Director – Vincent Dawn [Bruno Mattei], Screenplay – Rosella Drudi, Story – Claudio Fragasso & Rosella Drudi, Photography – Riccardo Grasetti, Music – Al Festa, Special Effects – Francesco Paolocci & Gaetano Paolocci, Art Direction – Bart Scavia. Production Company – Flora Film.
Cast
Reb Brown (Major Murphy Black – Marphy Black on end credits), Catherine Hickland (Virgin), Mel Davidson (Mascher), Max Laurel (Lung ‘Quang’ Kuo), Romano Puppo (Corporal Neil Corey), John P. Dulaney (Albert ‘Papa Doc’ Bray), Jim Gaines (Sonny ‘Blood’ Peel), Alex McBride [Massimo Vanni] (Private Larry ‘Diddy’ Guarino)
Plot
A crack military team headed by Major Murphy Black are sent into the South American jungles, although the accompanying expert Mascher will not explain the nature of the mission. As the team start to be eliminated, they realise they are being hunted by something non-human. Eventually, Mascher explains that they are dealing with Omega 1, a tough and near-indestructible cyborg that he has built.
Bruno Mattei (1931-2007), who often hid behind the Anglicised name of Vincent Dawn, was an Italian director who enjoyed some popularity in Italian exploitation cinema during the 1980s. Mattei started out making adult films, including the Nazisploitation film Private House of the SS (1977) and the Nunsploitation film The True Story of the Nun of Monza (1980). In genre material, Mattei also made the zombie film Hell of the Living Dead/Zombie – Creeping Flesh (1980), The Other Hell (1981), Rats Night of Terror (1984), The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1985), Terminator II/Shocking Dark (1989), Death by Telephone (1994), Eyes Without a Face (1994), Cruel Jaws (1995), Snuff Killer (2003), Cannibal Holocaust 2 (2004), Land of Death/In the Land of Cannibals (2004), The Tomb (2006), Island of the Living Dead (2006) and Zombies The Beginning (2007). Also to be found on the credits is the name of Claudio Fragasso, who later went on to direct the notorious bad Troll 2 (1990), and here co-conceived the story and apparently also plays the role of the Omega 1 cyborg.
Robowar was made a good couple of decades before the term Mockbuster was coined in the mid-2000s to describe the output of The Asylum. Even so, the Italian exploitation industry had been creating mockbusters by the bucketload for some thirty years before that with copies of the Western, the James Bond spy film, the Mad Max film and so on. As such, Robowar is a blatant copy of Predator (1987). There is an identical plot where a team of tough, individualistic soldiers are sent into the South American jungle and end up being hunted by something there. The group even pick up a local woman who joins them. And just like the Predator, the Omega 1 has heat-sensitive tracking vision.
Mel Davidson vs the Omega 1 (the cyborg with a six pack)
Predator is not the only then-recent hit that Robowar blatantly steals from. The other is RoboCop (1987), with this being one of several films of the late 1980s that copies The Terminator (1984) and RoboCop, featuring amok androids and cyborgs. Robowar is essentially Predator where the Predator has been replaced by RoboCop. Albeit a RoboCop that wears a motorcycle helmet, wields a shotgun and even has a six-pack of abs on their all-black leather costume.
What must be said about Bruno Mattei is that he at least makes a halfway decent military action film. He gets right in with the gunfire, explosions and combat manoeuvres with enormous enthusiasm. You kind of have to swallow a red-blooded cocksure militarism that goes with that – the team are as gung ho as anything. At one point, Max Laurel picks up Mel Davidson’s tracking device and tosses it in the river – in other words throws away something that would be valuable to them in knowing when the Omega 1 is approaching – on the grounds that “now we are all even,” which surely takes macho competitiveness to an absurd level of recklessness. There are also a number of gory skeletons that makes you think that Mattei hasn’t exactly left the Italian zombie film behind.
