Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Ploydsge just watch it!

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Bezenby Not wishing to go down the road of the late eighties Italian haunted house films of Lamberto Bava, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci, Marcello Avallone and Fabrizio Laurenti, Bruno Mattei instead relocates the slasher film to the jungle, and instead of screaming teens pits a bunch of muscle bound soldiers against an unstoppable killing machine. Believe me, you haven't seen anything like this before.Reb Brown (Strike Commando) stars as Reb Brown (Strike Commando), leader of the Big A*s Muthf*ckas, a squad of soldiers hired to go into the jungles of Venezuela to stop guerrilla activity. What a line up! You've got Romano Puppo (Street Law, Bronx Warriors 2), Jim Gaines (After Death), and a buffed up Massimo Vanni (Street Law, Bronx Warriors 2 and After Death). Some other guys too, including an ethnic guide in touch with nature (Where does Bruno get these ideas?), a doctor and a mysterious gentleman along for the ride that Reb is suspicious of, but judging by the skin tight, half-t-shirt Reb's wearing when he gets off that boat, I'm guessing Reb doesn't think about things too deeply so he lets him come along anyway.Things get strange for our macho mo-fos the moment they discover a pile of human bodies torn to bits. What we the audience know but Reb and co don't is that there is an experimental soldier/robot on the loose, killing everything in sight, and that guy who's joined them is its creator. I know, it sounds a bit like Robocop, but Bruno has the insight to inject a bit of originality to the film, including Reb going head to head with a bunch of guerrillas and picking himself up a chick sidekick into the proceedings.The lads start to get the idea that they're being stalked, which leads to several scenes of Massimo et al firing wildly into the foliage, no doubt a satiric remark on Mattei's part regarding the futility of US military might versus guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. Also, Reb (and Jim Gaines!) scream like girls every time they fire their machine guns, a reference to Strike Commando. Reb also gets in a couple of quips, saying 'Don't move' to a guy he's impaled with a machete, complete with a wink to all the ladies out in the audience. Hollywood take note: this is how you do an action horror film.Okay, okay, I'll level with you. This film bears a lot of similarity to another film you may have seen, set in the jungle and involving marines facing something they've never encountered before, being picked off one by one in various gory ways. And that film of course is After Death. Not only does the hospital from that film turn up here in an unforgettable home made napalm set piece, but the very soundtrack from that film turns up at various times. As an even more glaring example of the intricities of Bruno Mattei's conceptual continuity, the director of that film here plays the killer robot. Vast legions of fans devote themselves to finding all these 'clues' in Mattei's film.So, although Massino, Romano etc put up a good fight, you know the film is going to boil down the Reb being the Final Girl. There's a few twists at the end I won't reveal here, and I'm sure Mattei's making some comment about the faceless terrorist threat the West faces every day by having the Venezuelan extras played by Filipino actors, but that's just the multi-layered complexities of a Bruno Mattei film (hell, I'm still finding things in Zombie Creeping Flesh after all these years).This film is crying out for an American remake, probably starring someone weedy and terrible, like Adrian Brody. I can't think of single person who could replace Reb in such a role. Also, check out the mixed up credits for Jim Gaines and Massimo (Alex McBride) Vanni – another little in-joke for us uber-fans.

Comeuppance Reviews Major Murphy Black (Reb) and his team are sent into the jungles of the Philippines to track down and destroy a rogue robot.Much has been made that this is just an Italian knockoff of Predator (1987) and Robocop (1987) (but especially Predator)...that's all well and good, but, that aside, is this movie worth seeing? The answer is definitely yes! For a movie with almost no plot, it's surprisingly fast-paced, and rather than have a lot of dialogue, it's mainly yelling and shooting machine guns. However, there are some gems, such as "You walk like a ruptured duck!". Maybe something was lost in translation, but we're sure glad it was. There are other silly one-liners, but this was our favorite.Fan-favorite Reb Brown is out in force here - looking especially ripped in his child-size half-shirt, he gets to command his team with his trademark screams. But let's not forget about the cool nicknames of the people he's stranded in the jungle with - "Blood", "The Hunter" and "Papa Doc". Naturally, they were picked for this mission because they're "The Best". As for the robot, we get some pixelated "robo-vision", and it seems like a guy in a motorcycle outfit. But he also has a confused, scrambled, "robo-voice" as well, which seems heavily influenced by Buck Rogers' Twiki and his famous "bidi bidi bidi". It doesn't exactly inspire terror, but hey, who's to say how we'd feel if we were in that situation? As if this wasn't awesome enough, the robot can shoot lasers. Of course, they're of the "pew pew" variety! That alone raises the coolness quotient of this movie. And because this never received a VHS release in America (maybe they didn't want to roll the dice with rights issues?), we were sadly deprived of this minor gem in the 80's and 90's. Honestly, it's still pretty hard to find, presumably having been released largely in Japan and Italy, and we thank Sutekh over at Explosive Action for hooking us up with a copy.If you ever wished Predator was an Italian-made Exploding Hut movie shot in the Philippines, and had a robot instead of a "Predator", this is surely the movie for you. Featuring a great synth score by Al Festa and released in the golden year of 1989, Robowar is shameless...ly entertaining fun.For more action insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com

