After some men go missing in the jungles of an isolated island, a group of mercenaries is assigned to search the jungle, battle the guerillas who control the island, and rescue the missing. Accompanying the mercenaries is a shifty CIA agent who seems to know more than he’s letting on. What the mercenaries soon discover is that the guerillas aren’t the only threat that they have to worry about. There’s a shadowy figure stalking them. Equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and encased in impenetrable armor, this figure is following them like some sort of preda–
Wait. Does this sound familiar?
The 1988 film, Robowar, is an unapologetic rip-off of the Predator. Directed by Bruno Mattei and written by Troll 2 director Claudio Fragasso (who also plays this film’s version of the Predator), Robowar is such a rip-off of the Predator that it even ends with an end credits sequence in which we see clips of each actor stalking through the jungle. Reb Brown plays Murphy Black, the head of the mercenaries, and he spends a lot of his time shrilly shouting at them to “Move! Move! Move!” Catherine Hickland plays the head of a local orphanage. She introduces herself as “Virginia” and is called “Virginia” throughout the film but the end credits insist that her character was actually named “Virgin.” The other mercenaries are played by a combination of American and Italian stuntmen and some of them vaguely resemble their better-known counterparts from Predator. Max Laurel, who plays the group’s fearless tracker, looks like he could have been distantly related to Sonny Landham. Massimo Vanni and Romano Puppo play two mercenaries who have a relationship that’s similar to the friendship between Jesse Ventura and Bill Duke. Of course, in anyone really makes an impression, it’s Mel Davidson as the group’s government handler and who spends the whole movie smiling while delivering lines about how the entire group is doomed, himself included. It’s such an odd performance that it becomes rather fascinating.
What type of film is Robowar? It hits all of the same plot points as Predator but it does it with a much lower budget. Indeed, the film’s opening sequence appears to be made up of footage lifted from Mattei’s earlier film, Strike Commando. Whenever we see the action through the killer robot’s eyes, Mattei gives the action an extreme orange tint that makes it impossible to actually tell what’s going on. Reb Brown spends a lot of time yelling but the same thing could be said for the entire cast. This is one of those films where no one fires a machine gun without screaming while doing so. And yet, because it’s a Mattei film, it’s always watchable. Bruno Mattei (who born 92 years ago today in Rome) may have specialized in ripping-off other, most successful films but he was so shameless and unapologetic about it that it’s impossible to judge him too harshly. As always, Mattei keeps the action moving quickly and doesn’t worry to much about things like continuity. Mattei’s films were rarely good but they were almost always fun when taken on their own silly terms.
At times, Robowar almost feels like a parody of an American action film, with Fragasso’s script featuring dialogue that is so extremely aggressive and testosterone-fueled that even Shane Black probably would have told him to tone it down a notch. Much as with Troll 2, the film provides an interesting view into how Fragasso imagined Americans to be. Early on, we are informed that the mercenary group is known as BAM, which stands for “Big Ass Motherfuckers.” Later, one of the members of BAM insults two others by saying, “I bet they have the AIDS.” It’s as if someone programmed a computer to write an action movie and, as such, Robowar might turn out to be a surprisingly prophetic film.
Despite featuring a few Americans in the cast, Robowar was not available in the U.S. until it was released on Blu-ray by Severin Films in 2019. Though Bruno Mattei passed away in 2007, his work continues to be discovered by new audiences.
Everyone’s favorite hippie action hero, Peter Fonda, plays Virelli, a long-haired Vietnam vet turned mercenary who is hired by a corrupt African general (Robert Doqui) to protect the construction of a dam that will result in the flooding of a native village. Got all that? Though Fonda is top-billed, he is not the star of the film. The star is Reb Brown, who plays T.J. Christian. T.J. starts out as a member of Fonda’s team but then he falls in love with a nurse (Joanna Weinberg) and he switches sides. The villagers need someone to lead their revolution and all it takes is hearing Reb Brown do one of his trademarks power yells to know that he’s the man for the job. Reb Brown was famous for yelling whenever he did anything and he yells a lot in Mercenary Fighters, even more than he yelled in Space Mutiny.
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