Robowar - Robot da guerra
Tags: violence

Plot synopsis:
Major Murphy Black (Reb Brown) leads a group of commandos through the jungles of an unnamed island, but unknown to all involved but Mascher (Mel Davidson), they are being stalked by Mascher's robot invention, Omega-1. Over the protests of Mascher, the group first saves a volunteer hospital worker, Virginia (Catherine Hickland), from a band of guerrillas, then take out the hospital camp, killing all the guerrillas there, also. At this point, the robot begins killing members of the commando group, one by one. That night, Mascher admits to Murphy that he created Omega-1, that it was acting sporadically, and that he was there to check out the match-up between the decorated Murphy and Omega-1.
The next day, they continue, and are further stalked by the Robot. At one point, as Mascher is reviews a computer to check Omega-1's location, one of the commandos tosses it into the river, declaring that Macscher is now in the same danger they are. Later, Mascher reveals the radio device which can destroy Omega-1, but the robot kills Mascher and others, leaving only Black and Virginia, and takes the radio destruct device. That night, Black listens to an audio tape given by Mascher, which reveals that Omega-1 is a human/machine hybrid, whose human parts were made up of the brain of Black's old friend, Lt. Martin Woodrie. Omega-1 attacks in the house they're hiding, but Virginia stuns the robot with acid, and Black blows up the house. Black and Virginia reach the shore, and try to signal the boat, but Omega-1 catches up, and chases Black into the jungle. Cornering him, the robot removes the visor of his mask, hands Black the destruct radio, and instructs him to key the destruct sequence. Black does so, and returns to the shore.

Review: Ah, leave it to the directorial talent (or lack thereof) of Bruno Mattei to make me yearn for the Citizen Kane Reb Brown classics such as Space Mutiny or Yor the Hunter from the Future.Think of this outing as a prolonged hike in the nature preserve.
Herr Mattei also had access to bio lab skeletons and you're bloody sure that he was going to use them!All levity aside, many thanks to Smoke Manmuscle, I mean Reb for making this trial somewhat amusing.
Whether it's his high shrilled helium-ated octaves of unforgettable lines such as 'Incoming, get out of here!' and 'Move out!' or his constant bickering with Mascher (less than Carl Weathers and more like Andy Richter's shady uncle), Murphy Black weathers the storm to the beat of a Casio laced soundtrack.
Bruno Mattei does Predator, results are predictably awesome.
A combined rip-off of Predator and Robocop directed by hack trash grand wizard Bruno Mattei and starring veritable Colossus of kick-ass charisma Reb Brown in the Arnie role, along with Massimo Vanni looking like Chuck Norris and the always reliable Jim Gaines, and a script by husband and wife super-scribes Claudio Fragasso (Troll 2, Zombie 4: After Death)) and Rosella Drudi.
Anybody reading this already knows whether this film is for them or not, people generally are either Mattei fans or have sh!tty taste.
Fortunately the dialogue is worthy of Mamet, my favorite line being probably "You walk like a ruptured duck" .
It's OK though.Basically if you like films full of people walking around in the jungle and shooting at trees with occasional explosions and a robot that speaks in comically mangled digital gibberish then this is a film for you.
I like all of these things, so Robowar was definitely a film for me.
Not as good as the classic Strike Commando mind you, but in Mattei rip off terms this is pretty darned decent.
"Reb Brown stars in this action-packed adventure story of fighting men pitted against an unseen enemy, a force more powerful than the fiercest weapons.
Recruited by the CIA to rescue hostages held by guerrilla fighters in a Central American country, Brown and his men encounter an enemy unimaginably more deadly than any on Earth - because the Omega One is not of this Earth!"What you have just read (save the references to Reb and Omega One) is the VHS plot synopsis of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle PREDATOR (1987) because that is exactly what this Bruno Mattei flick rips off!
A virtual scene-for- scene, shot-for-shot remake of the big budget sci-fi epic, ROBOWAR is bad.
Mattei usually wouldn't settle for just one flick to rip off and throws us a curve ball by also copying 1987's other classic sci-fi flick, ROBOCOP.
But no one until Mattei had the gall to just brazenly ape a popular movie scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot, line-by-line.ROBOWAR is an obvious remake of PREDATOR, only changed slightly to accommodate the total lack of budget.
