The War of the Robots (1978)

This movie is TERRIBLE.

It starts out fine. You've got your future guys in miniskirts and civilization sufficiently advanced to build robots that look just like people and can walk and fight, but not sufficiently advanced enough for those robots to not talk like "PLEASE.COME.WITH.ME.HUMANOID."

All the characters call each other by their first names, which is hilarious. Captain John will be like "I need to stop you Lois! For Julie's sake!" Speaking of Captain John, he is basically Italian Captain Kirk. He is sent to chase some aliens (really robots!) who have kidnapped a genetics scientist, because only that one scientist has the code that apparently stops the nuclear reactor back home from randomly melting down on some schedule. (Little do they know that the code was always with them.. in their hearts.)

So this is an Italian ripoff of Star Trek, with some lightsabers thrown in just in case. Like Star Trek there are tons of scenes of people sitting at starship controls talking on and on about coordinates and vectors and stuff. And there are horribly choreographed alien (actually robot) fistfights. That would all be great, but this movie suffers from reused footage and filler. I can't tell you how many times they show this one scene where they are trying to pretend an alien spaceship is approaching, but all they do is zoom in slowly on the spaceship toy with their camera. There is a thrilling space dogfight, but instead of showing awesome scale models shooting lasers all over the place, 95% of the footage is of Captain John's big head in a space helmet looking at you and telling you about how overwhelmed he is.

When they fight the robots the first time, it takes FOREVER. They shoot the same three guys over and over but shoot it from different angles to make it seem like there is an army of robots. It gets stupid the first time. By the third time they are fighting these robots, you've just about had enough.

Man, what is this movie doing in my Chilling Classics collection? It's on the same disc as Oasis of the Zombies, and while that movie may not be great, you can at least make the argument- on a theoretical level- that, if you were to plot them out far enough on a graph, zombies and general chillingness interact at some point. There is nothing chilling about The War of the Robots. It is just bad.