Tim Kincaid, who has burdened the viewers of bad movies with such treacle as Mutant Hunt and the original 1986 Breeders, took a moment out between these two "films" to horrify and shock the world with a front runner for "Worst Fucking Movies Of All Time": Robot Holocaust. Though it has brought entertainment to many a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" viewer, back in the Comedy Central days, Robot Holocaust is just that when viewed as it's originally intended stand alone format, a holocaust. It's a holocaust of the mind, a holocaust of the soul and a holocaust of all 17 natural senses... oh, sorry, I forget you humans have yet to evolve past your measly 5, sometimes 6 senses. Well, when it comes to shit like this, consider yourselves lucky in that regard, as certainly all of my 17 sense were assaulted non-stop by the pure putridness of this celluloid nightmare.

The pain all begins back in 2033 (sorry, forgot you can't spread the fabric of time like a cheap French whore's legs much the same way I can either), when man's greatest creation, artificial life, rose up against it's collective masters, putting an end to the age of man and bringing about the rise of robots... as opposed to Rise Of The Robots which, though lame, was still better than this movie in terms of videogame-to-B-movie comparisons. Wiping out much of the Earth's human populace and poisoning the environment with radioactive contamination, the tin men revolt has all lead up to this one moment... two very dirty and near nekkid men wrestling... uggh. These two guys are fighting for the right to continued survival as slaves of the metal ones, with the winner finding sweet sweet salvation from this pathetic movie with a quick and semi-painless death. Why does the winner die? This is the Dark One's way of separating the weak and pathetic guys happy in slavery from the potential rebels... and I thought democracy sucked when George W. wormed his empty head into office... Speaking of humans (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), the last of the human race are called Air Slaves because they cannot survive without the last remaining supply of oxygen in their home of New Terra. The only reason they're allowed this oxygen is through the courtesy of The Dark One, the supreme evil of robotic technology, who pumps oxygen into New Terra and keeps the monkeys alive so they can do the mining and other menial physical labor that the lazy rust buckets now feel is beneath them. If everyone would just stop and take a good look at each other, the robots and humans would all realize they're not so different and could live in harmony with one another without the need to enslave each other or kill each other or any of that senseless crap. After all, robots are just people in bad plastic robot costume... at least here anyway...

Amidst the Air Slaves circulate tales of a nomadic people who travel outside in the land of technological horrors, who can actually breath the polluted atmosphere with little or no problems, and who may someday lead the Air Slaves back to their former glory and their rightful spot above robots on the social hierarchy... oh look, they can breath radioactive oxygen, surely they'll be unstoppable against the robots' vast technological resources, super computer brains and far superior tools of destruction! That's about as believable as Battlefield Earth. Hey, Roger Christian and John Travolta, take notes from Robot Holocaust: if you want to make a horrible and vastly unbelievable sci-fi blunder and ruin your careers while doing so, you don't need to flush $73 million down the unholy Hollywood crapper to do so! Yes, bad Halloween costumes, actors who couldn't thespianize their ways out of tissue boxes and keeping filming locations strictly to public parks and your uncle's basement will do just fine, just try not to get mugged while filming in the park and remember to remove all the porn mags and crack pipes from the basement and everything should go as planned... Getting back on track, as if anyone gave two oddly shaped turds that resemble Jay Leno (or his "humor"), the battle of the dirty, greasy men is decided by their robot foreman, who just zaps 'em both, quells the angry slaves with a dose of polluted oxygen and leaves with one of the miners who can apparently perform proper respiration with the irradiated air (though it probably makes his lungs glow in the dark too)... well, so much for an Air Slaves Workers Union.

