No Good Very Bad Movies 3: The one that's worse than the Transformers movie

 

Title: Gobots: Battle of the Rock Lords

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Runnerup

Rating: Disqualified!

 

It’s another off week, and I decided it was time to return to this feature. In fact, I have had to retreat and regroup on my whole idea here. What I really planned on was to make this a pretty short lineup that I could go through quickly. What I didn’t count on is how simply brutal the first two entries would be, especially Ingagi. People think I’m the kind of person who will watch movies just to laugh at how bad they are, but that’s never been what I’m about. More importantly, people who do that sort of thing are still usually nowhere near the worst of the worst. For me, at least, the movies that really do approach that level need to be handled in small doses. To continue this feature and preserve my sanity, I decided to go with a soft ball, a movie I had heard of but never seen that looked like a quick and easy watch. Except, alas, for the problem of finding it. Here is Gobots: Battle of the Rock Lords, a movie that makes Transformers The Movie look… remotely sane???

Our story begins with our second-favorite crew of transforming robots moving furniture (or something) in their outer space sanctum honestly called Gobotron. In the process, we meet Leader One, looking exactly like a robot fascist, Turbo, who wants to blast everything, and Scooter, who sounds exactly like Jar Jar Binks, as well as a few humans who get absolutely no introduction. After a few minutes of exposition, a ship that we briefly glimpsed in the credits arrives, carrying Solitaire and Nuggitt, the emissaries of a planet where the dominant cybernetic lifeforms transform into rocks. They warn that a warlord named Magmar is trying to conquer their world and gather the scepter-thingies of the local rulers. All this is overheard by the spies of Cy-Kill, the leader of the Gobots’ adversaries, the Renegades, who have the only Gobot girl Crasher, because this franchise can’t pretend to be for anything but the status quo. Inevitably, the two factions arrive on the Rock Lords’ world and quickly align themselves with Magmar and Boulder, who for some reason looks less like the toy than a cyborg Ricardo Montalban. Will good prevail, if only because the bad guys try to do each other in? Will someone please kill Scooter??? Find out- or don’t!

Gobots: Battle of the Rock Lords was a theatrically-released animated film by Hanna-Barbera, based on both the toy line and the animated television series. The film was apparently produced in parallel with the Transformers feature film by Hasbro/ Sunbow production, and ultimately released somewhat earlier. Contrary to speculation, there is little evidence that the two movies had any further influence on each other, or that many contemporary observers believed otherwise. The film had a high-profile voice cast including Margot Kidder as Solitaire, Roddy McDowall (see The Black Hole) as Nuggitt, Telly Savalas (see… The Horror Express?) as Magmar, and Michael Nouri of The Hidden as Boulder. Lou Richards and Bernard Erhard continued their roles as Leader-One and Cy-Kill respectively, with supporting voicework by Peter Cullen and Frank Welker. The film was released by Clubhouse Pictures, a branch of the Atlantic Entertainment Group (see… Night of the Comet?!). It received an estimated box office of only $1.3 million. The Rock Lords spinoff toys also proved unsuccessful, and was discontinued by 1987 The movie was released on VHS by KVC Home Video, the only known authorized home video release of the film. Surviving copies show a running time of 74 minutes.

For my personal experiences, I caught wind of this one while researching my toy-blog posts on Gobots. I was immediately intrigued. Unfortunately, what I quickly figured out is that this one is simply gone. Sure, you can get old tapes for prices in the middling double digits, and there’s evidence of an undoubtedly bootleg Blu Ray out there. But for availability in anything like a modern format, I had better leads on Shanks than this one. The best source by far was a two-part review video (see here and here), which included extensive video in authentic “full screen” format. The only one that claimed to offer the full movie was in horrible, gimmicky formatting, and somehow had a total running time of 90 minutes, more than 15 minutes longer than the running time shown for the tape. For the purposes of investigation, I watched the review video and the majority of the “full length” video. I finally called it quits not so much because I couldn’t stand any more, but because I had more than enough to evaluate the material.

