ROBOT WARS (1993) I hope Robot Jox was better than this! Giant robots fighting each other! Full Moon sure knew how to put together an intriguing trailer, but the movies themselves had a way of letting you down even when your expectations were guarded at best. This one's fairly typical - the cover and the trailer both promise giant robots fighting each other, but this only happens at the very end of the movie. Before that, it's mostly low-budget bad with only one giant robot. The stop-motion giant kill-bots are fun, stop-motion being one of those disappearing things that a lot of us are coming to miss terribly. Actually the one with six (or was it eight?) legs isn't really a robot - despite its name (the Mega Robotic Assault...something...I watched the damn thing on TV and couldn't rewind!) it's more of a walking passenger liner, which allows for some really bad shaky-seat acting (this must be a major part of Star Trek auditions). The multi-legged tank-bus is on tourist duty; the tour visits an American town that's been perfectly preserved from before the most recent global kill-fest (a big toxic gas leak, I think) to be a new sort of tourist attraction, and though the staff are all in their endearingly cheap sci-fi gear, all the tourists are dressed for the occasion. Some visiting Japanese officials (who get their own Japanese theme music) who have laser weapons hidden in their cameras and say things like "lacist!" and "Next time I bow to you, you can kiss my ass." This is definitely not one of those movies that tries to set up a foreign culture as the villain but makes all these efforts toward showing that they're really okay, most of Those People really aren't so bad, it's just a few of them...nope, in this movie, Japs really really bad. And they're taught how to drive the Mega Robotic Assault thing on the tour by its dumbass commander, resulting in one of the most hard-to-swallow hijackings I've ever seen. The most recognizable cast members are relentlessly hormonal future TV actress Lisa Rinna, who's unfortunately all talk, and Re-Animator cutie Barbara Crampton. Otherwise Don Michael Paul makes for an unconvincing "charming rogue" type with some awfully silly dialogue ("sweater puppies"?). Below Full Moon's par, which I don't remember as being that high. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE