User Reviews

well, we all know the music is awful. John Barry did a superb job -in comparison- with his score of STAR CRASH. Muzak, not music, plus a ripoff of the EU "anthem". Acting is negligible, although i've seen much worse. Bach & Clery were hot at the time, but perhaps it's not enough. Marco Yeh is the most stereotypical Chinese out of the bad taste jokes, with super slanted eyes, and plays some buffoon dressed like young Luke Skywalker, who can charm and subdue individuals pronouncing mantras crafted by someone on an acid trip. All in all, it is not the wreck many purport it to be, all taken into account. SFX aren't this bad. Troopers look just out of the VISITORS series, yet years in the future. Planets -the usual desert thing ala Star Wars 1977 - are decently pictured. The robot dog...agh! They did a much better job in Galactica: here we have a demented portable fridge. Kiel at his best...waving hands, sleepwalking and acting like a complete retard. I am against cheap nudity in non-porno movies, but here Bach & Clery ought to have saved the day i guess. Hey...Bach & Kiel in 1977 were starring a major Bond movie and Bach was second fiddle there, but things change, right? Easily watchable, unpretentious spoof salad.

L'umanoide is set in the distant future where Earth is now know as Metropolis & is ruled by the Great Brother (Massimo Serato). Lord Graal (Ivan Rassimov), the evil brother of the Great Brother, escapes from a space prison & sends his men to steal a rare substance called Capitron from a research institute on Metropolis. Together with the evil scientist Dr. Kraspin (Arthur Kennedy) & the power hungry Lady Agatha (Barbara Bach) Lord Graal intends to use the Capitron to mutate ordinary people into invulnerable humanoids with which they intend to conquer the known Universe. Dr. Kraspin uses the Capitron on a friendly space pilot named Golob (Richard Kiel) who he then fits with a control device, now a hulking invulnerable humanoid Golob is sent to Metropolis to kill the Great Brother before a bomb loaded with Capitron is exploded in Metropolis' atmosphere turning all of humanity into an invincible army of humanoids...

More commonly known as The Humanoid amongst English speaking audiences this Italian production was directed by Aldo Lado although on international posters (& the version I saw last night) the director is credited as George Lewis which is a rather obvious & unsubtle attempt to make him sound like George Lucas who of course directed Star Wars (1977) & which The Humanoid is a fairly blatant rip-off of. The only slight disappointment & oversight on the makers part is the title The Humanoid, how can you have a blatant Star Wars rip-off & not have the word 'Star' in the title? From the moment The Humanoid starts it sets it's stall out with the scrolling text that gives a little back-story while disappearing into the distant space or the very next shot of the huge triangular spaceship thing rumbling over the camera. There's the desert like planet, the strange 'Force' like power that kid has, the bad guy Lord Graal wears a Darth Vader helmet & matching quilted costume, there's a cuddly little comedy relief robot dog as well as a basic plot to take over the Universe. It's all here, the design of the costumes & spaceships is lifted straight from Star Wars, the character's are copycats & there's even a direct lifting of a scene as the hero blasts enemy fighters down from his own spaceship in gun turrets that are the same as those on the Millennium Falcon. The script is incredibly silly & childish, it doesn't even make that much sense either with a rather flat & plodding story. It needed a bit more life & energy really, everyone goes through the motions as you would expect & apart from the unintentional laughs the film can actually drag at times. One character is called Tom Tom, but he doesn't seem to give out driving directions.

To be fair to The Humanoid the special effects are generally alright, some of the close-up shots of the model spaceships look crap (they look like plastic models with light-bulbs sticking out) but overall the optical & model work is alright. A lot of the space background shots look they are are static pages from a book as the camera doesn't move that much. Now, I have to ask the question what use is that robo dog thing? Seriously? What possible function does it have? It is the one aspect that looks really bad as it wags it's areal like a tail & makes funny noises every so often. The costumes are OK, they certainly don't look that bad or dated although the heavy black S&M overtones of Lord Graal's costume is a bit unnerving at times. The laser gun battles also look pretty good although there's no Lightsabre's here, no, Lord Graal just shots blue bolts of electricity out of his hands but it's close enough I suppose. Look, while models aren't as detailed as those in Star Wars & the costumes look a little generic The Humanoid is a surprisingly decent looking film. Personally I think a lot of the effects shots are more impressive than a lot of low budget CGI computer rendered crap seen these days.

The IMDb says The Humanoid had a budget of about $7,000,000 & while I don't think it was quite that high I am pretty sure this did have some money spent on it & to be fair it does show. It's just a shame about that robot dog. This is quite hard to find these days, the version I saw had a Columbia Pictures logo before the credits & I doubt they are that interested in doing anything with it. Apparently filmed in Italy & Israel. The acting is pretty flt although the dubbing doesn't help.

