‘The Humanoid’ or — The Desperate Search for Entertainment?
One of my fondest teenage memories was sitting down with my friends and chuckling like crazy at the Italian ‘Star Wars’ (1977) rip-off ‘The Humanoid’ (1979). Oh, how we laughed at the appalling dialogue. How we scoffed at the sub-standard special effects. How we were bamboozled that the great Ennio Morricone had composed the score! How we were perplexed that this movie was even legally allowed to exist. In short, it was bloody awful which could explain why I can remember everything of our mocking hilarity and nothing of the movie itself.
Decades have passed, times have changed and since then I’ve not only become a fan of the film’s director, Aldo Lado, but also, even if I say so myself, somewhat of a connoisseur of low-budget 1970’s Italian sci-fi (the greatest Italian movie of all time isn’t anything by Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini or Antonioni but, as every right-minded person knows, Luigi Cozzi’s monumental ‘Starcrash’ [1978]). So why not re-visit ‘The Humanoid’ from a more informed and knowledgeable perspective? Maybe it’s secretly a glorious hidden gem? I’m so excited to find out!
1h 40m LATER
No, it’s still bloody awful. In fact, it’s absolutely shocking just how bad ‘The Humanoid’ really is leaving me wondering if maybe my lack of recollection of it wasn’t down to time-eroded memory loss but a form of cinematic post-traumatic amnesia.
The plot is too stupid to accurately communicate via any currently existing form of the human language (that must be a task left to future generations) but it might have something to do with Arthur Kennedy (yes, that one) attempting to create an army of humanoids by dropping a bomb on Richard Kiel (yes, that one) in a lake. The plan also involves killing a woman with the highly futuristic and otherworldly name of… Barbara Gibson?… as well as continually generating a youth serum that’s used to keep Barbara Bach (yes, that one) permanently young by stabbing women’s boobs with space needles. There’s also a robot dog, a telekinetic kid called Tom Tom and enough blatant lifting from ‘Star Wars’ to have George Lucas’ lawyers choking on their cocaine.
Still, considering similar charges can be levelled at Luigi Cozzi’s superior ‘Star Crash’ it doesn’t quite explain why Lado’s film fails where Cozzi’s succeeds, and the answer appears to be down to one simple word — enthusiasm.
It’s fair to say Aldo Lado, compared to Cozzi, was technically the more proficient (or is the more accurate word “competent”?) filmmaker but Lado directed ‘The Humanoid’ purely as a job for hire, as well as a favour to the producer, so had no real interest in sci-fi itself. As a result the film (and this is despite mayhem supremo Enzo G. Castellari brought in as second unit director to beef-up the action scenes) frequently feels flat, listless and lacking a certain pizzazz. Cozzi, on the other hand, genuinely adored fantasy-tinged space shit and that passionate zeal for the genre resulted in a deranged masterpiece containing enough unbridled pizzazz to fry a horse.
So ‘The Humanoid’s an unmitigated disaster, right? Weeeeeellllll…
It’s not wholly unwatchable or devoid of certain pleasures, although humanity might discover alien life before you can actually find any of them. Lado knows how to compose an appealing shot, there’s some vaguely impressive location work, the budget is decent for what it is and the special effects, despite being laughably primitive compared to ILM, possesses a quaint cobbled-together charm. It’s also hypnotically captivating watching a team of filmmakers with access to none of Lucas’ resources attempting to reproduce something of a similarly galactic sized scale and technical fidelity, and the more they fall flat on their face or inadvertently conjure up something uniquely bizarre (the bad guy’s Darth Vader costume looks like he’s escaped from a fetish dungeon) the more interesting it becomes.
However, even for fans of late 1970’s Italian ‘Star Wars’ knock-offs ‘The Humanoid’ is a bit of a slog but it’s worth watching purely to see if you can make it all the way through without lunging for the remote control to frantically turn the thing off which, when it boils down to it, is the only possible source of potential excitement or nail-biting drama this film’s capable of generating.