When did Danny Trejo stop understanding English?

I Heart Robots feels like a Dutch porn that had to cut its sex scenes for budget or so they could sell it to Tubi. Directed by Justin Price, I Heart Robots stars Franzi Schissler as Terra who lives in the robot apocalypse and talks to her friend Jess (Lela Gruber) over the radio from time to time. Terra is given a mission to go north with her robot Q in order to deliver Q and do some future apocalypse shit that might save the world or save humanity or something like that. I’m not really sure.

Terra dons a sexy outfit that makes basically no practical sense in the apocalypse and goes on an adventure with her annoying-ass robot. Q’s job is to be annoying and talk constantly in a bad Microsoft Sam voice. Along the way they come across robots whose complete lack of structural integrity is explained by the movie saying all of humanity put its weapons away years ago and relied on the robots. This is how our characters can down a big ass robot in one pistol shot, yet those robots also wiped out humanity.

This movie is a great lesson for first-time directors. The robot Q spends 90% of the time being poorly utilized by the director and CG people. If you know that the robots are going to look like crap walking around, don’t show their feet so the audience can see them gliding across the ground. A lot of scenes in this movie would have benefitted from a flat, stationary camera and darkness. There’s a few parts where the robots are meant to be intimidating, and instead of doing an over-the-shoulder top-down shot they have really awful side shots where you can see the robot’s feet not touching anything.

Seriously, the robots look so much better under the shroud of darkness. The robot scenes in this movie would have been so much better if they were dark scenes. It hides imperfections and raises viewer tension. There’s a reason stuff like Resident Evil isn’t in the middle of the day.

If you don’t know much English and can’t write a script, have your characters talk as little as possible. It’s a post-apocalyptic movie, long scenes of somber silence are expected and build the mood. There is far too much talking in this movie, and the only guy who pulls it off is inexplicably the director Justin Price. It’s very obvious that the actors weren’t given much scene direction, if at all. The scenes are a jumbled mess of flashbacks and dream sequences that make the movie convoluted and hard to keep up with.

You can tell this movie has a lot of heart put into it, but it’s not good. The actors are mostly terrible. Danny Trejo is in a good few scenes and he is just baffling with his lines. I want Justin Price to make scary movies because I feel like with some experience under his belt he can do a great job with it. Like the new Scott Cawthon but with movies instead of games.

Rating: C-