Thankfully, the bulk of the actual film is largely stock-footage-free though you'll recognize a lot of the locations from other Mattei/Fragasso Filipino films like the old hut from AFTER DEATH.The great cast (including Romano Puppo, Massimo Vanni, Jim Gaines, Max Laurel, etc.) actually turn in surprisingly good acting.
Even star Reb Brown performs much better here than in his other Italo-Filipino outings.
It's amazing too considering Mattei stages them either theatrically (everyone crammed into a master-shot) or shoots them shot-for-shot like scenes in PREDATOR.
Good, yet idiotically staged action scenes come fast and furious but are interspersed with more than enough filler shots of Reb Brown and Co. wandering through the jungle.The only real kudos go for the pyrotechnic crew for plenty of lovable slow motion explosions, as well as Al Festa and his wonderfully cheesetastic 80's synthesizer spectacular score.
While nothing as heinously 80's as AFTER DEATH and COP GAME, it's in a pretty similar league.People who like this film and get a kick out of line-by-line ripoffs should also seek out Mattei's not-quite-as-fun-but-still-hilarious SHOCKING DARK, which did the same thing with ALIENS and TERMINATOR..
The all-time favorite movie of director Bruno Mattei  may he rest in peace  undoubtedly must have been "Predator".
One of the last films Mattei made before his death was called "Cannibal Ferox 3: Land of Death" and it was an extremely blatant imitation of "Predator" where he simply replaced the intergalactic hunter with a tribe of cannibals.
When I watched that film, I didn't even know yet that "Robowar" existed and was thus unaware of the fact that Mattei already pulled off the exact same trick nearly twenty years earlier!
This is, again, a shameless and outright rip-off of the classic 80's action flick starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet this time replacing the alien with an out-of-control robot that was initially designed as a  surprise, surprise  hi tech secret warfare weapon.
Every other even remotely memorable element of "Predator" gets copied here, like the testosterone-driven lead characters, rotting human cadavers lying all around the jungle, the blurry computerized view from inside the robot's helmet, entire pieces of dialogs and even the who-played-who end credits!
Needless to say this is a terribly inept and laughable B-movie exploitation product, but it is guaranteed entertainment to watch; especially in case you're an avid fan of typically Italian trash.
Bunch of beefcake mercenaries, all of them with bad-boy attitudes and carrying around heavy artillery to compensate for their lack of brain capacities, are sent into to the jungle to complete a mission they know absolutely nothing about.
The Robo-Soldier wipes out everyone before the replacement Arnie leader (Reb Brown) discovers it was constructed using spare body parts from his buddy who died in the Vietnam War. End of story.
Obviously "Robowar" is just an insignificant and utterly brainless popcorn Sci-Fi/action/War flick with nothing else than explosives and violent shootouts.
Speaking of which, I guess Bruno Mattei spent most of the nearly non-existent budget on explosives and ammunition!
* note: if you are, like me, a sucker for old movie posters and DVD illustrations, you might have noticed that the cover image depicted here on this page is not "Robowar" but for "Robo Man", an even obscurer 70's Sci-Fi sleeper..
Italian low-budget PREDATOR rip-off!.
There is some scenes that rip-off PREDATOR as Reb Brown and Catherine Hickland battle a mumbling robot that doesn't stop.
This is one of the last few films made before the italian action craze ended in the late 80's.
From Italian trash director Bruno Mattei (Hell of the Living Dead) and writer Claudio Fragasso (who gave us the legendary Troll 2), Robowar is a blatant cash-in on the success of Predator, with a touch of Robocop for good measure.
Reb Brown stars as Major Murphy Black, leader of a group of mercenaries with very silly (nick)names (Diddy Bop, Killzone, Blood, Papa Doc, Quang) who are sent on a mission about which they have very few details, but which sees them coming face-to-visor with a high-tech renegade humanoid killer robot called Omega One.As the soldiers explore the jungle, encountering the charred corpses of victims of the malfunctioning machine, as well as groups of hostile guerrilla fighters, Mattei and Fragasso miss no opportunity to blatantly ape the aforementioned Schwarzenegger classic, with entire scenes and chunks of dialogue mimicked throughout (silliest moments: Brown throws his knife at an enemy and quips 'Don't move!', inadequately aping Arnie's 'Stick around' gag; Quang's utterly pointless sacrifice).As with many a Mattei film, there are plenty of unintentional laughs to be had at the sheer goofiness on display: Reb Brown, in his blue, sleeveless, cropped T-shirt, who looks ready for a pride parade; the supposedly cutting-edge Omega One, equipped with low resolution pixelated visual sensors and a garbled Speak and Spell voice-box that Stephen Hawking would laugh at; the group of marines wasting countless rounds of ammo shooting at the jungle while screaming; and Quang referring to himself in third person.Great film-making it most definitely isn't, but one can't help but be entertained just a little..
