udar55 In the future all national battles are settled on the robotic battlefield by ten story robots commanded by human robot jox. The battle is on for Alaska's resources and it is up to USA's Achilles (Gary Graham) to take it to the evil Russian rep and dirty fighter Alexander (Paul Koslo). This was Stuart Gordon's fourth film for Charles Band's Empire and the most expensive (rumored to be $10 million) in the company's short history. Was it the film that broke Band's bank? Possibly. It was filmed in 1987 but didn't get released until 1990 (via Triumph theatrically and RCA/Columbia on video) after Empire had gone bankrupt in 1988. Regardless, it is still a pretty entertaining film and - even though I've never seen a single second of Michael Bay's TRANSFORMERS films - I know it is a better film. The screenplay by sci-fi author Joe Haldeman touches on some good stuff, like genetic engineering and the gladiator mindset. Sure, there is some really cheesy stuff ("we can live"), but the cast is all game and you have to love Koslo's villain. The stop motion effects by David Allen are the real showstopper and they hold up pretty well. The miniatures are great too. Look for Stuart Gordon in a cameo as a bartender and Jeffrey Combs as an overly excited bystander. Crash and burn, my friends, crash and burn.

keith-moyes-656-481491 Robot Jox has received some spectacularly bad reviews. They are understandable, but not entirely deserved.I dug this movie out of the remaindered bin in my local video store nearly twenty years ago. I watched it once and then expunged it from my memory. Having just seen it again, I feel that time has been kinder to it than I would have expected.In fact, it is two quite different movies. The stop motion and miniatures were shot in America and are pretty good for their budget level. This Robot Jox is a decent enough little movie.The live action was filmed in Italy and that Robot Jox is hard to sit through.Italian cinema boasts some fine movie makers (De Sica, Fellini, Rossellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, Bertolucci, etc.) but popular Italian films are something else entirely. They nearly always have a strange, enervated, drifting feel to them. Even genre greats, like Mario Bava and Dario Agento cannot entirely escape the somnambulistic ambiance that seems to descend on any movie made in an Italian studio. Neither can Stuart Gordon, whose other work is much livelier than this.Beware the curse of Cinecitta!However, this movie would have struggled wherever it was made. The central problem is that it is an idea looking for a story.In a world devastated by war, territorial disputes are settled by gladiatorial contests using giant robots. This is an OK idea, but once you have set it out, what then?All Stuart Gordon and Joe Haldeman came up with was: an inconclusive initial combat; the hero refuses to fight again; an ambitious young woman seeks to take his place; he changes his mind; a spy is revealed; the final battle takes place and again ends in a draw.This is a sequence of events but not a story.I appreciate that anybody who paid good money to see Robot Jox in a movie-theatre would have felt short-changed, but twenty years later I am inclined to be more indulgent. For me, it is starting to look like some of those cheap SF programmers that flooded into theatres and drive-ins in the late Fifties. It is not good, but at least it tries.As such, I find is has some historical interest as a representative product of SF cinema at a particular stage in its development.I am glad I watched it again.

merklekranz Take a trip down memory lane without the now overused C.G.I. The stop motion robots may seem crude, but their crunching and bashing is more believable than the cartoon-like computer generated images. Think of "Robot Jox" as sort of a cross between professional wrestling, and "Rockem Sockem Robots". The idea of settling wars with giant robot battles is a good one, and the rivalry between genetically engineered fighters and normal men is interesting. There is even an attempt at character development, as relates to the major combatants. So what you get is a sci-fi storyline that works, along with the battle visuals, which are totally acceptable for what they are. - MERK

TVholic Robot Jox tries hard, but is fundamentally a series of fight scenes strung together -- robot against robot, man against man, man against woman. The premise had potential, but it seems the script wasn't really given the couple of more drafts it needed. Still, it was fairly good, for a science fiction action movie. Part of it was because the script was by Joe Haldeman. For those who aren't familiar with the name, Haldeman wrote the award-winning science fiction novel "The Forever War." It's considered one of the very best powered battle armor novels, right up there with Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and John Steakley's "Armor." And this movie is really more like a giant powered battle armor movie, rather than giant robots. It's closer to what fans would have wanted instead of the travesty that was Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers," which bore only a passing resemblance to the novel it was based on.Despite some assumptions, this really isn't based on Homer's "Iliad." A couple of names are all they had in common. Achilles having his robot's foot blown off had no parallel in the Iliad, which didn't include Achilles' death. Nor was the ancient Achilles a noble warrior. He was the mightiest, but also vengeful and petty. Even the robot jock killed off in the first scene doesn't fit. He was named Hercules, while the Greek Iliad would have had Herakles.The effects were fairly good for the time and the budget. True, it wasn't comparable to "Terminator 2" a year later, but that movie cost ten times as much. The stop motion was almost as good as the robotic walkers in "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi." Better, in fact, than a lot of Ray Harryhausen animation, which is highly regarded, but quite dated.Don't bring high expectations into this and you probably won't be disappointed. It's better than a lot of other low-budget flicks and even some big-budget blockbuster wannabes that have better effects but far worse scripts.