverse characters as the man-hatind amazon Nyla
(Jennifer Delora), the mute barbarian Kai (Andrew Howarth), the klutzy
robot Klyton (J. Buzz Von Ornsteiner) and others, and they head for the
Dark One's headquarters, facing many a terrible threat, but finally they
make it, and are ultimately even helped by Valaria, who has had a fall-out
with the Dark One due to her inefficiency. Deeja's father though is
beyond saving, he has been put into some kind of cocoon by the machine and
only asks to be shot. However, our heroes manage to free the Dark One's
slaves and destroy the supercomputer for good - and that's worth something
at least ... There are no two ways about it, Robot Holocaust
is a pretty bad film: The script, consisting of elements of the then
popular Conan-movies,
Red Sonja, Escape from New
York, the Star Wars-series and even Alien,
mixed with elements from vintage pulps and serials, seriously lacks in
originality and isn't even well-compiled, the cast is uniformly
sub-standard (even though Angelika Jager's overacting is at least
amusing), the sets (mostly warehouses, abandoned powerstations, quarries
and the like) are apparently on the cheap side, the special effects are
dirt-cheap and less than convincing, as are the monster costumes and
makeups, and the whole thing seriously lacks any real excitement. And
all of this is exactly what makes Robot Holocaust so utterly
enjoyable, it's a hilarious trip down nostalgia lane, to a less
sophisticated time (the 1980's) when films didn't try to hide their
sillines and the visions of the future were still fuelled by old-fashioned
pulp-imagery more than anything else. Granted, this is no genre classic
of any sort, but a hoot to watch.
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