Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: RoboCop (1987)

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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb, and today we are going to rerun our episode on 1987's RoboCop. Yes, the ultra-violent sci-fi action classic that is deeply satirical as it is gratuitously violent. Originally published, 12-1-2023. Let's dive right in.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lam. And this is Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be featuring a movie that I feel like is kind of a foundational text for my adult appreciation of cinema. It is the 1987 sci-fi action satire Robocop, directed by Paul Verhoeven.

Rob, I'm so excited we're talking about Robocop today. Did you come up? I think I know you came up with this topic because you recently visited some of the original locations featured in the movie. Yeah, I was on a family trip to Dallas over Thanksgiving break. We'd never been before. We went there primarily to go to Meow Wolf and then to check out.

various things in the city, museums and restaurants and whatnot. And I'd honestly kind of forgotten about the RoboCop connection until we were there driving around. And then I look out the window and I see the Dallas City Hall. And then I remember this is the RoboCop building. This is OCP headquarters, or at least the lower portion of it. They did a map painting on top of that to make it into this enormous skyscraper that reaches up to the heavens.

And then was just generally impressed by the architecture in Dallas. And then once I got back, you know, started looking at Robocop again and was reminded like just how present Dallas is in the background, standing in for futuristic Detroit. Right. So Robocop is not actually set in Dallas. It's set in near future Detroit at the time the movie was made.

but some of the architectural landmarks in Dallas really communicate the feeling that they were going for in the world of Robocop.

Yeah, and it's unmistakable, even if you're not from Dallas. There's a car chase earlier in the film where you see Reunion Tower in the background, which is a very identifiable structure. It's this concrete pillar jutting up into the sky, and there's a sphere up there. It's not a perfect sphere, but observation and restaurant deck. And my family actually went up there.

It's pretty fun, has pretty cool history, like a lot of these buildings. But, yeah, it's there in the background. Anybody who knows anything about Dallas, or even seen the opening to the TV series, Dallas, would have been able to recognize that this is not Detroit, this is Dallas. But, you know, nice stand in. Lots of neat, futuristic looking architecture. So, when did you first see RoboCop?

I saw it like I think a lot of people of my generation saw it way too young. I think it was playing at a friend's house or kind of like friends of the family at their house and ended up watching part of it and you know there's plenty there to

bring in a young mind to captivate a young mind, you know, robot fighting crime, firing all sorts of crazy guns. But then, you know, it is it's kind of a notoriously violent film. It's it's got some really grotesque moments in it, which we'll discuss. It was not appropriate viewing at this at whatever age I was. But, you know, I I still loved it, grew to love it. And I think a lot of people have this experience. Someone I was talking to in the last couple of years,

said that their mom had rented this for them at the store when they were young. They were just like, oh, they need a film. Robocop, this looks fun. They didn't look at it closely enough to realize it was rated R. And then the violence just washes over them.

and probably a lot of the commentary sort of went over their heads at that age too. Oh yeah, yeah. All that ends up sticking with you probably is like the cool robot stuff and there is some really cool robot stuff in this film, the violence and probably the profanity. So I did a little digging to figure out when I first saw RoboCop and I was able to peg it to a year

based on a rather greasy marker. So I knew that, and this is also a very robo-cop sounding reason to be able to know when I saw this. So I first saw it right around the debut of the Wendy's menu item, the Baconator, which would place this event in the year 2007. So, you know, it was 2007, I don't know how old I was, I was like 20 or so.

I was hanging out with some friends and somehow it came up in conversation that first of all I had never seen robocop and second I had not yet had one of the new bacon haters and they were like okay we've got to fix both so we went to windies and then we watched this movie.

And sorry to the Wendy's fans out there. The Baconator, at least this one at this time, was not good. And I'm not trying to be a food snob. I totally admit I can enjoy a greasy fast food sandwich. But whatever I got that day was just not right. It seemed like it had about eight slices of American cheese and like 30 strips of bacon on it. Just too much, too much bacon and cheese. Maybe those things are different now.

I don't know. But on the other hand, Robocop was amazing. And this memory, I think, sticks with me because the Baconator I had that day came to seem like something that you would see an advertisement for in Robocop. It's like an in-universe Robocop food item. It's something Emile would be eating while he's pointing a gun at you and asking if you think you're smarter than a bullet.

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of the 6000 SUX of burgers, it sounds like.

It'll be hilarious if a Wendy's ad runs on this episode, by the way. So I was struck by how different this movie was than I had always assumed, because I'd never seen RoboCop, but I was aware of it as one of these 80s action movies. And I received it the way it had been, I think generally culturally metabolized, which was totally missing the point of it.

shelving it alongside these other gory our rated eighties action movies maybe on the level of commando starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that that's how i thought of what robo cop was

And I think it can leave that kind of impression in memory if you were far removed from, especially in early viewing of the film. I mean, the violence is so violent that it kind of sticks with you. And you might forget some of the other stuff. Like I was talking to my wife about this when I was about to rewatch it. She was very, very supporting of me watching Robocop, but did not want to watch it. And I had to remind her, say, oh, no, there's a lot of satire in it. There's more to it than just the violence, though the violence is there and it's sticking with you for a reason.

