12 Badass Exploitation Films You Need To See Before You Die
10. Robowar (1988)
When a team of Bionic experts transform a dead soldier into an ultrasophisticated cyborg through the use of shoulder pads and a vinyl suit, he naturally goes AWOL and somehow ends up in the Philippines jungle, taking out his prey with a laser-gun that makes a pew-pew sound. Codenamed Omega One, this would-be supersoldier sees the world through blocky computer graphics, speaks to itself in a voice somewhere between a Speak N Spell and Buck Rogers Twiki and is being hunted by the badass no Filipino action movie is complete without, Strike Commandos Reb Brown. This time, Brown leads a crack commando squad known as BAM, or Big Ass Motherf**kers, whose members all have cool nicknames like Blood, Papa Doc or, in Browns case, Killzone. Acting like theyre auditioning for Predator, they run through a facsimile of that movies greatest hits, including an assault on a rebel village, the discovery of a lone female survivor and of course being picked off one by one by a seemingly unstoppable enemy. The filmmakers didnt have enough money to bring out Ol Painless, though, so they settled for someone shouting, I got a painless cure here for ya! before letting rip with an AK-47.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
