Fuck you Transformers!
Tim Gross was very good to me on my birthday this year. Yes, he got me the entire Full Moon Archive box set. As I go through this glorious collection I am going to post an accompanying review. Picking the first movie to watch was a bit of a conundrum. I mean seriously, when faced with picking from The Puppet Master, Trancers, and Subspecies series, Dollman, Demonic Toys, and Doctor Mordrid, where do you start. Damn right, Robot Wars! I have to say it’s been a number of years nice I saw this one and it was an absolute frickin’ joy to watch again. When you first see David Allen’s awesome stop motion robots you’re yelling “FUCK YOU TRANSFORMERS!”. When you see Barbara Crampton walking out of the dock terminal you’re yelling “FUCK YEAH TIGHT PANTS!”. The movie also stars a young and gorgeous Lisa Rinna in her 3rd movie and Don Michael Paul, who went on the write Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.
Directed by Albert Band(Charles Band’s father), Robot Wars was marketed as the follow up to Stuart Gordon’s Robot Jox. It really isn’t. The story is right out of the Cold War(which incidentally was over before the movie came out). 50 years after the Great Toxic Gas Scare of 1993, the US uses an old battle Megarobot to shuttle sight-seers to an old suburban town, fully restored to it’s early 90′s glory. Of course they have to drive through a zone of hostile Centros(Central Americans with gas masks and laser guns) to get there. Throw in some Clod War era tension and treachery with the East and there’s enough story, and Barbara Crampton’s hot ass, to drive the movie along until the big robot fight payoff at the end.
Suprisingly the movie held up for me. Â Â Everything I loved about it when it came out, I still love. Full Moon in the early Nineties was a lot like the Corman studio in the Seventies and Eighties. Everything was shot quickly and movies were finished within weeks. The quality wasn’t the best but they were damn fun to watch. I know there was great attention paid to matching the movement inside the giant robot to it’s actual physical movement, which it being a giant scorpion, was rather jerky. Those poor sight-seers were tossed around worse than the passengers on the S.S. Minow. As near as I can tell, this must be because the megarobot controls fight Hemis(people from the US, Northern Hemisphere…get it…nevermind) like a mother, yet work smoothly for Asian dictators(I’m not giving away too much am I?).
Of course being a Full Moon movie, ya gotta have a Video Zone! Robot Wars is technically only 16 years old(according to IMDB) but when you watch some of the behind the scenes of the effects you get a good understanding of how filmmaking technology has progressed in that time. This is especially true when they get to the monster machine that is the optical printer. What can be done, more or less on any Mac, used to be done for years on soemthing that took up about 1/4 of the room. Watching David Allen work, you also realize how lost the art of stop motion might be. It was also interestingly funny to find out that Albert Band, who was supposed to co-direct with Charles Band, ended up as sole director because his son never showed up.
Robot Wars was the perfect begining to the journey ahead of me that is the Full Moon Archive Collection. Ah hell, I’m gonna go watch it again because, like the Exorcist for Beetlejuice, it just keeps getting better every time I see it.
