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L'umanoide (1979) More at IMDbPro »

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
Prime Example of Exploitation, 18 May 2006
10/10
Author: Simon Key from United Kingdom

I saw this in the cinema when it first came out, riding the Star Wars wave like a stoned surfer.

I managed to get hold of a VHS copy some years back, and when I viewed it with adult eyes, I was astounded by how dreadful the whole film is.

The film is so bad in every way that it manages to reach the 'Plan-9' point and gains entertainment value from being so crummy and downright lame.

I have to agree, I'd sit down to watch this film with a nostalgic bag of cheesy Wotsits and a bottle of fizzy pop over laying eyes on the risible Phantom Menace any day!

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
I Think I'm In Love, 19 October 2005
8/10
Author: Steven Nyland (Squonkamatic) from New York, USA

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

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.

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6 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
The Italians made some fine movies, 10 August 2004
Author: Roger_knows_what_kicks_ass from Trondheim, Norway

THE HUMANOID is one of the most entertaining movies ever made. Aldo Lado has supplied me with some of the most bizarre and twisted images you could never imagine. You know you're in for a treat when the main character is named Golob, played by a bearded Richard Kiel and he's got a robot-dog in his crappy spaceship. You somehow can't go wrong from there on.

The Tom Tom character is also doing his to make THE HUMANOID one of the ultimate Italian science fiction epics, beware his excellent wisdom. Barbara Bach and the gigantic Kiel was quite the team in the Seventies, and as always she's looking hot in this; "The story of Golob turning Unfriendly and Unstoppable". I love Golob and his dog, I wish to see more of them. Why weren't there any sequels?

Ahhh! The glory of Italian Cinema of the Seventies and Eighties continues. These directors and screenwriters seemed to have no limits in ripping off the Hollywood big-seller. There's still plenty of somewhat obscure masterpieces to be discovered, I'm glad I found this one.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
Another painful entry in the genre of Star Wars rip-offs, 26 April 2005
6/10
Author: Randall Phillip (monstermonkeyhead@yahoo.com) from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

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.

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3 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
A fine addition to Bad Movie Nights...., 20 May 2004
2/10
Author: Mappy the Mouse from Adelaide, Australia

....Which is pretty much the only occasions I'd watch this film.

Honestly, this film is one long collection of laughable clichés. More than Star Crash, and that is a feat of some magnitude.

The incredibly poor special effects. Yes, it was 1979 and this film was a low-budget spaghetti sci fi flick, so I suppose we could forgive it for this. Almost.

The incredibly laughable reuse of models and costumes from other sources which shall remain nameless to protect them from comparison.

The painfully repetitive soundtrack, more like a collection of notes strung together.... I can't believe Ennio Morricone was responsible for it.

The stunning range of Richard Kiel's acting. He must have been getting mightily sick of playing the invincible, monstrous giant by this stage. Normally nobody would play the role better, but his rampage through various faceless soldiers is so stupid as to elicit more laughs than fear.

And then there is Marco Yeh as Tom Tom.... It doesn't come as any surprise to me that this is the only production to feature him listed on IMDb.... At least he didn't have to wear the stupid costume Ivan Rassimov was made to suffer.

But gawd is it funny as hell....

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6 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
What a _CHEESY_ movie!!!, 20 May 2000
Author: Michael A. Martinez (aylmer666@juno.com) from Los Angeles, CA

Aside from the goofy special effects and silly dialog, there's still plenty of lameness in this low-budget Italian/Turkish STAR WARS ripoff ...enough to keep most people rolling around the floor in laughter. The "villain" played by Ivan Rassimov (SHOCK, EATEN ALIVE, ULTIMO MONDO CANNIBAL) is one of the biggest pansies I've seen... even if his costume does look just like Darth Vader's... from his silly comments like "so you have come to battle me at last, princely hero!" to the way he cracks the whip around his cronies like "you failed to kill the girl! You are stripped of your command for 100 days!", I couldn't take him seriously at all. Wouldn't most villains kill their own men for disobeying them? No wonder the silly troupe of Leonard Mann, Corrine Clery, and Richard Kiel destroy his entire army so easily... and his death has to be the lamest ever filmed... "ack, my blue screen is dying!"

The Humanoid has a dynamite cast though, from Arthur Kennedy (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA) to Barbara Bach (CAVEMAN) to Massimo Serato (AUTOPSY). Even better is the crew... from Enzo G. Castellari to Giannetto De Rossi, Antonio Margheriti, and Ennio Morricone. The only problem here really is that all these cool people did their jobs BADLY... This film is not only hilariously cheap, it's a real snoozer, especially because of Morricone's howlingly awful "sleepy spacey music" which never stops! The score has no tune or melody to it, it's just random music, but synthesized to a point where it's even worse than Morricone's score for COLD EYES OF FEAR. I'm usually a fan of stuff like this but you have to draw the line somewhere. This film is lame beyond belief, though not quite as bad as STAR WARS EPISODE 1: "THE PHANTOM MENACE".

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More entertaining than those Star Wars "Prequels" for a fraction of the cost, 17 January 2009
8/10
Author: LJ27 from Vancouver, Canada

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

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.

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mediocre watchable Italian spoof salad, 22 May 2007
5/10
Author: h-a-m from Italy

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

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.

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