• Directed by Albert Band
• Written by Jackson Barr
• Starring
  • Don Michael Paul
  • Barbara Crampton
  • James Staley
  • Danny Kamekona
  • Yuji Okumoto
• Produced by Charles Band

The giant robot subgenre is a small one, largely because no one’s been able to make a good one. Robot Jox was an adequate movie; Robo Warriors was tolerable.

And this one, Robot Wars, is simply execrable.

It’s once again a future where all of America looks like Arizona. Mega-Robot 2, shaped like a huge scorpion, patrols the borders to protect what’s left of the nation from the “Centros” (who? some political group — that’s all we find out). Inexplicably, MR2 also transports sightseers around the perimeter, exposing them to the danger of enemy attacks (which, naturally, is the first scene). The robot pilot (aka driver) is Drake, played by Don Michael Paul, a leading man with the charisma of a young Scott Valentine. (Let that sink in a minute.) The most notable of the passengers is Leda (Barbara Crampton), who is apparently an archeologist; at least, that’s what I finally found out watching the Videozone segment. All we find out during the movie is that she’s bringing some soil samples back from Crystal Vista, a Southwest town which has been preserved intact since it was abandoned during the toxic gas scare of 1993. (Remember, this movie came out in 1993 — talk about a rush to date your product.)

So Drake fights off the Centro attack, and returns and reports to his money-grubbing superior who insists that the tours continue. Drake finds some evidence that the Eastern Alliance (aka Asia), supposedly an ally to our side, is supplying the Centros. (The Easterns are here represented by Danny Kamekona and Yuji Okumoto, the master-and-protege heavies from Karate Kid 2).

Apparently, there’s some kind of subplot about our side selling the Easterns some scaled-down models of MR2. See below re the editing here.

Let’s see — Drake meets Leda, she criticizes his driving and belts him, and he’s smitten in more ways than one. Next time we see them on-screen, they act like they’re full-fledged lovers. See below re the editing here.

So Drake gets removed from the pilot roster for insubordination, and spends the next day with his sidekick with the teams who keep the corridor free for MR2 to transport tourists. Apparently there was a battle we missed. See below etc.

Leda and her reporter friend head back to Crystal Vista; something in her soil samples leads her to believe that our side is hiding something beneath the town. She starts exploring (there are tunnels under the public school), but finds out the town is crawling with Centros. Why? See below etc.

And then the Eastern heavies, who’ve been playing around with MR2 during their own sightseeing tour, take it over. Why? See below etc.

But Drake and his sidekick get to Crystal Vista (how? see below), rescue Leda, and find out that the buried something is actually Mega Robot 1, which was supposed to have been destroyed by treaty. Drake pilots MR1 into battle with MR2 and defeats him. End of movie.

Officially, this has a running time of 106 minutes. I think they must be counting the 20 minute Full Moon Videozone afterward, because I doubt this was much more than 80 minutes. And here’s where all the “see below” comments come in: I think that Charles Band, confronted with a movie that was longer than what he wanted to release (ya gotta make room for the Videozone, after all), had the editor chop out about half an hour. Gone were such inconsequential bits as plot, continuity, character development; the only hard-and-fast rule was “don’t lose any of the effects shots — we paid good money for those.”

Because of this, through the entire movie I felt as if I had gone to the bathroom repeatedly and thus missed important scenes. Everything which would have made the storyline interesting (or even remotely comprehensible) ended up on the cutting room floor. I honestly had to wait until the Videozone to make sense of it all.

Given that this movie and the decidedly-lackluster Robot Jox were the first real entries in the live-action giant robot genre, it’s no wonder that it died a-bornin’.