The Humanoid is a decent attempt at recreating Star Wars on a smaller budget & has it's moments, I certainly wasn't bored by the visuals & action at least even if the story did get a little tiresome by the end. Not a bad effort really although still a silly & sometimes unintentionally funny piece of sci-fi nonsense.

They say that familiarity breeds contempt, and that is definitely the case with this unassuming rip-off of STAR WARS, one of many similar Italian films spawned in the late '70s in their rush to make a quick buck off an American hit. Characters, subplots, effects, costumes - even the opening scrolling text - are ripped off wholesale in this predictable sci-fi outing, and it's a wonder that George Lucas didn't sue - but then again, I guess this wannabe "epic" wasn't exactly on wide release in the cinemas back in those days.

Aldo Lado - the director previously responsible for such acclaimed gialli as SHORT NIGHT OF THE GLASS DOLLS and WHO SAW HER DIE? - is the man helming this puerile trash, and is seemingly unable to invest his scenes with any dynamism or energy whatsoever. However, there is one exception - the all-out action finale, which is basically a huge shoot-em-up between good guys and bad, with plenty of effects and madness going on to make it hugely entertaining. It's a shame it only lasts for ten minutes of the ninety, because if the entire film had been in this over-the-top and action-packed vein then it would have at least got a four - or even five - star rating. As it is, THE HUMANOID is a plodding, paceless, and even lifeless affair with cardboard-quality effects and unremarkable plotting which serves to waste the talents of a well-known cast.

As in STAR WARS, there's a bunch of good guys all teaming up together to fight off the bad, and these include Princess Leia-wannabe Corinne Clery as the female lead and supposed love interest, although this film is definitely lacking in cheesy romance. Clery was a minor Italian actress of the period who later went on to star in Antonio Margheriti's equally tacky YOR - THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE. Here, she's totally unmemorable, apart from the one brief interlude in which she falls in a pool and her white dress suddenly becomes see-through - this, and another brief moment of nudity equal the film's sex content.

Leonard Mann (who he?) is the totally unremarkable Luke Skywalker clone, a square-jawed curly-haired fresh-faced action star who is, quite frankly, pathetic, and the worst member of the cast. Then there's Richard Kiel, fresh from the success of MOONRAKER and taking a major role as a good-guy pilot who gets zapped by evil forces, mysteriously loses his beard, and becomes the old sticky-out-jawed hulking brute we all know and love, throwing people through windows and against walls as he goes on a short-lived rampage. The odd thing is that when he jumps into a pool, he returns to his old lovable self complete with a beard, seemingly grown in the space of only two minutes! Then there are the pair of somewhat respectable actors who really don't deserve to be seen in this mess. The first up is the always-beautiful Barbara Bach, as a big-haired evil spare vampiress who, like Ingrid Pitt in COUNTESS Dracula, is forced to have the blood of young women in order to retain her youth. Then there's Arthur Kennedy as an evil scientist whose diabolical plan is pretty pathetic. Exploitation stalwart Ivan Rassimov (DEEP RIVER SAVAGES) is Graal, a bad guy who costume so resembles that of Darth Vader that you wouldn't be able to spot which was which in an identity parade, but at least Rassimov is hidden behind a mask for the entire film to spare him the embarrassment of being seen - let alone heard, as his dialogue is frankly ridiculous.

The biggest surprise is that the "old sage" role taken by Alec Guinness in STAR WARS has been replaced by Tom-Tom, an obnoxiously twee Chinese boy played by the unknown Marco Yeh! I don't know who thought it would be "clever" to replace the old with the young, but this annoying kid just takes the biscuit as he patronisingly deals out advice to our heroes. Shoot the little git! Finally, we have old-timer Massimo Serato (THE WILD, WILD PLANET) as the "Great Brother", a minor good guy role, and he inexplicably disappears halfway through anyway.

As well as the undistinguished efforts of a familiar cast, there's also a worrying amount of familiar names in the crew of the film as well. Aside from director Aldo Lado, the usually stylish Enzo G. Castellari is credited as the second unit director, Antonio Margheriti contributes miniatures and effects work, goremeister Giannetto De Rossi is on hand with the makeup effects and Ennio Morricone, of all people, contributes the awful synthesiser music which is one of the film's lowest points. It's a shame that the combination of all this raw talent couldn't have been channelled into a beter film, but I guess everybody has their off days and somehow everyone's off day happened to be when making this film! Elsewhere, we have lots of tacky models flying about in a supposed space (they were wise to concentrate on ground-level action for the finale, is all I'll say), plenty of laser beams and shooting which is just about on a level with that in STAR WARS, a rubbishy robot R2D2-wannabe which is so bad it has to be seen to be believed (a scene in which this robot squirts robo-grease over the ground, causing all the bad guys to fall over, is the saddest in the movie), loads of enemy soldiers being decapitated in a row, bows which fire glowing blue arrows instead of light sabers, Rassimov shooting blue lasers out of his hands, too much shoddy back projection and poor blue-screen effects work, and a neck-breaking (I guess those exploitative Italians couldn't resist throwing in just a little violence). Although the last fifteen minutes is hugely entertaining, the rest of the film is sub-par making this a film for bad movie lovers only.

