War of the Robots - 1979

Where do I even start with this one?  Geez, it's like someone put Star Wars into a blender, drank it, vomited it out, and then had his friends, all of which were Italian, make it into a film.  Watching this movie it made me realize just how hokey and kitschy Star Wars would be though, it you were to describe it only in special effect and in some of the more memorable characters.  I think it would go something like this:

"So you got this dude and he has these weird metal robots that speak all weird, and he's in this desert but then these white suited guys come after him and he finds this old guy who decides to take him to some planet, and there's this pilot guy with a giant furry ape-type-thing as a friend that only he can understand and they fly away and barely escape.  Then there's this huge spaceship and there's this girl on it, and she's good and the bad guys are trying to get information out of her.  One of the bad guys is dressed all in black and has some bizarre breathing apparatus on, and he can hurt people without touching them, and eventually the good guys get to the ship and there's fights with these glowing swords and the hero old guy dies...except he actually only sort of disappeared. And they rescue the girl, and fight these huge monsters, and eventually escape and then they come back, in spaceships, and they blow up the huge spaceship."

I mean honestly we know Star Wars so well as a culture, that we forget just how strange it really is.  But it's done with heart and it's done well, and it's part of a thing we as a society accept because it just works.  But look at those elements and tell me that it's not a huge WTF moment for you.  So now we have War of the Robots.  And its cheesy and strange, and has those same WTF moments, but all they were doing was trying to capitalize on another movie that had just done the same thing.

The fault with these films, these tons and tons of movies that ripped off Star Wars, was that they thought the effects were the only things that sold the film.  Or it seems that way at least.  Cause they easily copied parts of the movie, but then the plot is just beyond all hopes of understanding.  At least that's how it normally goes.  And that's because there was more of  Star Wars planned, they were going to expand on these characters.  So the didn't  NEED to tell us about Darth Vader in the first one, they didn't NEED to fully explain the force.  It was understood that we as an audience would learn that in the future movies.

This movie borrows heavily from Star Wars, as I've said.  It's got spaceships fighting big, other spaceship, it's got robots, it's got weird evil villains, it's got glowing swords that kill people.  It's even got an old wrinkly dude as one of the villains, sort of odd since in Star Wars we had not seen Palpatine at this point yet.

It's a barely comprehensible film that is best not watched for plot but for the effects, which are occasionally fun to see.  That's about it.  Not much to say about this flick.