Robot Holocaust

Director Tim Kincaid made other entertaining and campy films in NYC during the 80s like BREEDERS and BAD GIRLS DORMITORY (a favorite) but neither of those contain a performance as memorably bad as Angelika Jager. Speaking English with a heavy (French?) accent and trying to be menacing while wearing a long feather boa in her hair, Jager gives a performance of transcendant awfulness that should be treasured by bad cinema addicts the world over. Just try to keep a straight face as Jager tries to actually act while trying to remember her lines as us in the audience try to even understand the nonsensical dialogue through her heavy accent. Amazing!

I was so "impressed" with Tim Kincaid's MUTANT HUNT that I gave this one a try. It is the near future, post apocalypse of course. A wandering fighter named Neo (no, not that Neo!) joins a group of similar looking fighters to challenge The Dark One and his underling Valaria. Along the way they encounter mutants, crazed females, sewer worms, a big spider leg and some clunky robots. Oh my!

Sadly, ROBOT HOLOCAUST is hardly up (or down) to HUNT's level. Clocking in at a painful 79 minutes (the box says 90), this is one cheap flick. The sets have all the elaborate design of a carnival haunted house and the costumes prove that in the near future everyone will dress like John Travolta in the final dance number of STAYING ALIVE. The atomic wasteland is a combination of rubble filled old buildings and Central Park. The Dark One's headquarters is ominously named The Power Station and looks like, well, a power station. The acting is universally bad except for Angelika Jager as the evil Valaria. Jager is a whole 'nother level of bad. Vit er sick Cherman acczent, she gives a performance so amazingly bad that it becomes the sole reason to recommend this film. She also delivers the film's only nudity in the "pleasure chamber" section of the film. Ed French again supplies the robot effects but they aren't nearly as slimy as his work in MUTANT HUNT.

After starting his film career making gay porn (under the pseudonym Joe Gage), director Tim Kincaid (not his real name either) tried his hand at low-budget sci-fi movies, turning out cheesy cheapo trash like Breeders (1986), Mutant Hunt (1987), and this dreadful post-apocalyptic garbage which still has more than a whiff of homo-eroticism about it: the film opens with some man-on-man action, as two warriors stripped to the waist wrestle to the death; there are some very phallic rubber-glove-puppet creatures called sewage worms that lunge at the heroes; Andrew Howarth, surely a Chippendales reject, stars as long-haired mute Kai, whose economical costume consists of a small banana hammock; and choice lines of dialogue include 'Is there a small knob at the tip of one end?' and 'I'm reaching behind you'.

Still, it's not all penis-shaped monsters and sweaty men grappling each other: Robot Holocaust also features really bad rubber robots, the most unconvincing matte painting that I have ever seen, a very attractive female villain played by Angelika Jager (seriously hot, but also contender for worst actress in movie history), a corpse-burrowing surveillance drone, the terrifying 'beast of the web' (a hairy rubber claw), cruddy mutants (who get decapitated), and a character called Neo who might be the saviour of the human race (sadly, not played by Keanu Reeves, but rather no-talent Kincaid regular Norris Culf).

Robot Holocaust is badly written tosh (requiring an intermittent voice-over to help with the exposition) that is occasionally so bad that it entertains, but is mostly so bad that it doesn't. After a couple more straight to video duds, Kincaid returned to the world of gay porn where one can only assume that his real passions lie.

2.5/10, rounded up to 3 for the scene in which a topless Angelika Jager enters a pleasure machine (Barbarella, anyone?), where she fondles a plasma globe proffered by two semi-naked gyrating slaves.

This movie is bad, it goes without saying. But, I have seen comedies that weren't this funny. Really? Sewer socks? A female villain that is a cross between Barbarella and Freddie Mercury? The only reason that it wasn't longer is that Kai had to be back at Chippendales by 6:00. The whole thing looked like it was filmed at William McKinley Jr. High with the art room making construction paper props. The grand total of three robots that comprise the mega population of robotum. Finally, the pasty white legs and tighty whities of the slaves used to feed the dark one. The whole thing looks like a Jazzercise class gone bad. Other than that, it was fantastic.

All right, there's no way to sugarcoat this. The plot was ridiculous, the premise was ridiculous, the acting was unconscionable, the effects were laughable and all of the outdoor scenes appear to have been filmed in New York's Central Park. That having been said, there was something about this movie that I couldn't walk away from. Maybe it was the atmosphere, or maybe it was the evil super-vixen or the amazon wenches.

Anyway I'm not one to sit on the margins and criticise without pointing out a few redeeming qualities, so here they are.

A violent off-shoot of the women's lib movement is portrayed in a wilderness setting (central park, of course), and all of the masochistic young men out there will be very impressed. Furthermore, some of the scenes in which certain characters lose consciousness are amusingly dramatic (you'll note that I write dramatic, rather than convincing).

All I can say is that some people like B movies and I'm one of them. If you're one of them too, then give it a go. Cheers, Mr Kincaid. This is one for the ages.