I should point out that I am a fan of poor sci fi films and have seen many made from the 50's onwards but nothing quite prepared me for this. To ensure absolute fairness I recently viewed the film again on youtube and I am afraid to say my memory had not been distorted.

In what has to be one of the worst films ever made every left over costume from Star Wars got reused to make an abomination which gives cheap sci films a bad name.

The only reason this gets 2/10 is that Richard Kiel did his best in it. Everything about it was bad, the storyline, the ripped off costumes and that unbelievably irritating noise made by the 'Robodog.' Awful, awful, awful - avoid unless you are having a bad film night. Then you will laugh at how bad it is.

I too must own up to having seen this film at the cinema when it first came out, in a double bill with The Manitou (what a night at the movies that was!).

Despite having some decent stars in it (Corinne Clery, Barbara Bach, Arthur Kennedy and, er, Richard "Jaws" Kiel, who is the lead), The Humanoid (original title "l'Umanoide") is truly dreadful.

There is some entertainment value to be gained by counting all the direct Star Wars swipes (I'll start you off with spaceship and costume design), and some elements of the script are so laughable as to be funny (the two don't necessarily go together).

But the music, dubbing, and wobbly mattes are beyond poor, and the rip-off status which oozes from every frame is so seedy that it irritates.

Here's humanoid Richard Kiel and his robot dog Spot who can actually wag his antenna. This is a silly science fiction War drama coming out right after the massive success of "Star Wars", and even if it was planned first, it's still mediocre. Much of it is truly laughable, very cartoonish in many ways, although Richard Kiel's character, described to be a big, gentle and kind man, is quite interesting, going from the big gentle giant in his first scenes to a humanoid out to kill in the middle of the movie than somehow switch over by the power of a child in the third to help the good guys. He doesn't really say much, but when he's on screen, you can't help but look at him.

What Arthur Kennedy is doing in this movie is truly perplexing, on the side of the villains, and he's probably one of the only actors attempting to do any acting. The special effects are decent but the music is cheesy, and I found myself yelling out wise crotch at the screen, most memorably when a computer voice keeps calling out the name Barbara, to which I replied, "Bring me my hot chocolate!", remembering the "Twilight Zone" episode "Uncle Simon". It's not by coincidence that some of the characters look like they are straight out of "Star Wars", although it does make me wonder who ripped off who.

This movie must be seen. It is the best film I have ever watched. It has everything, and every big name in Italian cult cinema participated in it's execution. Visual effects and coordination by Antonio Margheriti, 2nd unit direction by Enzo G. Castellari, music (or whatever you call it) by Ennio Morricone. It stars Ivan Rassimov, Leonard Mann, Corinne Cleri and Jaws from James Bond. It is not just a ripoff of STAR WARS, but a collage made out of moments, shots, images, sequences, textures, and modular hallways from STAR WARS that have been sort of shuffled around, done on the cheap, and without any regard for how stupid it all looks. Or how anyone might feel about it. To quote Yoda, the film is RECKLESS and that is what I admire about it the most. Even if the movie devolves into a laugh fest it maintains it's straight face and stage voice, staying in character as you howl at how utterly ruthless they were in stealing whatever they could, even if they weren't quite sure how to make it work right. My favorite touch is the lovable robot dog that Keil has with him for some reason never explained. The thing looks pathetic, like a toaster with a drop bottom lid or maybe a golf ball washer on wheels. They got it to open and close it's mouth, turn in a circle on it's support legs, and twist it's head around from side to side. And that's ALL it does -- the director (or 2nd unit director) moved the camera from position to position rather than the robot, which makes a couple of electronic kazoo like noises and blinks some lights and then backs up. That's you're anthropomorphic lovable robot, now let's make the Evil Empire all identically vacuuformed plastic stormtrooper types and have a leader who's face is obscured by a mask & give him an elaborate helmet that just happens to resemble Darth Vader. We need good guys on a desert planet so garb them in brown earth tones, give all the women bizarre Princess Leia type hairdo's and make sure that there is a cute little mystical Chinese kid who can substitute for both Short Round AND Yoda, even though they are characters from movies that hadn't even been made yet, which proves how ahead of it's time THE HUMANOID was. Finally, to hell with the laws of physics, they may apply to the entire Cosmos according to Dr. Carl Sagan, but they make for plodding movies with long majestic shots of the space ship models that could provide viewers too close a look at them & realize what the models were made out of: Have the things turn on a dime and zip out of the way. Being a quick study I recognized at least one cupcake tray serving as nuclear power stacks and am pretty sure that one of the ships had mounted electronic toothbrushes for laser cannons. They still fired lasers though, which is all that really matters once you get down to brass tacks. That's also a fitting analogy for the whole film, which has the re-definition mindset of a nine year old who just doesn't have a special effects budget for his after school play sets. Like Marcel Duchamp with his stupid bicycle wheel ("Mount it on a stool/It'll look real cool.") the whole film is a massive exercise in cultural redefinition, assigning new roles to older or previously used artifacts, images and facets of life that has little to do with their original intended function. THE HUMANOID is stupid, silly, clunky and almost pathetic, but it has ten times the imagination of the past three 2hr+ Burger King promotional commercials George Lucas has been suckering people to pay good money to see. I'd rather watch crap like this any day of the week, and there is a certain honesty about it's sense of self awareness that is refreshing. The film knows exactly what it is, doesn't step outside of that role for one second, and achieves marvelously by confining itself to the gutter. It is one of the best movies I have ever watched from beginning to end.

