This column is about exploration. And I love that. It’s about the enthusiasm of one core group of fandom’s vast Cheet-O-stained belly inviting another cheering group into its own little world. The giddy excitement of transitive nerddom causes us to blog with abandon. Blogging: the new world’s understanding of Love, the rapacious god come unbridled from the chariot of societal normatives. Blog love. Blove. This column is about exploration. This column is about blove.
This column is also about shitty movies.
Now I really love that. Come children, down the gully hatch of the “shitty good time” we go!
Just a stone’s throw away from Terrible is a movie. Past the avenue of the mediocre B-picture, through the Day-Glo pastiched swampland that I call the “Nineteen Hundred and Eighties”, and hiding underneath that crumbling highway overpass tagged with the enthusiastic graffiti “Good Idea!”, there’s a puddle. Look closely.
It is a puddle formed from the dripping backsweat of a mentally challenged Anime fan. He stands by himself in the vast desert of his own imagination. Watch this ogre’s meaty thighs as they slosh apace against one another, dribbling creative, life giving juice into the Oasis… the Oasis is called Robot Jox.
What can I say about this movie? Well, it’s from 1990. It’s low budget. It took years to be released because it buried the basement-budget studio financing it. And it’s directed by Stuart Gordon, the quiet lunatic that made Re-Animator, the film I’ve seen more than any other.
Sure, but what about the movie? IT IS EVERYTHING YOU WANTED WHEN YOU WERE NINE YEARS OLD AND STUPID. Ok so like there’s no war anymore so everybody fights by piloting these giant claymation mech warriors and they’re huge and they go all like GOOOSH and KRAKAKAK and WHAAAOOOMMM! The main character is Achilles (played by Gary Graham who isn’t Glenn Scott who isn’t one of the Carradines) and he fights some Russian dude who is soooo mean. Oh and his dad (Achilles’s dad, I know I’m getting ahead of myself!) is like this awesome fat cowboy who is like actually a bad guy who kills the super smart Asian doctor. Every American state is like its own country now and stuff so like there’s politics and Soviets (I don’t like them) and there’s like a secret weapon that Achilles has. Oh and if the soviets know about it they can beat him and take a bunch of land. Oh and Achilles’ dad is the spy. KRBOOOOOM!!!!
Oh and it also stars another character played by Kid who is way better when ‘n Play isn’t around. I don’t know why all the guy characters kept hitting on him.
Honestly, there is an alternate universe where Robot Jox was produced properly as a high-budget, high-concept science fiction allegory with equal parts intrigue, thematic interest, and special effects driven action. The universe we’re in is the one where a director I love tried to make a kid’s movie out of a script written by a guy who respected his own adult-oriented short story. The result is what my grandmother referred to as a “clusterfuck abortion”. Thanks Grandma.
Having said that, there is something so goddamn charming about this shitty little movie. It’s ambitious WAY beyond it’s ken. Stuart Gordon has always had that characteristic; he simply doesn’t understand that it’s not enough money for how ambitious his story is. The fantastical (and childishly dumb in design) Robots themselves are actually a total blast to watch. It is really surprisingly good claymation that is honestly more engaging than Transformers 2.
Actually, that’s my recommendation. I couldn’t sit through Transformers. I watched Robot Jox twice.
The childish joy you will experience watching this comes, I suspect, less from the appeal to the child in you than the child in the film. Sure, there is the joy of sheer camp value, and sure, I get my rocks off going through the movies I kept seeing the covers for in the video store as a little boy. But honestly, the movie’s naivete and ambition, its mix of bright colors, miscalculated regurgitations of concepts you’ve seen done better elsewhere, some good acting, some BAD acting, the fun of the actual fights themselves, and a political subtext which surpasses Rocky IV in subtlety all serve to make Robot Jox an honest way to kill 83 minutes.
Robot Jox … it Robot Rox.
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Josh and Mason bring you the movies! Only they don't review the good ones that you desperately hope to read about, they review extremely bad movies, the kind of movies you can see for free on Hulu or Snagfilms. Enjoy!
This is your best one since your first one. Spot on.