Robot Jox, the Quintessential Hollywood Mecha Movie
I doubt any of you three have seen Robot Jox, a live-action/stop-motion giant robot sci-fi made in 1990.
Rent this movie. Or maybe have a friend rent it to avoid using up a netflix queue slot. Or maybe download it, as I fully expect the production company that made this film to have gone bankrupt immediately after release, likely neglecting to keep the copyright from lapsing into the public domain out of sheer incompetence.
I'll let the lone imdb review ("Greatest Giant Robot fighting after World War 3 movie ever") speak for itself. I watched this movie when it went to VHS, which must have been '93 or so, and thought it was awesome. I still do, but for entirely different reasons.
The dialogue is horribly funny. It is almost inconceivable that the writers were being serious, as each line somehow seems a parody of itself.
Yet, at the same time, the action sequences of the movie are actually very good. There is a hand-to-hand (human) fight scene where the choreography actually made it seem real, even out of context, in the way that the Hong Kong style of the Matrix made each hit seem exaggerated and unrealistic. The stop-motion animation of the giant robots might sound cheap, and other effects were definitely low-budget, but within those constraints they still managed to pull it off. As an example, there were a few cockpit perspective sequences where they greenscreened the actors in cockpit facing against their stop-motion robot opponents, and it didn't seem awful. I'm still not sure how it didn't seem worse.
That's basically the baseline for this movie... awful. Yet somehow the schizophrenic combination of awesomely bad dialogue and surprisingly good action means that I highly recommend this movie, because it is probably free.
Rent this movie. Or maybe have a friend rent it to avoid using up a netflix queue slot. Or maybe download it, as I fully expect the production company that made this film to have gone bankrupt immediately after release, likely neglecting to keep the copyright from lapsing into the public domain out of sheer incompetence.
I'll let the lone imdb review ("Greatest Giant Robot fighting after World War 3 movie ever") speak for itself. I watched this movie when it went to VHS, which must have been '93 or so, and thought it was awesome. I still do, but for entirely different reasons.
The dialogue is horribly funny. It is almost inconceivable that the writers were being serious, as each line somehow seems a parody of itself.
Yet, at the same time, the action sequences of the movie are actually very good. There is a hand-to-hand (human) fight scene where the choreography actually made it seem real, even out of context, in the way that the Hong Kong style of the Matrix made each hit seem exaggerated and unrealistic. The stop-motion animation of the giant robots might sound cheap, and other effects were definitely low-budget, but within those constraints they still managed to pull it off. As an example, there were a few cockpit perspective sequences where they greenscreened the actors in cockpit facing against their stop-motion robot opponents, and it didn't seem awful. I'm still not sure how it didn't seem worse.
That's basically the baseline for this movie... awful. Yet somehow the schizophrenic combination of awesomely bad dialogue and surprisingly good action means that I highly recommend this movie, because it is probably free.
posted by joe at 6:12 AM
5 Comments:
Okay, it is #109 in my Netflix queue. We'll just see. Also, I think it is possible that four people read your blog. Think positive!
Fighting robots! Frankly, these bore me unless I personally designed one of the robots. Then it would be cool.
Also, you say the dialogue is "horribly funny," but I'm pretty sure you mean "humorously horrible." There's a difference.
I said horribly funny because it takes a sick sense humor to be able to laugh at dialogue that is so bad. 'Horribly' is an acknowledgment of that sickness. There may be a slight difference, but both adverb/adjective combinations apply perfectly well.
When did you design a giant robot, Keith?
I am a giant robot. I have grown over time and am now gigantic.
There exist video games in which you can designed robots to fight. I have played and enjoyed a few incarnations. I think Mechwarrior is an example.
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