In the title role the film imports Richard Kiel who achieved a small amount of fame around the time as the comic steel-toothed henchman in the James Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). [Staying with the Bond films the film also brings in Barbara Bach and Corinne Clery who played love interests in the aforementioned Bond films as well].

Sometimes the Star Wars parallels in The Humanoid become merely tedious – the lookalike Darth Vader villain, the lookalike Star Destroyers conducting copycat moves in shots as they pass over the camera, even a sequence shooting down tiny pursuing enemy fighters which directly copies the design of the gun turrets from the Millennium Falcon. But it is a juvenile fantasy without any serious view of its elements – the script plods in a way that cannot permit anything else – and as such it shouldn’t be considered too badly.

The sets, effects and costumes aren’t too bad on the whole. Expectedly there are some shoddy opticals, but on the whole the effects are fair – the models are okay as long as they aren’t used in closeup. Kiel’s throwing about of people comes quite plainly assisted by wires and one scene where he swings a person around by their feet is all too obviously just a dummy. The costumes have a flat anonymity – we are once again amongst the science-fiction that considers that all people of the future will wear jumpsuits, robes and capes. Only Barbara Bach emerges with any sartorial elegance in an impressive gilt-edged V-neck dress and a hairdo with an afroed fringe at one point. Ennio Morricone slums it attempting to conduct a John Williams symphonic score on a four-track synthesizer which, apart from some nice heavy Gothic organ-lines, sounds expectedly ratty.

What we could have done without is the robot dog, clearly a copy from Doctor Who’s K9, which cutely bleeps, wags its tail and a flap over its mouth while going ‘ooh-ah, ooh-ah’ – one cannot work out if the robot has any particular practical function, although it does urinate motor-oil to cause the baddies to slip up at one point. The filmmakers attempt to create a verbally sparring Han Solo/Chewbacca relationship between Kiel and the robot dog does cause one to groan (although one must admit that it gives Kiel his most likeable screen moments – in moving him from a friendly hulk to a monster the film not only wastes him but also manages to switch off any interest the character has). The Tom-Tom character, who uses the Buddhist mantra ‘Om Mane Padme Hum’ as a magic spell (to the accompaniment of a music-box tinkle) and in the end goes off to the Sacred Land of Tibet (!!) is pretty funny.