MST3K Robot Holocaust - Review

Robot Holocaust was one of the movies released by the legendary Wizard Video. Wizard was well known for their oversized boxes and fantastic artwork with titles like Headless Eyes and Psychos in Love. Awesome title aside, Robot Holocaust has gotta be one of the worst movies they were ever subjected to on the show. The only redeeming quality I could find (aside from unintentional hilarity) was that the evil Valeria (played by Angelika Jager, not to be confused with artist Angelika Jaeger) was pretty hot. Hot, yes, but certainly not an actress. In this, her lone film credit, she gives an acting performance so bad it has to be seen to be believed. I'd say it's right up there with the appearance model Bridget Hall made on Cybil years ago (dear God, why do I know that?). The poor girl was clearly just hired for her looks, and hearing her try and speak her lines properly through her very thick accent is kinda sad. Sad in a really, really funny way. I dare anyone to try and understand three consecutive words that come out of her mouth.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the actors in this movie never worked again. Well I'm sure they probably had jobs at some point after Robot Holocaust, just not jobs in the movie business. One of the actors, Joel Von Ornsteiner is now a respected forensic psychologist who goes by the name of Dr. Buzz. He's even appeared numerous times on CNN and CourtTV. The film's director Tim Kincaid put out of few more cheapies throughout the 80s before taking a decade off from filmmaking. He currently directs several gay porn films a year under the name of Joe Gage. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just using these two guys as an example of how interesting a person's career path can be after taking part in the production of a bad, bad movie.

Being that they were still working out all the kinks in this first season (well, first season on a real network) the jokes aren't as funny and they don't come as fast as we've grown accustomed to. But I think as far as Season 1 goes this one is actually pretty funny. There are some great jokes at the expense of Valeria and her difficult to decipher dialog, and some well used Ted Nugent zingers. Although the guy they frequently refer to as The Nuge doesn't really look like Ted Nugent at all. He looks more like he'd be in Manowar or something, but I guess "The Huge Nuge!" is funnier than if they yelled out "Hey, it's the drummer from Manowar!" One thing I didn't really like about Season 1 was Josh Weinstein. I didn't find his Dr. Larry character very funny, and his Tom voice was way too deep. I mean no offense to the man, I'm sure he's a funny guy (he did write one of the best Freaks and Geeks episodes after all), just saying, I didn't find him funny on this show. Hysterical in Cinematic Titanic, however.