Santa’s Labyrinth

A bearded, aging barbarian fights bandits, vampires, a mostly-off-screen dragon, and (inexplicably) a horde of space robots to save a kingdom from a hazily defined doom in this z-movie snoozer. In many cases the main character is portrayed on-screen by obvious stand-ins failing to hide behind a series of absurd wigs and beards. An extra 1/2 star for the (non-sequitur) robot fight at the end, which seems to be borrowed from a better, more carefully made film.

The exit to this level of the labyrinth is guarded by the ancient robot (Level Boss, Curates, Ashes). Adventurers attempting to pass must answer a query to be given a token that will open the gate back to the labyrinth proper.

That question is posed using the relation ”Watch a Movie”@"Good Times", the “Heroes and Champions” topic of heroic archetypes, and the “Movie Night” topic. Specifically, the visiting robot is asked to make a movie recommendation to the fictional hero type of their choice. (Level Boss, Curates, Ashes) will evaluate the response and if it seems plausible will let the robot pass.

A few pairs known to satisfy the query are:

• Trickster God watches A Night at the Opera (1935),
• Hard-Boiled White Knight Detective watches All the Presidents’ Men (1976)
• Character who may or may not be a literal angel in a Hallmark Christmas Movie watches The Mechanical Marvel (1959)
• Robot Yearning to be a Real Boy watches Robocop (1987)

Note that just because a movie features a particular archetype doesn’t mean that movie is necessarily a good recommendation.

The fourth station of this part of the Labyrinth is just a complete 23 minute long episode of Gerry Anderson's extremely uncanny-looking late career puppet television show "Terrahawks", played in color without commercials.

Animated, for television. The Herobotix team of crime-fighting robots take a break from fighting their arch-enemies the Creepadroids to learn various holiday lessons from their human friends. The Creepadroids apparently didn't get the memo, and their attempts to interfere introduce convenient cliffhangers at every 30 minute mark in this movie that is clearly an after-school cartoon miniseries cut together into a feature. The only surprises in this otherwise by-the-numbers toy advertisement disguised as a movie are during a 30-minute segment where Herobotix lieutenant Turbotron and Creepadroid antagonist Drillkill are forced to cooperate to find their way through an enormous subterranean maze.