Robot in the Family (1994)

Robot in the Family (1994)

Directed by: Mike Richardson, Jack Shaoul

Starring: Joe Pantoliano, John Rhys-Davies, Herschel Sparber

Once again I’m thwarted by my own rating scale of one to five. Some movies just deserve to be rated even lower than what I would normally call a one, such as Robot in the Family. This movie is a goddamn mess.

Joe Pants is an inventor/antiques dealer who creates a giant, retarded robot to both look for gold and take care of his kids. They get mixed up in a plot by his neighbor and antiques dealer rival John Rhys-Davies to steal some artifact from the Dome of the Rock, thus preventing peace in the middle east from ever happening. Oh, and the robot talks like Jabberjaw, and he never fucking shuts up.

It’s not just that the story behind this movie is retarded beyond belief, which it most certainly is, but also that it’s edited in such a way where you’re never entirely sure what exactly is supposed to be going on. The plot is randomly interrupted by the robot leading an army of toys down the street for no reason, or a scene of the kids trying to make pancakes. It’s all thrown together slap-dash and half-assed, and it’s really damn irritating.

And speaking of irritating, there’s that whole Jabberjaw robot thing again. Just the damn voice of the robot awoke primitive instincts in my brain that threatened to drive me to mass murder, and if I attempted to make sense of the mephitic garbage it was spewing, I probably would’ve ended up setting fire to several city blocks. I’m not using hyperbole at all when I say that I wished the robot instead just made the noise of a dental drill scraping a chalkboard.

I hate this movie so goddamn much.