The War of the Robots (1978)

You won't be disappointed!

How sad is this?

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Everything in this film reeks of lifting many ideas from the original Star TREK TV series! The bridge with the big screen for viewing, personal quarters, the crew is from planet Earth, monitors on the ship for viewing communications with crew-mates, sliding doors, color coded uniforms, aliens holding hostages, etc... I kept expecting to see a rip-off of a Vulcan (Mr. Spock) walk onto the screen. The only Star Wars influence I really see here are the laser-swords and the end fighting where they seem to be mimicking Skywalker and the guys in X-wing fighters, plus Darth Empress saying something about "leave that one to me" (she wanted to get him like Vader did Luke) but mainly the film is borrowing heavily from Star TREK TV series.Story of this movie is OK, special effects fun, terrible acting, but the movie is kinda fun to watch, I'd rather watch Star Trek but this is not a downright awful film to view.5/10

Professor Carr (Jacques Herlin) and his attractive assistant Lois (Malisa Longo) are abducted by silver skinned aliens in bad wigs, who are later revealed to be androids ruled by a wicked empress intent on ruling the galaxy. Rather inconveniently, the professor is the only person alive with the know-how to prevent the potentially catastrophic explosion of a malfunctioning Earth satellite, and so a perilous rescue mission is quickly launched, with Captain John Boyd (Antonio Sabato) in command of the spaceship Trissa (the name of the company that provided the film with its funky PVC space suits!).Never ones to ignore a trend, opportunistic Italian directors quickly jumped on the late-70s sci- fi bandwagon, churning out some amazingly horrendous films in the process; one such effort was The War of the Robots, a pulp sci-fi stinker that clearly aimed to mimic both Star Wars and Star Trek, but which missed the mark in almost every way imaginable, providing none of the spectacle, excitement and technical wizardry of those particular films, but plenty in the way of unintentional laughs as Boyd and his brave crew spout ridiculous 'futuristic' space jargon, are repeatedly duped by obvious traitors, and do battle with wave upon wave of inadequate androids that possess all the fighting prowess of a bath sponge (whether it be with a gun, a laser sword or a space-craft, the robots seem incapable of killing their enemies).Other silliness includes a couple of pathetic space-walks, a Texan character with a distinctly un-Texan accent, a minor character called General Gonad (snigger), the dullest space dogfights imaginable, and a sub-plot that sees shapely crew-member Julie (Yanti Somer) holding a torch for Captain Boyd, who remains oblivious to her obvious charms until the film's heartwarming finale, when he finally realises that, despite a rather unflattering Ziggy Stardust haircut, she is a total babe (as are all the women in his crew, whose PVC space suits appear to be a tad tighter than those worn by their male counterparts!).

I didn't so much as like this movie as was captivated by one of the minor characters. As far as the movie goes, it had moments of entertainment between very poorly edited/directed scenes that almost put me to sleep. It obviously, and as others have stated, tried to exploit other successful SciFi movies. The 'robots' were almost funny but I guess when you have no money, you costume a bunch of starving extras and call them robots. I loved the green, form-fitting, crew jumpsuit uniforms on the women.One of the minor female characters captivated me though. She was the one that was shot in the back while escaping. Unfortunately,IMDb doesn't have any pictures of the cast so I can't figure out who played the part, since she is among the characters listed as "Trissi crew". Between a beautiful face and her tragic end, I can't help coming back to it as being one of the few properly directed scenes in the whole movie. We see little of her until the battle in the big room. Everyone is making their getaway but she hangs back to protect the others. Alas, her nobility is repaid by being left behind. As she breaks for her escape, she is shot in the back and killed by a robot. Her body rolls down the steps and rests face up with "dead eyes" staring up at the camera in a haunting shot. I can't understand how someone can direct such a good sequence but make the rest of the movie such a yawner! Anyway I would love to know more about the actress that played the tragic and noble "Trissi crew".

Had "War of the Robots" appeared several years earlier, it might have worked a bit better. That's because the quality of the special effects would have looked great about 1965--but after films like "2001" and especially "Star Wars", this Italian film just looks crappy. At no point in the film are you able to believe that they are in outer space--suspension of disbelief with these effects just isn't possible.If you set aside the terrible sets and effects, you are left with a story that has a good story hidden underneath all the stupid histrionics (more about that in a minute). A race of aliens called the Anthor have become sterile. So, to preserve their species, they steal bodies of other races. To make things worse, the Anthor are real jerks--with that whole 'let's take over the galaxy' mentality. So, it's up to the intrepid humans to fight in space to save our species after Professor Carr and Lois are captured--and the aliens inside these two bodies are now leading the assault on the humans! This isn't a bad idea for a story--but later, and here's where it gets really dumb, the alien inside Lois STILL has the hots for her old human boyfriend and ultimately throws aside all her lust for power and galactic domination because of this lust!! Talk about dopey!! The film is not 100% awful--hence my score of 3. The 3 certainly would not indicate it's a thoroughly bad film--but it certainly won't be mistaken for a good one! The film looks cheap in most respects and isn't quite bad enough to make for must-see viewing by bad movie buffs.