It's that time of the month again! What time? That time where we pick a film from the hundreds of thousands available to watch for free on the internet without breaking any laws... sort of... and then talk about it a little bit with some screenshots. I need a name for this bit... Indie Week? B-Movie Week? No... something more catchy... Anyway, last month I subjected myself to Nostradamus, a film with a mindbogglingly unbelievably silly plot, but with some nice action set pieces and after putting myself through The Terror of Tiny Town last week, which I'm still getting counselling for, I need something that doesn't require lots of thinking. And isn't going to make me feel like a rotten piece of shit for having watched it.
THE KILLER ROBOTS! Crash and Burn is a 2016 indie film produced, written, directed, staring, scored, erm... costumed, filmed,... animated... and erm... pretty much everything else'd by: Sam Gaffin. Auto (Sam Gaffin), Max (Mike McGowan), Strobo (Samuel Williams) and Trog (Charles Harris) are prison robots wheeled out to fight and take down mechanical monsters, but when they suddenly learn to work together and destroy the monsters by working as a team they have to be annihilated. However, resurrected from the junk pile and after rendezvousing with Betacron (Andy Jones) and Rhea (Jenna Hellmuth) they are sent to artificial planet Vidya with a mission to deactivate the algorithm that is plaguing the planet and turning it's inhabitants into robot zombies to bring about the age of enlightenment. After recruiting some friends, and suffering some setbacks, including Betacron being killed, Max and Rhea being captured and all the time being pursued Desecron (Brian Manowitz) and his team and the planets indigenous population of robots, most of the team finally make it to the satellite orbiting the planet and Strobo administers the card to de-activate the algorithm and bring about the age on enlightenment... which appears to be a big musical concert broadcast all over the universe... and then the planet gets blown up...
Holy fucking fuck me.
This movie is, without a shadow of doubt one of the weirdest fucking things I have ever watched. I genuinely don't think I can top it. Not with anything. And we are only, what, the 2nd movie into this mini project? Holy high heavens.
So after taking a minute to compose myself, it's pretty obvious to me this was shot on a budget of literally nothing. Literally fuck all. The whole movie is a green screen job in a studio. There is no location work here. I feel like it's intentionally produced as quick and dirty as possible for comedic value and the movie is so self aware. There's terrible bad jokes worked into the script, terrible puns, the whole works, and the whole thing is just running at a 100 mph, there's lots of running away from things, lots of running towards things, lots of explosions, gun fire, more explosions. This whole movie is a cinematic encapsulation of giving an overly excitable 10 year old an entire bag of sweets, several fizzy drinks and an ice lolly and then saying; "ok kid, here's 1 hour 40 minutes of movie, do whatever the hell you want!" and thus: The Killer Robots was born.
I don't even know what you want me to say? I'm not even sure where I can analyse this? I'm not even sure I should be analysing it as if it was... a competently produced movie... The cinematography is all over the place because this whole thing is a green screen job, so there's jerky shots, off angle shots, shots where everything moves too quickly, jerky, stuttery character movements, or dodgy animation of the characters because, again, it's a green screen job, and for some reason with these films nobody ever looks at the camera when they're speaking, always sort of to the north-east or north-west corner of the screen. But I feel like a good portion of the shoddy cinematography is done on purpose. I mean, if you are gonna go balls in on this - if you know right off the bat it's gonna have low production values, why even try to bother trying to aim for the bar? Just say; fuck the bar and go nuts with your crazy camera work? And they did.
The acting, script, dialogue is corny, cheesy and over the top because of course it is. But not bad, necessarily, everybody in this is 100% committed to overacting their roles, you can't fault it on that. And the special effects were so obviously done on the cheap, they're intentionally dodgy complete with jerky movements of the objects, and motion set pieces so blurry and obscure it's impossible to know what is actually going on at certain points. But the digital set design was actually pretty good. These felt like immersive places and distinguishable from each other, and were well designed to reflect robotic planets and junk yard planets e.t.c that at least gave the movie some base design for which to play out the crazy, chaotic action.
The costume design and characters were also pretty creative and it seems like the costumes were put together with whatever the hell they could find and cobble into some kind of weird suit and then complete the look with black and silver face paint... It was an... interesting... direction to take but it at least gives the film some familiarity with the characters and there was at least enough effort put in to make the costumes and therefore the characters look convincing enough to be robots...
There is a saying that every person has at least one movie in them, and for Sam Gaffin that movie was some kind of insane, really bad acid trip about robot mercenaries. But I've said before now that I will never rag on a movie, no matter how low budget, if it's a trier and after watching this it's obvious that every single bead of sweat, every tear, every drop of blood that Sam might ever secrete in his life was put into this movie and it's a total passion project built from the ground upwards and... oh my god it's not even his first movie...
I don't even know where I am with this? Everything about it is terrible, but it's terrible intentionally for comedic value, and I can't pretend that, whilst after the novelty wore off about half way though, I still did enjoy it a little bit but I can't in good conscience score it much higher than a 2... but you absolutely have to watch it. Even if it's just in abject horror and disbelief. Like going to the scene of a car crash after the accident purely to satisfy your morbid curiosity. So uh yeah, 2 out of 5 from me.
