ANI-MOVIES, *Defenders Of Space

Yet another Korean knockoff from the Joseph Lai filmography, Defenders Of Space, was original titled Phoenix-Bot: Phoenix King(also known in parts of Europe as Master Of The Future), and features several ripoffs of various anime and Japanese toylines. Among these are White Base from Gundam, some of the ships from the Leijiverse, and a certain fire engine from Transformers which as this point was still part of its original Diaclone line, plus the title character of Tezuka's Phoenix manga.

In the future, the mighty Zinba empire lead by Emporer Nicholas are a race of blue aliens ripping off the Gamilons from Yamato armed with Tatsunoko super robots, and invade the human colony on Mars. Some of the youngsters were luckily off planet playing baseball, and arrive just as their city has been decimated. Two of them head to Earth to seek out the power of the mysterious Phoenix King, instead of for some reason getting help from Earth's defense forces, which seems to be run by guys in business suits. The pesky kids unlock the Phoenix King robot, which is actually Inferno from Transformers and only transforms into a fire engine near the end of the movie after a single Autobot manages to take out an entire galactic armada.

The animation is sub-par, even by Korean forgery standards, with the characters changing facial patterns from scene to scene. There's boring music, and even though its only a little over an hour long the film pads out several segments with shots of the Phoenix-Bot flying in space, almost like the entire movie was one big commercial for this one 80s action figure. There are parts where the movie completely say "screw you physics" like when someone shoots opens a ship's window in space to run a drive-by on an approaching missle, like something out of GTA. If you're planning on doing your own Mystery Science Theatre session for a crappy anime wannabe bootleg, then dial this up, which is conveniently part of the Ronin Mecha lineup on Tubi.