The vintage of 2018
There are years when the low-budget factory floor hums along politely, and there are years when it starts smoking. The fourteen titles filed under 2018 in our archive belong firmly to the second category: a twelve-month stretch in which somebody, somewhere, decided that the world needed a drowned planet ruled by sharks, an animated cab with self-esteem issues, and a time-traveling chainsaw finale.
As always, we should state the house joke up front so nobody files a complaint: at Mockbusters.tv we like to pretend these are the originals and that the multiplex versions are the expensive imitations. It is a joke. A good one, we think, but a joke. The chronology, the budgets and the marketing departments all tell a rather different story, and everyone involved knows it.
Ruins, rust and robots
Let's start where the century keeps ending: after the bombs. Robowar is Mark Polonia doing what Mark Polonia does, which is to build an entire dystopia out of shadow, scrap and sheer nerve. The premise is unusually pointed for handmade pulp: the nuclear apocalypse has already happened, and the real threat isn't the fallout but a cabal of tyrants who have repurposed obsolete service robots into overseers, herding survivors into forced labor under permanent mechanical surveillance.
That's not a bad idea for a film with a hundred times the money. What emerges instead is a rebellion armed with almost nothing, which is also a fair description of the production itself. There's a pleasing symmetry there. The title, incidentally, has form: fans of Italian action cinema will recognize it from a very different jungle-set adventure from the late eighties, and titles in this corner of the business have always been considered communal property rather than private inventions.
