Non-Horror Exploitation: RoboCop (1987)

26 Years later RoboCop is an amazing classic that still kicks ass in every possible way. I'm normally not a big fan of films with comic book like characters but this one proves that those kind of films CAN be great. 

Detroit - in the future - is crime-ridden, and run by a massive company. The company have developed a huge crime-fighting robot, which unfortunately develops a rather dangerous glitch. The company sees a way to get back in favour with the public when a cop called Alex Murphy is killed by a street gang. Murphy's body is reconstructed within a steel shell and named Robocop. The Robocop is very successful against criminals, and becomes a target of supervillian Boddicker.

So RoboCop is set in the future although you probably wouldn't know that if it wasn't shown in the synopsis. Just everything is typical 80's about this film but the robots. The music is cheesy, the badguys and scum of the streets look like there heading to a fetish party and the newsreaders have 80's hair and bulky shoulder pads. But there is only ONE dude in Detroit who has even bulkier ones. His name is RoboCop. 

So officer Murphy gets killed off by a gang in what is certainly one of the most grim, nasty and disturbing looking kill scenes I've ever seen in a film (especially in an action film). Some company then turns his corpse into RoboCop, an invincible super cop who lives on babyfood... That's right, babyfood. He quickly takes a car and goes searching for bad dudes doing bad things in the big city of Detroit. 

RoboCop, considering its genre, is a very violent film. Bloody scenes certainly don't get shunned. And although it's all very gory you can't really deny the humoristic tone in it all. All gore gets shown fully on screen but there is always that little piece of dark humor that gets thrown in what makes this movie so fucking great. 

The badguys, lead by Kurtwood Smith, actually do the same thing. The cast precisely finds the right formula between being cold blooded killers and being dorky and funny (but still not in a childish way). Paul McCrane probably is the best example of this all. Eventually RoboCop (who still has some vague memory of when he was Murphy) finds out that he has been killed by a group of guys and hunts them down which results in some amazing shoot outs and scenes. My favorite probably being RoboCop busting in a drugshouse, killing everybody off and then take one of the guys who killed him, throw him face first through glass multiple times while reading his rights to him. 

RoboCop is a 1987 film and in some scenes it really shows. The evil enemy robot and the fatal fall in the last scene for example look pretty dated but at the same time it all adds to the charm of this great film. 
RoboCop is a lovely classic action/sci-fi made by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven that, for many many years, many many genre fans will love. 

 Fun Fact (Source: IMDB)

In Sacramento, California a robbery suspect fled into a darkened movie theatre to escape pursuing police. He became so engrossed in the movie playing on screen, Robocop, that he failed to notice that police had evacuated all other patrons from the theatre. When the lights flipped on, the stunned man was taken into custody.