With all that out of the way, I have to say I kind of liked this one. Yes, it’s terrible by any objective standard. Yes, the animation is simplistic at best. Yes, most of the characters are one-dimensional cliches. Yes, the theme song is a literal commercial jingle; yes, the running time barely fills out a TV episode; yes, Scooter (voiced by Welker!) makes you want him to die every moment he’s onscreen. With due adjustments for the state of animation before the Disney renaissance, however, it still reaches a high standard of mediocrity, or would have if the creators hadn’t stuck their necks out by putting this in theaters. Then there are at least relatively good points. The voice acting is generally good, the robots are moderately interesting in design, and the environments, especially on the Rock Lord planet, are downright impressive.  I can even put in a good word for Nuggit, as entertaining and competent as VINCENT apart from an overdone bit with his face plate, and especially Cy-Kill and Crasher (voiced by Marilyn Lightstone), whom I will get back to. Then there are surprising “dark” moments that work perhaps better than in Transformers, notably a shot of a burning city and a nameless rock warrior literally smashed to pieces.

Meanwhile, what puts this movie in overdrive is the underlying absurdity of the transforming-bot concept. The scale is even more shot to Hell than Transformers was, and that included a robot who could somehow transform from a handgun into a full-sized mech. (At least he wasn't, ah, anatomically correct.) Leader-One and Scooter are particularly wonky, all the more so since was see them together often enough to compare; the jet bot should be easily 40 feet tall, but Scooter never looks less than half his size. Cy-Kill requires even more improbabilities, rendering him not only out of scale but with a hopelessly bulky upper body. Then the core problem is that we actually see the bots living independent of people, which would be commendable as a depiction of non-anthropomorphic robots. However, this takes away what rationality there was in the transformation premise. The penultimate hilarity is that the Rock Lords actually make far more sense. If you can look like a rock, you can blend in almost anywhere on an Earth-like planet, and even if a few passing geologists gets suspicious, all they’re going to report is that they saw a big, weird rock. Try to pose as a fighter jet or even a red sportscar, on the other hand, and you’re going to attract more attention than you want under the best of circumstances.

That leaves the one scene, and this is where I had to say a little more about the villains. Around the midpoint, Cy-Kill and Crasher meet up with Magmar, and the villain gives his big pitch. What deserves to be said is that these two are literal cartoon villainy on the level of Snidely Whiplash, and as seen here, there’s just the right tongue-in-cheek tone to work. Cy-Kill strokes his potential ally’s ego, while Crasher follows his lead with sardonic insults and demented laughter that has long since gone from comically overdone to genuinely unsettling. This in itself satisfies certain problems I neglected to rant about with Transformers; tell any given supervillain to join you or die, and you’d probably just have to kill him, but tell him he’s a genius with a common interest, and he’ll go along with it even if he knows you’re already planning to betray him. The jaw-dropping climax comes when Cy-Kill declares himself “a friend of the oppressor, a champion of the evil cause”. And this is what I mean about cartoonish villainy. Even kids could see that a “real” bad guy would be talking about being a superior AI, or having a command from the robot gods, or just being a “law and order” candidate. But no, here the villain boasts about being evil for the sake of being evil, and nobody questions it.

In closing, I will as usual offer a little further explanation for the rating. My intention when I set up the rating system was to put any film I couldn’t find or view in full in the “unrated” category. But this film is not quite in that category. For the moment, it remains available as it was meant to be seen, if you’re willing to pay more than I or anyone in his right mind would for an old tape. But what really sets it apart is the total absence of material through the usual online/ bootleg channels, more complete than I have ever encountered with any film not considered lost (and for that matter some that are!). This is the kind of vacuum that can only happen from a total lack of interest or, as I think far more likely, an active campaign of suppression. This is all the more impressive since the kind of legal action needed for this outcome presumably requires an admission who was responsible for making it. By all indications, the powers that have always been do not want this to be seen, and there is no denying that they have a point. This is a long way from the worst cartoon out there (have I mentioned I saw the Battletoads pilot?), but for ignominious failure, it’s a benchmark that will not soon be matched. As for me, I just might watch it or even pay for it if it ever comes out in a modern format at a decent price. You heard me, Hasbro. I dare you.