Robowar (1988) * (out of 4)Maj. Murphy Black (Reb Brown) leads a group of men into the jungles where they can't possibly imagine what is about to attack them.
Inside the jungle is an alien creature who will slowly stalk and kill them.Plagorism is one of the most serious crimes that a writer can commit and often times it will end their career or at least put a black cloud over it.
For some reason filmmaker Bruno Mattei ripped off countless movies in his career.
Often times he would not only rip-off plots but also entire sequences, lines of dialogue and much more.
With that said, for some reason Mattei is still a "legend" in his own way as bad movie lovers flock to his films.ROBOWAR is a rip-off of PREDATOR but it also rips on ROBOCOP.
The alien here stalks the people in the jungle just like PREDATOR but his outfit is pure metal like ROBOCOP.
I can understand how some people would watch movies like this and have a good time with their badness but sadly this film isn't in that "so bad it's good" range.
Instead, ROBOWAR is just a really low-budget movie and a really bad one at that.The performances, direction, editing, story and pretty much everything else are downright awful but that's to be expected.
What's so bad about this movie is that it really doesn't reach a sleazy level as the violence is rather tame and there's not much blood or gore.
The men are hit with countless bullets but not a drop of blood spills.The action scenes are all rather stupid but the ending is nice in terms of explosions.
I'm sure some might find a few laughs in how bad the movie it but sadly it's too boring to be enjoyed..
Reb Brown and director Bruno Mattei are notorious for making really bad movies, but this is the worst of the worst!
An all-too-obvious PREDATOR rip-off, this movie very nearly copies PREDATOR scene for scene!!
Most of Brown's movies are incredibly bad, but also delightfully fun and cheesy.
As for Mattei, while he's considered by many to be the Italian Ed Wood, he needs to just leave originals alone and stop trying to rip-off other versions of good movies.
It's bad enough he would end up making a rip-off of TERMINATOR 2 (even though it's more like ALIEN than T2).
This movie is confounded by bad acting, lame dialogue, and from the looks of it, the script is only about 15 pages long!!
Not wishing to go down the road of the late eighties Italian haunted house films of Lamberto Bava, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci, Marcello Avallone and Fabrizio Laurenti, Bruno Mattei instead relocates the slasher film to the jungle, and instead of screaming teens pits a bunch of muscle bound soldiers against an unstoppable killing machine.
Believe me, you haven't seen anything like this before.Reb Brown (Strike Commando) stars as Reb Brown (Strike Commando), leader of the Big A*s Muthf*ckas, a squad of soldiers hired to go into the jungles of Venezuela to stop guerrilla activity.
Some other guys too, including an ethnic guide in touch with nature (Where does Bruno get these ideas?), a doctor and a mysterious gentleman along for the ride that Reb is suspicious of, but judging by the skin tight, half-t-shirt Reb's wearing when he gets off that boat, I'm guessing Reb doesn't think about things too deeply so he lets him come along anyway.Things get strange for our macho mo-fos the moment they discover a pile of human bodies torn to bits.
What we the audience know but Reb and co don't is that there is an experimental soldier/robot on the loose, killing everything in sight, and that guy who's joined them is its creator.
I know, it sounds a bit like Robocop, but Bruno has the insight to inject a bit of originality to the film, including Reb going head to head with a bunch of guerrillas and picking himself up a chick sidekick into the proceedings.The lads start to get the idea that they're being stalked, which leads to several scenes of Massimo et al firing wildly into the foliage, no doubt a satiric remark on Mattei's part regarding the futility of US military might versus guerrilla warfare in Vietnam.
Also, Reb (and Jim Gaines!) scream like girls every time they fire their machine guns, a reference to Strike Commando.
This film bears a lot of similarity to another film you may have seen, set in the jungle and involving marines facing something they've never encountered before, being picked off one by one in various gory ways.
As an even more glaring example of the intricities of Bruno Mattei's conceptual continuity, the director of that film here plays the killer robot.
Vast legions of fans devote themselves to finding all these 'clues' in Mattei's film.So, although Massino, Romano etc put up a good fight, you know the film is going to boil down the Reb being the Final Girl.
