Year: 1987
Director: Paul Ver Hoven
Star: Peter Weller, Kurtwood Smith
“Part Man….Part Machine….All Cop”
Well, it’s Old Detroit, and it’s a bad scene, brother. Cops are dying left & right, and crime not only pays, it has a pension. The Old Detroit police squad has a new guy, Murphy. He’s teamed up with a bad-ass chick named Lewis, and they’re off, baby. Now, they come across Clarence Boddicker & his gang. The same gang that’s been killing cops & doing all sorts of evil stuff for quite a while now. They call for back-up. But back-up isn’t coming. So, what are two cops to do against the most evil gang in Old Detroit? That’s right, baby, split up and take’em on by themselves! I mean, this has to end well, right?
First thing, Lewis is distracted by a dude’s hangdang and gets knocked off a ledge. Then Murphy rushes into a room to get the drop on two dudes. What happens next, is entirely his fault. The rest of the gang pops out from the shadows, and proceed to introduce us to the worst death scene in the history of film. He gets his hand blown off, then the rest of his arm blown off, then he gets about 4-5 shotguns unloaded on him from about 8 feet away. He’s wearing body armor, so it’s just making this all that much worse. It’s absolutely brutal. Clarence puts a bullet in his head, and the gang goes on their marry way.
Murphy is rushed to the hospital, where he’s pronounced dead. They ask him then if he wants to be turned into a bad-ass cyborg, and if he doesn’t want to be, give them a sign. They give him a 5 second window to give them a sign, and when no sign is shown, BAM, baby, he’s Robocop. Straight out the gate he’s beating the hell out of robbers, and shooting rapists in the dick. How fucking awesome is that? You know Robocop is a real man, because he has a clip that’s smaller than average, but he’s able to dispense countless rounds at a semi-auto machine gun pace without reload.
Before Robo was created, there was a guy trying to make the whole ‘robotcop’ thing happen himself. His product was ED-209, one of the most bad-ass things in a film ever. He has .50 caliber machine gun hands, and a glitch in his system. That’s all you want in a bad-ass. He ends up blowing a board room member to shit at one point in one hell of a scene. If I were the guy who created ED-209, I’d be riding around one while wearing a cowboy hat, screaming at chicks “Show me your boobies! You have 10 seconds to comply!” and they’d be all turned on by my cowboy hat and death machine.
Robocop’s former partner, Lewis, realizes that Robo is in fact Murphy, and tries to get him to come around. That, coupled with him having memories of what happened to him, cause him to finally realize just who he is, and what happened. He decides to take what happened to him personally, so he hunts down Boddicker & the gang. It’s at this point the film really picks up, and we’re straight action from here on out. Gas stations exploding, massive shoot-outs at a drug warehouse, and Robo hitting up a disco.
The films third act takes place where it all started, the abandoned warehouse where Murphy was ripped to shit. It’s a pretty sweet ordeal, because Boddicker & his buddies have cannons and a rockin’ mail truck. They try their luck, but Robocop moves at the speed of areyoufuckingkiddingme?MPH, and they just can’t catch’em. One of the coolest scenes you’ll ever see, is when Emil crashes into a vat of toxic waste, and it basically starts to melt him. Clarence puts him out of his misery by smashing him with a car, and turning him into stew. Awesome stuff.
Robo finally gets Clarence with the Robospike, which I’m pretty glad I don’t have. Why, you ask? Well, sure it’d be a bad-ass thing to have, but I’d get out of control with it. Using it to pick my nose, scratch my hangdang, clean my ears, all sorts of things, and at one point while driving and picking my nose I’d probably tap someone’s bumper and send the spike into my brain. But then again, I could flip people off with it, so perhaps it’d be worth it. In anycase, it’s so bad-ass when Robo is just screaming “CLARENCE!” and Boddicker is basically about to shit himself. He then blows up ED-209, and kills Dick Jones. Man, what an awesome movie.
Man Movie Encyclopedia Tally:
1-Liners: None
Guys Beat Up: 3
Guys Killed: 25
Swear Words: 74
Boobs: 2
Explosions: 19
Slow-Motion Scenes: 14
Car Chases: 3
Chases on Foot: 2
Broken Bones: None
Fight at a Motel? No
Guy Get Girl? No
Guy Smoke Cigarettes? No
Man-Facts:
The suit was quite the piece. At one point it had an air conditioner/fan installed because Peter Weller was losing up to 3lbs a day from sweating so much.
The hospital team that tried to save Murphy was an actual trauma team. Apparently a good portion of their dialogue was just ad-libbed, since they knew the lingo.
Peter Weller actually turned down King Kong Lives to film this. I’m sure in retrospect he wishes he’d done KKL.
Kurtwood Smith’s wife plays Dick Jones’ secretary, Barbara.
At first the Director wasn’t digging it, he actually through it away. His wife eventually dug it back out, read it, and convinced him that there was more to the story than he initially thought.
Arnold was originally considered for the role, but they thought he’d look too bulky in the suit.
Box-Office Business:
Created for $13 million dollars, and distributed by Orion Pictures, Robocop was released on July 17th, 1987, in 1,580 theaters. It came in at #1, for a weekend total of $8,008,721.
In total, in the US, Robo brought in a cool $53,424,681
C’mon Bennet, Let’s Party:
What I love about Robocop, is that it’s one of the most violent films of all time, and it was marketed towards kids. I got an ED-209 for Easter, and I had a rockin’ Robocop figure with cap-gun firing sounds. I mean, how the hell did that happen? This is probably as adult as you can get with a movie without involving hardcore porn. Needless to say, but worth saying, Robocop is the absolute best when it comes to sci-fi action. Peter Weller is awesome as Robocop, with the pitch perfect voice that I emulate to this day. Kurtwood Smith, while known to the younger generation as Red Foreman, will forever be Clarence Boddicker, one of the sleaziest villains of all time. The violence was over the top and gruesome, partnered with a great score & special effects as the perfect accoutrements. A film so awesome, that truly no sequel could measure up.
4 & ¾ Head-Butts Out Of 5