Yeah, I agree. And at the risk of sounding like a sucker, I think Robocop has a quite genuine soul and humanity to it. And amid everything else it is, it is a hyper-violent action movie. That's true. It is a hair-raising depiction of a world in the hands of amoral egomaniacs. It is also a sort of light, light sci-fi speculation about cybernetics.

It is definitely a hilarious funhouse mirror to American culture. Amid all those things, it's about the struggle to keep hold of one's own humanity in a situation where there is enormous pressure from every direction trying to transform you into a soulless machine.

A lot of retrospective appreciation of Robocop mentions the satirical aspects of it. I think you absolutely could look at Robocop as a satirical vision of a dystopian near future from the time that it was made.

And I think one of the main political thrusts of the commentary in the movie is, if you ever heard people say, I wish the country could be run like a business, the situational premise of Robocop is to say, okay, let's see what that would be like. So it depicts a kind of privatization nightmare where everything that used to be thought of as a public interest and a public good is sold off to corporations to be run for profit.

And that seems to be happening in pretty much all domains in the world of the film. Robocop especially focuses on the police department in the city of Detroit, which has been bought out by a corporation called Omni Consumer Products or OCP.

And OCP seems to be using it primarily in a couple of ways. You get the sense they're looking at it as a cost cutting center. So maybe they're taking the money for the contract and then just cutting costs down to the bone without regard for how this affects people and then keeping the difference. But they're also using it as a playground to test out prototypes of new hardware that is eventually destined for military use and thus big Pentagon contracts.

And the plot of RoboCop essentially arises as a conflict between two rival OCP executives. You got Dick Jones and Bob Morton who are squabbling to get their respective lethal robot projects online at the police department so they can eventually step them up, scale them up, and secure defense dollars.

So the things that are happening in the movie are happening because of what's going on at the corporate board level, these characters squabbling to get their own projects online and make bank off of that. Meanwhile, the main good characters are essentially just street level cops who are unknown and unimportant to these power players, but whose fates are controlled thereby.

Yeah, I mean, they're just struggling trying to do their job. Also, there's talk of unionization. There are all these other additional elements that are in play kind of at the street level. But OCP is not at street level. They're halfway to heaven in their enormous skyscraper. And that's where a lot of the plotting and ultimately a lot of the action goes down.

That's right. So I thought Robocop was great when I first watched it. I've seen it several times over the years since then. I've long had an appreciation of it. But most recently, when I watched it just this week, I sort of think it's better than ever. And one thing that struck me on the most recent viewing is that

In a way, I think the sort of police and criminal justice themes are less essential to the spirit of the movie than a lot of people would think and certainly than I once thought. So like the characters are cops and some of the villains are career criminals, but

They could be in any line of work of what used to be public service sector jobs, and the spirit of the movie would be similar, though I guess it would be a lot less high octane if this was about librarians whose branch is bought out by OCP, and they want to replace all the books with advertisements for the new 6,000 SUX.

But I think the deepest idea, like what's at the heart of this movie, is that it's about people who are doing a job, whatever that job is, where their bosses do not see them as human beings. They are treated like inanimate tools or machines just to be used to their maximum value, exhausted and discarded. And this metaphor is literalized in the case of RoboCop himself.

and his redemption is in rediscovering and reasserting that he is a human being, not just a mechanism to be used for profit by somebody else. His rediscovery of his humanity, that he is a human and not a product.

Yeah, I very much agree with just the how good the movie is like basically Robocop shouldn't be this good as I rewatch it in my mid 40s here, you know, because it's a film that again terrified and enthralled me when I was.

at a way too early age, entertaining me later on as a solid dystopian action movie with some laughs thrown in. But yeah, it absolutely delivers satirically, it delivers with the action, and it delivers emotionally. When the film really gets into its own emotional depth, I felt like those moments still hit pretty hard, or actually hit harder than they ever had.

For instance, Murphy's son in the film is about the age of my own son. So it's, you know, that resonated in a way that it just wasn't going to resonate with me when I was a kid. And then, of course, all of this on top of the expected nostalgia rush of watching a film like this that, for better or worse, you grew up with.

Yeah, totally. So I see all that. And at the same time, I accept Robocop is probably not for everybody. This is, to be clear, a hard R-rated hyper-violent film. So you've got to be in the, I don't know, in the right headspace to accept it. But if it is on a wavelength that is amenable to you, I think it is excellent. All right, Joe, what's your elevator pitch for Robocop then?

Omni Consumer Products has bought out the contract for old Detroit and wants to replace its human police force with one of a selection of different gun-wielding robots. Beatkop Alex Murphy is killed on the job and his body parts, including the remains of his damaged brain, are used as scaffolding for one of these projects, a cyborg called Robocop.

Is he simply a tool now controlled in full by his corporate masters? Or is there still a human being inside who can act of his own free will? All right, let's listen to that trailer audio. All Detroit has a cancer. The cancer is crying. We need a self-sufficient law enforcement robot. How long will it take? We can go to prototype within 90 days.

