Robowar

Una plagio italiano de serie C de Predator, por el mismo grupo de meritorios que engendraron la obra maestra Terminator 2 (Shocking Dark) (que plagió sobre todo a Alien). Por desgracia, no es ni mucho menos tan divertida. Copia el original con escenas, planos, gestos actorales y diálogos específicos. Y los conecta con planos de relleno de soldados caminando por la selva con una banda sonora electrónica barata con guitarras de rock. ¡Pero atención! El final es sorprendentemente diferente: ¡el cazador del espacio no es un alienígena cualquiera! P.D. Equípese para esto con una cantidad considerable de paciencia y autocontrol. (16.10.2021)

Así que esta vez la copia sin sentido no fue muy divertida. Robowar es, en efecto, un plagio de la estadounidense Depredador, pero desgraciadamente es una de las obras menos entretenidas y más defectuosas del legendario copista y chapucero italiano Bruno Mattei. Sus películas pueden ser muy entretenidas (Apocalipsis caníbal, Año 225, después del holocausto) e incluso completamente hilarantes (Terminator II), pero realmente no hay nada aprovechable de este aburrido paseo por la selva. (18.11.2021)

The Italian science-fiction horror movie Robowar is one of those productions that simply does not care about ripping something off and becoming successful off the back of someone else's work, and the result is very bad indeed. However, on the other hand, channels like SyFy or Asylum do the same thing, albeit not as successfully. Of course, it is a bad B-movie, although it is still quite easy to watch despite that. (20.05.2020)

The Italians were a lot of fun in the '80s. As far as "originality of authorship" goes, they rode the same wave that studio Asylum have been doing for the last two decades: they picked up on a film trend, probed its most prominent representative, and quickly made a shameless ripoff, and to make it look good on store shelves (and in its day on VHS rental shelves), they changed the title slightly, but in a way that was still familiar to the viewer. So while today the Asylum guys are churning out treats like Transmorphers, Atlantic Rim, etc., some of the most prominent 80s trash masters, Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso, worked in tandem to concoct this total rip-off of Predator. Here, they copy the characters (the leader, the Indian/Latino with hunting instincts, the tough black guy, the intellectual, the fighter with no pain), the scenes (the attack on the mercenary settlement) and their succession, even the camera shots and the actors' perspectives at precise angles. Only the tension-filled final half-hour of John McTiernan's film, when Arnold wordlessly sets traps for the predator as in the days of the Neanderthals, was omitted, and instead a female element was inserted, a silly motif of a supposedly deceased comrade from the war, his transformation into a super robot, his later epiphany, and a plea to the Italian Arnold of Wish to send him out of the world forever. You can take this as a spoiler and it won't hurt anything, because I don't believe anyone can take this cockeyed approach to making movies seriously and be interested in what's happening on the screen. And more than anywhere else, the saying "When two people do the same thing, it's not always the same thing" is true. These are two completely different universes - the legendary one, with top action and full of invention, and then the Italian one, where a bunch of nobodies run around in the woods and play soldiers, with a production design like a second-rate TV studio. Actually, not even that. (13.12.2023)

The Italian purveyor of dreck Bruno Mattei again went to see his friends in the Philippines, but instead of watching the second Rambo, this time they put on Predator and reminisced a bit about RoboCop. And just like a lot of little boys, they were inspired to run off into the woods and make their own version. Except in their case, they had cameras and, instead of sticks, actual weapons and piles of blank cartridges. To insult the movies that Bruno Mattei, Rossella Drudi and Claudio Fragasso foisted upon the world by calling them mere copies is the absolutely wrong way to look at them. While some VHS trash flicks try to look like original works, albeit while parasitising on popular hits in every possible way, Mattei’s best remake-sploitation larks provide wild entertainment by thoroughly adhering to the models on which they are based, transforming their key elements and scenes through ultra-cheap production with a bunch of somnambulic amateur actors. Mattei's copying almost rises to the level of sweding, but instead of zero-budget DIY creativity, it is appropriate to admire the low-budget foolishness and deduce the production circumstances that led to the distillation of copied scenes, characters and various details into the vastly futile form that his movies present to us. Seen through that particular lens, Robowar is an epic spectacle (though in that respect, it plays second fiddle to Mattei’s later Shocking Dark), enriched with the most magnificent example of absolute framing in the history of cinema (i.e. the scene in which the characters pretend not to see something that is right next to them, until it appears in the shot). By the way, they shot their own local copy of Predator, called Bangis, in the Philippines eight years later. (29.01.2021)