Robowar is a 1988 Italian Predator rip-off which makes a nice change from Exorcist, Star Wars and Aliens rip-offs. And it’s directed by the one and only Bruno Mattei. Robowar rips off another movie as well but to reveal which one would be to reveal a spoiler.
The US Government assigns a crack team of anti-guerrilla jungle fighters for a mission to a small island. The team is led by Major Murphy Black (Reb Brown). Much to Murphy’s disgust he finds that Mascher (Mel Davidson) will be going along as well. Mascher is one of those scientist types but he’s an intelligence agency type as well so Murphy doesn’t trust him one little bit.
There’s one thing Murphy is sure of – he hasn’t been told what this mission is really about. It certainly isn’t about fighting guerrillas although that’s what he’s been told. Mascher knows what it’s about but he’s not saying.
They do encounter guerrillas but they’re dead and horribly mangled and disfigured. No animal or human being could have mangled bodies that way.
Then the team realises it’s being stalked. And eventually they realise that whatever is stalking them can’t be human.
Murphy and his team also encounter a girl (played by Catherine Hickland) in the jungle. There has to be a girl of course. Her name is Virgin (yes really). She’s been doing some humanitarian stuff in a nearby village but now every single person in the village is dead. She will have to tag along with Murphy’s team if she wants to stay alive.
Whatever is stalking the team starts to pick them off by one. It seems to be unkillable. They fire thousands of rounds of small-arms ammunition at it with no effect whatsoever.
It will become crucial to find out what they’re up against but persuading Mascher to talk proves to be difficult. He knows they can’t kill him because he is probably the only one who knows how to kill this thing.
Mattei of course was working on a very low budget. By the late 80s budgets for Italian genre movies were minuscule. There’s no way he could afford a cool semi-invisible monster like the one in Predator so we have to make do with a robot. We know right from the start that we’re dealing with a robot so that isn’t a spoiler. And the only people evil enough to create such a horrifying killing machine would be the U.S. military so that isn’t a spoiler either.
Tens of thousands more rounds of small-arms ammunition get expended and there are plenty of explosions. There are some reasonably gruesome scenes. There’s lots of gung-ho testosterone-fuelled violence. Murphy’s team is composed of very tough hombres but they may not be tough enough.
Mattei keeps things racing along. The movie was shot in the Philippines and the jungle scenes really are excellent. Claudio Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi wrote the screenplay. They worked with Mattei regularly. Mattei and Fragasso would make movies in tandem with Mattei directing one movie during daylight hours while Fragasso was directing a second movie at night on the same location since they could only afford one camera. Fragasso apparently directed a couple of scenes in Robowar.
You don’t want to worry about how plausible the story is. It’s just an excuse for non-stop action scenes.
The robot is the problem. It doesn’t come across as sufficiently scary or cool and the high-pitched tinny voice is off-putting.
The acting is fine for this type of movie. We get a bunch of very colourful characters with just enough personality to make us care whether they survive or not.
Robowar lacks Predator’s very cool special effects but it is action-packed ultra low budget fun with lots of mayhem. And it has enough Italian genre movie craziness to keep things interesting. Highly recommended.
Severin’s Blu-Ray release looks great and there’s a stack of extras in the form of interviews. Claudio Fragasso’s account of the world of low-budget film-making in the 80s is worth hearing.