8 out of 10.

One curious note, though: about seven minutes into the film there is a scene where a young, shapely woman who has been captured by Barbara Bach's evil dark queen is strapped into some futuristic torture apparatus stark naked (shown clearly only from the front from the waist up) and skewered by a rack of sharpened glass needles for purposes never made clear. I note the incident because it stops the movie cold, is entirely outside the scope of anything else that happens in the film, completely inappropriate and yet is the one detail from the movie that I remember with crystal clarity, if only because there was no discernible reason for it to be there.

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD.

Watching this movie, it looks like someone saw STAR WARS (A New Hope as it is now called) and decided to take all the scenes and characters, scramble their order and then toss them up on the screen again in some random order. You have a cheap Darth Vader, R2-D2, Han Solo, Princess Leia and land speeders, laser arrows instead of laser swords and of course this films version of a Star Destroyer. There is one new sub plot about a woman who will age hundreds of years in a few seconds if she doesn't get a serum made from other women's internal juices but that is about the only original idea in this film. Ennio Morricone decided not to steal John William's score but his is pretty forgettable. Special Effects are attributed to the same guy who directed HORROR CASTLE (1963) and CASTLE OF BLOOD (1964). Also on board for FX is Armando Valcauda, who did effects on STARCRASH. Somehow this movie cost $7 million back in 1978 or '79 when it was made but I honestly don't see where that kind of money could have gone as this film in no way looks that expensive. Apparently THE HUMANOID was too shoddy even for American International Pictures who bought the rights to distribute it in America and then shelved it. Either that or they were afraid it would land them in legal trouble with 20th Century Fox for releasing a film which so blatantly steals from STAR WARS. Ironically, this film is very similar to the "prequels to STAR WARS only without the CGI. Only big difference is that this film moves at a faster pace and is actually entertaining. It's a shame this film never got a U.S. release. It's a fun little way to spend a couple of hours.

In what can be considered a genre of Star Wars rip-offs, this one stands out for having a higher budget (which ain't saying much), as well as, it being more shameless in imitating Star Wars. There are some scene for scene shots that are nearly identical to Star Wars. Also, there are "Land-speeders," a ship that greatly resembles a Star Destroyer, and instead of storm troopers, you get a bunch of Darth Vaders. This movie stars Richard Kiel's beard and Barbara Bach's breasts. The lame-o plot goes downhill fast. It involves a bad guy shaving off Richard Kiel's beard, thus turning him into a "humanoid" to kill off his goody-two-shoes brother. This means Kiel lumbers around making silly faces (attempting to act) and groaning. If scenes of a grinning retard hugging a Chinese kid as muzak plays is your cup of tea, then this movie is for you! And let us not forget the "classic" scene where the robot dog pees on the floor so the bad guys slip in it, and then electronically giggles. If you'd like to see even more low-end Star Wars rip-offs, then check out War of the Planets and War of the Robots. Both are commercially available on DVD.

A pilot of the future Golob gets entrapped in the machinations of Lord Graal, Dr. Kraspin and Lady Agatha and is turned by them into the titular Humanoid, going on a rampage to assassinate the Great Brother. He is rescued by a man, a woman, a boy with strange powers and a cute robot. The film does perhaps wears its 'influences' rather heavily but the space ship model work is adequate and the music score by the legendary Ennio Morricone is a galaxy away from other similar films. Of the actors I liked Richard Kiel as the genial Golob, veteran Arthur Kennedy hamming it up as Kraspin and Barbara Bach as the stunning Lady Agatha who has a demise straight out of H. Rider Haggard's 'She'. Not a classic but I enjoyed it much more than those tedious 'Star Wars' prequels and sequels.