90s Sci-Fi Comedy With Sopranos Star Is The Strangest Film You’ve Never Seen
Before he became a household name as “Joey Pants” thanks to his turn in The Sopranos as the detestable Ralph, Joe Pantoliano had a solid career as a supporting actor, notably in The Matrix and Bad Boys, but he even popped up in The Fugitive and The Goonies. In 1994, between those two time periods, Pantoliano inexplicably turned up in the low-budget sci-fi comedy Robot in the Family as an antique dealer who builds a robot, gets into a feud with another dealer, and ends up bringing peace to the Middle East.
This is a bizarre movie, made even stranger since it stars Joey Pants and John Rhys-Davies.
A No-Budget Production
Robot in the Family stars Joe Pantoliano as a Turkish antique dealer who builds Golddigger, a robot designed to detect gold, but what it does is constantly talk in a stream of one-liners delivered in a horrible New York Jewish accent. I’m not overexaggerating; once Golddigger arrives, it never stops talking, not once. Befitting the microbudget for the film, the robot looks like cheap cardboard panels painted with gold and covered with light bulbs, as if C-3PO was re-created for a student film.
The Movie Makes No Sense
The plot of Robot in the Family is both incredibly simple and overly complex, mostly because the film never slows down and throws new characters, plot points, and horribly out-of-place music at you every minute. It ends up coming down to a MacGuffin chase for a helmet that is somehow responsible for causing war in the Middle East, and I have to say “somehow” because it’s never actually explained. John Rhys-Davies plays the evil dealer, Eli Takei, who wants the war to continue because he’s also an international arms dealer, and he’s so over the top as the villain that it’s clear at least he was having fun on the set.
The Behind The Scenes Story Is More Interesting
If all of this sounds like a bizarre fever dream, know that this is the bare surface level of the crazy that happens in Robot in the Family, which, according to the director, Mark Richardson, originally had a script of over 200 pages. The film was written by a Turkish antique dealer named Jack, who wanted to be the lead character who happens to be called Jack, and eventually was indicted by the FBI for running an elaborate insurance fraud scheme and selling forgeries, which is ironic because that’s part of the villain’s grand plan.
Given what a bizarre character the real Jack turned out to be, a movie about the making of the film would be far more interesting than what we got.
Found Life Thanks To The Rise Of So Bad It’s Good Watch Parties
Robot in the Family never made it to theaters and was released on VHS, where it was promptly ignored for years and would have been lost to time if not for the continued influence of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the allure of films that are so bad they’re good. Rediscovered by bad movie podcasts and YouTubers, the film has found life as what Red Letter Media called one of the “best of the worst.” Take that as a warning: there’s no reason to watch this movie unless you want to see one of the worst films ever made and wonder how a future Sopranos star and Gimli from Lord of the Rings got roped into this.
Thankfully It’s Not Streaming Anywhere
REVIEW SCORE
Missing from every streaming service, Robot in the Family is hard to find today, but clips of it keep popping up on social media, and even if you see them in context, don’t worry; they still don’t make sense. Short Circuit, even with the controversy of a white actor playing a stereotypical Indian, is a significantly better movie because it, shockingly, includes significantly fewer offensive stereotypes.
Today, Joe Pantoliano is retired from acting, and John-Rhys Davies is still going, at 80, with over a dozen projects currently in the works, but it’s likely that both would like to forget Robot in the Family was ever made.