There's a few twists at the end I won't reveal here, and I'm sure Mattei's making some comment about the faceless terrorist threat the West faces every day by having the Venezuelan extras played by Filipino actors, but that's just the multi-layered complexities of a Bruno Mattei film (hell, I'm still finding things in Zombie Creeping Flesh after all these years).This film is crying out for an American remake, probably starring someone weedy and terrible, like Adrian Brody.
Also, check out the mixed up credits for Jim Gaines and Massimo (Alex McBride) Vanni – another little in-joke for us uber-fans..
Bruno Mattei gathered a bunch of B-movie actors, threw them into the jungle, and then ripped off the basic plotline from "Predator", ripped off whole lines of dialogue from "Predator", ripped off the irrelevant action sequences from "Predator", he even ripped off the "who-played-whom"-type closing credits from "Predator"!
Well, well, well.....this is a mightily shameless knockoff even by Bruno Mattei standards!
Despite the great cast of Italian B-movie stars assembled here including Reb Brown, Massimo Vanni, Romano Puppo and Max Laurel, this film never raises above the decidedly average mark due to its obvious lack of imagination and ambition other than to be a blatant Predator clone (sans the budget).Not content with ripping off just the basic premise either, Mattei has directly lifted a number of scenes and lines of dialogue from the previously mentioned Hollywood blockbuster with the result at times being frankly cringe inducing.In addition the main bulk of the film here is comprised of budget saving, boring padding tactics which usually comprise of our heroes plodding around the jungle aimlessly interspersed with some intermittent gunfire as they catch a fleeting glimpse of their hunter (a rather poorly conceived looking robot named Omega 1) Certainly not one of Mattei's better efforts and curiously lacking the usual 'so bad it's good' charm that his work usually comprises, Robowar is overall, a fairly bland affair.
Robowar is shameless...ly entertaining fun!.
Major Murphy Black (Reb) and his team are sent into the jungles of the Philippines to track down and destroy a rogue robot.Much has been made that this is just an Italian knockoff of Predator (1987) and Robocop (1987) (but especially Predator)...that's all well and good, but, that aside, is this movie worth seeing?
For a movie with almost no plot, it's surprisingly fast-paced, and rather than have a lot of dialogue, it's mainly yelling and shooting machine guns.
There are other silly one-liners, but this was our favorite.Fan-favorite Reb Brown is out in force here - looking especially ripped in his child-size half-shirt, he gets to command his team with his trademark screams.
As for the robot, we get some pixelated "robo-vision", and it seems like a guy in a motorcycle outfit.
Honestly, it's still pretty hard to find, presumably having been released largely in Japan and Italy, and we thank Sutekh over at Explosive Action for hooking us up with a copy.If you ever wished Predator was an Italian-made Exploding Hut movie shot in the Philippines, and had a robot instead of a "Predator", this is surely the movie for you.
Featuring a great synth score by Al Festa and released in the golden year of 1989, Robowar is shameless...ly entertaining fun.For more action insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com.
Even my Reb Brown love has limits.
An Italian ripoff of both Predator and Terminator starring Reb Brown (Yor Hunter from the Future), directed by Bruno Mattei (The Other Hell), from a script by the husband and wife team of Claudio Fragasso and Rosella Drudi (who concocted Troll 2, a movie that is at the same time not a sequel and not about trolls)?
You had me at Italian ripoff.Major Murphy Black (yep, Red Brown) is the leader of a team of commandos that are on a mission in the jungle.
Only Mascher knows why they are really there - to test his new invention, Omega-1 (who is played by writer Claudio Fragasso), a robot that looks like a BMX racer with scuba gear.But first, they have to rescue Virginia (Catherine Hickland, Witchery) from soldiers who are overtaking her hospital camp.
Just like Predator, the team easily kills all of the terrorists/evil guys/generic villains, but it's just to set up the real story.
Yep, Masher wanted to see how his creation would stack up against Murphy.The robot is smart enough to kill everyone, even his creator, and destroy the one device that is supposedly the only thing that can kill it.
At the end, the cyborg corners Murphy in the jungle and shows him how to initiate his self-destruct sequence.
And that's that.Even I can't defend the fact that I waste nearly ninety minutes of my life watching this movie.
Robowar." Hopefully, they realize that I mean a Bruno Mattei movie and don't think that it's a Rosebudian cipher and they have to go on a quest to discover what I mean.