Afterwards, our nomadic "hero" Neo and his new robot sidekick (apparently not all artificial intellects think alike) introduce themselves to the rebellious miners... I guess since the miners are dependent on the air of New Terra, it actually does make sense that there'd be very little security in such a place to keep riffraff squatters like Neo out. Privy to the taking of the radiation breather, Neo takes to questioning the man's daughter, who too can breath the pollutants courtesy of a device her father, who also happens to be a brilliant inventor, created himself... yes kids, you too can created complicated personal breathing apparatuses with simple items found around the house... provided your house is a dirt hole lorded over by sentient killing machines... plastic killing machines... you have no idea how much this hurts. As for Neo's presence, he's here as an ambassador from his tribe of outcasts who can breath the poisoned atmosphere, looking for recruits to help out in their organized rebellion against the machines and the overthrow of the Dark One. Everybody's up for it, and just like that they all waltz out of their confinement and trek out for the wastelands. While braving the ruination of their surroundings (which looks a lot like a very unruined metropolis similar to Manhattan... though the word "unruined" is a rarity when referring to NYC), our brave band are attacked by a gang of pissed off Amazons! These aren't the attractive type who use men for nothing but sex then leave the next morning, like those in Hercules And The Amazon Women, but the violent type who kill men and eat their livers for the sweet alcoholic nutrients they hold. Uhm, they don't exactly do all of that, but they hate all men, meaning that this will likely be the only generation of these man-hating dykes.

Neo really plays up his ambassador job (which was likely just an excuse for his tribe to kick him out of their loosely formed nomad society) and convinces the Amazons that not all men are evil, some are like him: too naive/stupid to be evil. Secure in their sexuality and strapping on their tolerance (as opposed to their big pseudo penis accessories that they're usually strapping on), the butches join the party and our ever expanding rebel mob marches on in their common goal. Meanwhile, you have to wonder what the "all powerful" microwave known as the Dark One is up to while all this is going on. Well, first of all, let it be known that he (since it does have a distinctly masculine voice programmed to it) is indeed keeping tabs on his would-be overthrowers. Secondly, ol' Darky (don't worry, it's not racist, the thing's a fuckin' over-hyped Speak & Spell after all) has little thing called the "Pleasure Machine", with which he rewards his skanky, trashy, female human minion when she remembers to use a coaster when setting her glasses of Tang on him. The future definition of "pleasure" is a little off in comparison to mine though, since I can think of a lot of things that would entertain/arouse me better than standing in a cage and touching one of those Spencer's Gifts lightning globes while a topless couple dances around a fog machine, but then, what do I know, I'm just an omnipotent deity. While I'm on the subject of Darky's evil airhead Valeria, I'd like to make it know right now that my idea of "pleasure" would be to mutilate this slut, cut her out with a rusty butterknife and sodomize her with a cattle prod! Don't think of me as sick and twisted though, cuz that's exactly what the Oregon legal system does to the worst actors that enter their territory... what, you think I'm kidding?! Go look it up! And while you do so, I'll just run in the opposite direction whilst your back is turned... suckers, heh heh...

So, with their little band fortified with more than enough female basketball players for the job, the gang march toward Darky's sinister Coney island disco power plant of death. On their journey they come across many dangers, like a sewer pipe inhabited by man-eating sock puppets ("deadly sewage worms") and some of the worst "mutants" I've ever had frolic across my television screen, "dangers" which our mighty crew conquer with ease. After all that work, the good guys make it to Darky's HQ, only to be disappointed when they discover it to be nothing more than a bad matte painting of an evil power plant... oh wait, WE'RE the ones who are disappointed to find it's just a bad matte painting, while the heroes are left with the daunting task of keeping a straight face when referring to said illustration as a genuine domain of horror. Back at New Terra, the Air Slaves are already in a panic that their comrades have been gone for ONE FUCKING DAY and they've yet to see any results, meaning that the group must obviously be dead... firstly, I was unaware that the guys were working their daring coup de'ta around an agreed upon schedule, and secondly, these Air Slaves are awful demanding for results, throwing a fit of paranoia so early when they should just shut their pie holes and be thankful Neo bothered to let them in on the deal at all! Well, unhappy with the pace of the invasion, the Air Slaves decide it's time to make their own attempt at stopping Darky, via fucking around with (i.e. sabotaging) the evil quisinart's fuel supply through their slave mining operation in a way that's so simple and stupid that I'm shocked they either didn't try it sooner or that Darky's bound to fall for it.

