Robot Holocaust

• Written and Directed by Tim Kincaid
• January 20, 1987

A group of heroes crosses a post-apocalyptic wasteland to save a scientist from the tyrannical Dark One and his army of robots.

Robot Holocaust is quite possibly the very definition of a poorly done if not a completely bad movie. I can’t find one positive thing to say about this movie other than a moment of needless and gratuitous nudity on the part of a character whose name I can’t recall because all these characters blur together. That really was the high point in the movie with most everything else being far less. When nudity is the best thing, you have either you’re a porno or are just a festering turd of a production.

It’s not even a film like Samurai Cop that transcends its poor quality to become something good. There are no unintentional moments of humor or moments of guilty enjoyment other than the aforementioned moment of nudity. And the more I think about it, the more the scene feels like an attempt at avant garde softcore porn.

It’s not bad because it uses a plot done numerous times before and since The Terminator. As recycled as that idea is, it can be quite entertaining. This just does everything badly. The dialogue is clunky and awkward. And it doesn’t help that the acting is as awful as the dialogue. Nobody even tries to polish this turd. Then again I’m not sure if they possibly could with such winning dialogue as “Who is this woman who walks through the She Zone with male scum?” I laughed at that so maybe I might need to partially rescind that statement concerning no unintentional comedy.

I swear the robot costumes we see are slightly altered versions of those used in Ice Pirates. Seriously. The costuming for the human actors looks like it’s taken from any number of fantasy films or generic low budget science-fiction movies. I’m not against cutting corners. Sometimes you can do something good on the cheap, but this isn’t something good done on the cheap. Then again I’m convinced these were not skilled filmmakers. A couple of pals got drunk and decided to make a movie more likely.

I don’t know if they were going for a campy tone or tried to be serious and just landed in campy. Campy can be okay though it’s not my favorite thing. I’m just not sure if the director knew what to aim for. Was there even a director?

I would like to point out a particular character or actor in this, but I know nothing about any of them yet I have watched the entire movie. There’s no definable characteristics that separate one from another. Aside from the villain called the Dark One and he was just a disembodied voice. I don’t know if the Dark One is a computer system or the crystal they keep looking at that shows only one particular thing they’re looking at or what. No idea how the Dark One came to be in charge of everything nor what exactly the Dark One is as a being.

This was clearly shot outside of some city either in a local park or on stretches of property where no one really wanted to go anyway because there was nothing there. These people are supposedly trekking through wastelands of the near future. It’s some pretty nicely manicured stuff or it looks like piles of dirt and rocks pushed up by a bulldozers just to get it all out of the way. Maybe even the back area of a large public park where nobody really is meant to go. I don’t know.

This is around 79 minutes, but it feels so long because it is just so bad. I’m not joking about that. I paused the movie after what I thought was a good 45 minutes if not an hour and it was just under a half hour. By the time the finale rolled I had lost almost all interest and had trouble focusing. Most likely this lost me probably not long before the finale but it felt like long before the finale.

As a curiosity Robot Holocaust is worth a watch. But it is a painful curiosity that may not even be worth watching as a cheesy joke to yourself.