Eric Smith Reb Brown and director Bruno Mattei are notorious for making really bad movies, but this is the worst of the worst! An all-too-obvious PREDATOR rip-off, this movie very nearly copies PREDATOR scene for scene!! Most of Brown's movies are incredibly bad, but also delightfully fun and cheesy. This one is just a pain to watch. As for Mattei, while he's considered by many to be the Italian Ed Wood, he needs to just leave originals alone and stop trying to rip-off other versions of good movies. It's bad enough he would end up making a rip-off of TERMINATOR 2 (even though it's more like ALIEN than T2). This movie is confounded by bad acting, lame dialogue, and from the looks of it, the script is only about 15 pages long!! It rarely makes any sense at any given time! It is interesting to see Catherine Hickland in an early role (she would gain notoriety in the world of soap operas...more specifically "One Life to Live"). This film is rubbish!

Coventry The all-time favorite movie of director Bruno Mattei – may he rest in peace – undoubtedly must have been "Predator". One of the last films Mattei made before his death was called "Cannibal Ferox 3: Land of Death" and it was an extremely blatant imitation of "Predator" where he simply replaced the intergalactic hunter with a tribe of cannibals. When I watched that film, I didn't even know yet that "Robowar" existed and was thus unaware of the fact that Mattei already pulled off the exact same trick nearly twenty years earlier! This is, again, a shameless and outright rip-off of the classic 80's action flick starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet this time replacing the alien with an out-of-control robot that was initially designed as a – surprise, surprise – hi tech secret warfare weapon. Every other even remotely memorable element of "Predator" gets copied here, like the testosterone-driven lead characters, rotting human cadavers lying all around the jungle, the blurry computerized view from inside the robot's helmet, entire pieces of dialogs and even the who-played-who end credits! Needless to say this is a terribly inept and laughable B-movie exploitation product, but it is guaranteed entertainment to watch; especially in case you're an avid fan of typically Italian trash. Bunch of beefcake mercenaries, all of them with bad-boy attitudes and carrying around heavy artillery to compensate for their lack of brain capacities, are sent into to the jungle to complete a mission they know absolutely nothing about. They end up facing a practically indestructible handmade killing machine, although it suspiciously looks like a guy in a latex suit talking like he's a defect cassette with songs for children on it. The Robo-Soldier wipes out everyone before the replacement Arnie leader (Reb Brown) discovers it was constructed using spare body parts from his buddy who died in the Vietnam War. End of story. Obviously "Robowar" is just an insignificant and utterly brainless popcorn Sci-Fi/action/War flick with nothing else than explosives and violent shootouts. Speaking of which, I guess Bruno Mattei spent most of the nearly non-existent budget on explosives and ammunition! These dim-witted mercenaries literally fire off gazillions of bullets. Multiple sequences exist of one hireling randomly starting to shoot at trees and the others joyously join in and waste an entire arsenal. But hey, giving the quality of the acting performances, a serenade of bullets is actually less painful to listen to than the atrocious dialogs. The robot is hilariously cheesy, especially when he produces noise and recollects his past. I cannot possibly reward this movie with a rating that is any higher 3 out of 10, but please rest assured it is recommended and guaranteed entertainment! * note: if you are, like me, a sucker for old movie posters and DVD illustrations, you might have noticed that the cover image depicted here on this page is not "Robowar" but for "Robo Man", an even obscurer 70's Sci-Fi sleeper.