Fighting their way through the catacombs of the Dark One's lair (more basement scenery), the party vanquishes "The Beast Of The Web", which I'm guessing is meant to be a giant spider, but in reality is just a really cheap looking giant spider leg. How cheap? Think about those stupid little elementary school Halloween projects your teacher used to make you do with the paper spiders with black pipe cleaners for legs. Now, take one of those black pipe cleaners, multiply it's size by about 1000 and you've got a good idea of what I'm referring to. Having vanquished the "beast", our heroes sally forth through Darky's "Chamber of Despair", the some more booby traps and robot henchmen, before finally coming upon Darky himself. The entire film has been working up to this dramatic climax, in a scene that I'm just gonna bypass and sum it up like this: with a combination of the Air Slaves' meddling and a laser gun zap from Neo, Darky is destroyed and mankind's continued existence is secured... as long as the coincidental mutation the nomad's gained (the ability to breath toxic gas) turns out to be the next step in man's evolution and not some lucky fluke. Unless that scientist guy can whip up enough respirators for everybody. Either way this whole charade seemed a little too easy considering this ragtag group of nitwits may have saved all of humanity just by knocking off a few extras in bad make-up, a handful of angry arms with socks over them and an artificial intelligence that my childhood Calecovision would have little trouble out Ponging. Shit, if I weren't so lazy, I'm pretty sure I could've saved the world from the Dark One with little more than a pocket knife, two cans of Old Milwaukee, a child-proof lighter and a comfortable chair on wheels. Okay, that's enough about the movie itself, let's get to the technical crap so I can end this horrible chapter of my existence.

If Ed Wood were alive today, he'd be making shit like this. The problem with that is, Wood's pictures had a charm to them, in that movie making technology of that bygone era wasn't all that great to begin with, so despite the fact his FX, writing, stories and actors all sucked, they didn't suck as bad as Robot Holocaust does in comparison to the movies of the '80s. Actually, Ed Wood movies are far more pleasant than this movie. To what CAN I compare Robot Holocaust with? Well, since I just saw Half Baked last night (for the 30th time), let me put it like this: what's watching Robot Holocaust like? Imagine stripping naked and running backwards through a cornfield. Honestly, the real Holocaust didn't affect me THIS badly! The robot rebellion theme is nothing new in the world of moviedom, and it's something that can be accomplished rather well when done right, say in the hands of James Cameron, Stan Winston and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their Terminator movies. Robot Holocaust, in case you've been far too stoned to pay attention to the review you just witnessed, is FAR from being a Terminator or a 2001: A Space Odyssey, falling more along the lines of botched colon surgery. It's not good to make a movie where technology and mutants are your villains, especially if you don't have the FX budget to support a 20 minute childrens' show on PBS, let alone a feature film. Brutal killing machines with legs are not well represented with plastic costumes worn by actors who can't even remember they're supposed to act stiff and mechanical. The antagonist's menacing lair is not well represented by a 5th grader's art project. Mutant worms that are supposed to pose a serious menace are not well represented by tube socks with cardboard teeth that are put to shame by the hand puppet monster that came with the He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe Fright Zone Playset... I'm sure all my childhood Hordac figures are spinning like ravenous tops in the little graves I dug for them... or just their dismembered appendages on some occasions... So, as the folks at Marvel Comics would say, 'nuff said. Now go repent your sins like I'm about to and watch something that DOESN'T make you pray for death 15 minutes in.

Sequels: Nope

If You Liked This Flick, Check Out: Befriending Tim Kincaid, that way you'll be in close proximity with him when I put three slugs between his eyes... hopefully I can save a couple bucks a few of those will penetrate through to your brain too...