MOVIE REVIEW : Stuart Gordon’s ‘Robotjox’ Offers Little Fun or Irony

Of the horror moviemakers who emerged in the last decade, Stuart Gordon ranks near the top: a dark stylist with a wicked, buoyant sense of humor. When he’s at his best, as in 1985’s “Re-Animator,” he’s capable of blow-away satire and outrageous ingenuity. Unfortunately, his latest movie, “Robotjox” (citywide), shows him closer to his worst.

The weakest of his four movies to date, it’s a modestly budgeted stab at a big lumbering, sci-fi action picture. Part of it seems stuck in the past, a pre- glasnost parable held on the shelf too long: perhaps germinated by the comic idea that the “Terminators” and “Rambos” were less human heroes than gargantuan star-robots.

Accordingly, Gordon and his scenarist, science-fiction writer Joe Haldeman, imagine a post-apocalypse world in which national arguments are settled gladiator-style by human jock-operators in huge, mechanical warrior-monoliths, slugging it out before crowds of radiation-masked fans.

Does it seems obvious that the Gordon of “Re-Amimator” would comically subvert this genre? Not from this film, woefully lacking in fun or irony until the end, when the robots lumber, thrash, bash and soar off into the stratosphere. Before this, “Robotjox” might as well be a low-budget “Top Gun” knockoff, with failed aspirations to “RoboCop.”

It’s full of earnest-looking scientists bent studiously over monitors and people in uniforms walking agitatedly through sterile corridors. There’s a nasty Soviet, swaggering Alexander (Paul Koslo), and a genetically bred female jock, Athena (Anne-Marie Johnson), who plays like a token feminist. And there’s the hero, champ Achilles, (Gary Graham) who tries to walk away, but can’t.

All these characters are such cliches that the movie’s only chance to come alive is to send them up or dig into odder crannies and quirks. Only one actor, Michael Alldredge as patriarch Tex Conway, puts any humor into his role; he and the robots walk off with what little there is to steal.

It’s a mark of the failure of “Robotjox” (MPAA rated PG rating despite nudity, violence and implied sexuality), that until the very last minute, it might easily be taken for a low-rent version of exactly the type of movie it’s trying to slyly defuse and deconstruct. We’ll have to wait for some later outing to see Gordon re-animate his considerable talent.