watched Robot Jox today. Not bad for an old mech pilot movie
It had a little bit of Robotech, little bit of Gundam and had some of that Stuart Gordon/Charles Band charm to it
shareBetter than Michael Bay's Transformer movies.
shareI remember seeing ads for this on TV when I was in 4th grade, (it was marketed as ROBOJOX) but then confused when it didn't come to the theaters in my home town. It looked like the most awesome thing ever at the time, considering I had watched cartoons like ROBOTECH and VOLTRON ad nauseum as a small child and never known there to be an actual live-action movie with giant robots punching and shooting at each other.
When I finally got round to watching the actual movie in 2000 or so, I found the film to be pretty underwhelming though there are brief moments of sheer awesomeness and brilliance, mainly owing to Dave Allen's special effects and stop motion. If the movie had the money to give us more of that, it would be far more fondly remembered.
It's also worth noting for fans of Italian exploitation movies of the 70's and 80's that you get to see a few of the familiar dubbing guys in person (like Larry Dolgin and Geoffrey Copleston) plus favorites like Alex Vitale and Al Yamanouchi in the closest thing they'd been in to a mainstream movie at the time (Yamanouchi went on to bigger things decades later). Also Stuart Gordon directs with his usual whimsicality and brings along Jeff Combs for a bit part, so it's a fun East-meets-West of the creator of Re-Animator working with the effects people from Puppetmaster and casting actors in Bruno Mattei and Lucio Fulci movies.
Also worth mentioning is Frederic Talgorn's soundtrack.
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