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STUDIO: Lushy Lemming
MSRP: $9.99
RATED: NR
RUNNING TIME: 80 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Lloyd Kaufman Signs a Release
- Commentary
- Special Effects Before and After
The Pitch
A feature length late night car insurance ad with creepy dudes roleplaying Voltron.
The Humans
Charles Harris, Jenna Hellmuth, Lloyd Kaufman, Mike McGowan, Samuel Williams
The Nutshell
After they escape from prison the four imaginatively named killer robots are asked by peaceful plant people to find a mystical potato that will save their entire race. So they do. And the plot isn’t even the easiest joke in the movie.
The Lowdown
Killer Robots is a green screen movie where dudes cosplay as The Insane Clown Posse stuck in shiny boxes wandering around a reel for an online technical college graduate circa 1999. It’s a comedy where the jokes are either absurd or awful, and just for the sake of being absurd and awful. It tries to be something terrible for an audience to laugh at. Being awful is not the same thing as being funny. Not even close. Plan 9 wouldn’t be funny if Ed Wood was in on the joke; or if there was a joke at all. Things that try to be terrible generally just are. Killer Robots has only one joke; it’s a movie that doesn’t give a shit and wants you to know it. It’s like trying to win a high school talent show by having the world’s smallest penis. You don’t audition for Mystery Science Theater, it doesn’t work that way.
In search of the miracle behind magnets, ICP took flight into space. Using tinfoil and farts.
Killer Robots probably just barely escaped from being a Youtube exclusive by having Lloyd Kaufman in it for half a second. It almost feels weird reviewing something that so obviously came from some guy’s basement. The film is all laughable costumes and stick figure CGI. I don’t even think I was meant to see this. This is the type of movie that should have its one and only screening in some crappy hotel room at Gencon. This was not made by talented people, this was made by people with a bad idea and no one to tell them just how bad it really was. Even with no budget, what is seen here is vomit thrown on a screen for fun. The limitations really mean nothing. With fewer people and roughly the same budget, Shane Carruth gave us Primer. This film is what a bunch of stoned fourteen year old kids do with their daddies camera, not a filmmaker with something to say or even a joke to tell.
Oh, God! Somebody stop the future!
I’ve never seen so much obvious running in place outside of Tony Little infomercials. It’s a common technique for films with a lot of green screen effects, but those movies try. Killer Robots doesn’t even try, people run in place by making gigantic steps and pantomiming movement like Uncle Joey trying to make baby Michelle stop crying. When they go over stairs, they just float above them and keep making the same exaggerated steps they always do. The actual environments they are walking around in don’t even attempt the illusion of depth, so it all ends up looking like b-roll FMV from a Sega CD game. The robots jump from place to place and point at things that are important before something happens and they go to another place, where they point again. I don’t think they once thought they were making anything resembling an actual film, but the complete lack of structure or narrative is kind of confounding.
Killer Robots is schizophrenic and moronic to the core, and it irritatingly revels in it. I guess people watch Adult Swim and think that being random is somehow funny in and of itself, missing that it’s one joke with the same punchline. It doesn’t matter what you say, the joke is always that it doesn’t make sense. The ending is especially guilty of this; the film keeps the killer robots looking for a mystical potato thread for all of twenty minutes before it decides it wants to be the world’s lamest H.P. Lovecraft film. The robots get to a city, or what they call a city but has no distinction from any other set, randomly find Cthulhu and forget about the stupid magic potato thing. A disembodied fish head tells us this is their greatest adventure and then our heroes are shooting shit with nerf guns duct taped to super-soakers. Then they go inside Cthulhu and ask him to stop. Of course, he does. See, it’s funny because it’s so stupid. Or it’s stupid because it’s stupid. It may sound surreal and amusing, but watching it is as funny as listening to a four year old who just learned the word fart and must put it in every sentence he says.
At last, the Sewer Shark sequel we’ve all been waiting for!
I’m sure the people making this had a ton of fun playing the Babylon 5 RPG between takes, and I’m sure they had the best of intentions all along, but this is terrible, terrible dreck that only serves as a counter argument to people that say Youtube is a breeding ground for future filmmakers. It certainly proves that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. No one outside of the cast’s moms ever needs to see this. If one person would have stopped and thought ‘hey, maybe comedy is an art form that requires a bit of a process and technique’ we could have had maybe one good joke. Instead, they just try to coast on not making sense and saying whatever random word comes to mind. At best, this would make a great reel for someone if MadTV ever comes back on the air as a cable access show. But mostly, it’s just an insult to common sense and low budget filmmakers with craft and talent.
Videodrome 2: Toasterdrome just couldn’t live up to the original.
The Package
An ugly non-anamorphic transfer of an ugly film. Whatever. They throw in some extras, including Lloyd Kaufman signing a release. Which is Lloyd Kaufman signing a release in the bathroom. Don’t worry, there is a bunch of poop jokes. Classic. They also recorded a commentary, but I got about twenty minutes into that before I felt embarrassed and started skipping around. The best extra is the special effects before and after, where you really see how little these guys can do using the same tools that other people do amazing stuff with. It’s a shitty package, but I honestly think my eyeballs would invert if I had to look at any more floating dudes in clown makeup.
Rating: 
Out of a Possible 5 Stars