Where are you from? Petrosa. Welcome to hell. All units, all units, check your lives. Federal lives, you're coming with me.

Man, this guy is really good. It's machine. RoboCop, what is he? He's a cyborg, you idiot. All hero. What are your prime directors? Protect innocent. Let the woman go, or there will be trouble. Of all the law. You are under arrest. What is this? Justice. Yes.

Thank you for your cooperation. Good night. All right. Well, if you want to go out and watch Robocop before proceeding with the rest of the episode, go for it. It's widely available as a physical or digital release. Joe, you watched it on the older Criterion Collection DVD, which I understand is pretty awesome. I watched it on the Arrow Blue Ray, which I rented from Video Drome, which I really love. Both are loaded with extras.

I think I got to upgrade my disk because my old DVD now is playing in a rectangle inside my TV screen. But nevertheless, yeah, it was a great rewatch.

Let's get into the people involved in this production. Starting at the top with the director, Paul Verhoeven, born 1938. Dutch director, best known internationally for his string of major Hollywood genre films of the 80s and 90s.

This is our first brahuvan film. He started out in Dutch cinema, and his first full-length feature was the 1971 comedy Businesses Business, followed by 73's Turkish Delight. That's his first collaboration with fellow Dutchman Rudgar Howard in his film debut. This was an erotic drama, and the film was a critical success and received a best foreign language film nomination at the 1974 Oscars.

He did three additional Dutch films with Hauer and a 1983 thriller called The Fourth Man with Jerome Krabi, another Dutch actor of note that he had frequently worked with that went on to international success. After this, he transitioned to Hollywood with the Rudger Hauer-helmed 1985 medieval action adventure film Flesh and Blood, or it's actually the title often looks like flesh plus blood, equals what?

cinema, I guess, and then comes Robocop, which was a big enough hit, though at the time criticized for his violence, certainly, that he went on to direct total recall in 1990, Basic Instinct in 92, Showgirls in 95, Starship Troopers in 97, and Hollow Man in 2000, which was apparently an unsatisfying film for

where he's like well this is the first movie that i made that looking at it someone else could have made it you know he didn't feel like his touch was there so after this he moves back to Dutch cinema with a string of pictures that lean more historical and theme less sci-fi and so forth. But i believe he is set to return to american cinema with a project called young center which is currently in development.

yeah regarding his other big hollywood movies it's it's it is a weird string of films that you can totally see the as different as they are the creative threads that run through them and i would say what the thing that they all have in common is excess he was a filmmaker who was into

depicting a kind of carnal excess in terms of sex and violence, but usually to make a point of some kind, whether he was successful or not in all of these endeavors, that's questionable. Though I think I would single out Starship Troopers in 97 as another movie that I think at the time, a lot of people really did not get it. Kind of like what happened with RoboCop. A lot of people saw it as a kind of

excessive mindless hyper-violent sci-fi action movie that, in retrospect, a lot of critics have looked back and said, this is actually a quite sharp satire and works much better than we originally realized. Yeah, I still need to go back and re-watch it, because I watched it when it first came out. I just didn't pick up on all the satire. And so the fascist themes in there that are there intentionally, that are being satirized,

just ended up sitting with me in a very weird way. I was like, I really don't like the humans in this. And of course, I don't think you're supposed to like the humans in at least by the end of the film. So yeah, I need to revisit it at some point. Now, Verhoeven was apparently I've read slow to accept the Robocop project, apparently because he didn't really understand the satire at first.

And I think it's been said that his wife said him down and was like, no, no, no, see, this is what it's, don't you see what it's doing here? And then he was like, okay, yeah, I see now. And I wonder how much of that has to do with the excess, you know, because it's like, he seems like a filmmaker, you know, who is about pushing for the excessive violence and or sexuality, more of the violence in this film, but also pushing the satire, like making sure that everything's ramped up enough that you can't miss it.

Even, at least subconsciously, it's going to needle your brain and make you realize something's not right here or something's being said. There's some additional way I'm supposed to interpret this. Yeah. Though, like I said, I mean, I think especially in the case of Starship Troopers, it seems like a lot of people did miss it at the time and only got it years later looking back. Yeah. Now the writers on this, we have two writers. There's Edward Neumeier, American screenwriter, producer and director. This was his first big hit.

alongside Michael Miner, who I'll get to in a second. He went on to work on Starship Troopers, Starship Troopers 2, and Starship Troopers 3, which he directed. He also co-scripted Anacondas, the hunt for the blood orchid in 2004. And he's actually the writer of the upcoming Young Center project that I referenced earlier.

I have not seen the Starship Trooper sequels, but oh boy, that just sounds like, I don't know, reaching into a snake hole in the woods. I don't know if that... Maybe they're great. I haven't seen them.

Now, as for Michael Miner, also director and screenwriter of various projects, this was his first big hit as well, which he followed up with script work on 1989's Deadly Weapon, which he also directed. Longmore Man 2. And also Anaconda's The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. He also directed 1999's The Book of Stars, which looks like it got some good reviews. I think it's more of a drama. Early in his career, he directed a number of music videos for The Rock Band, The Y, and T. I don't think I know them.

I was not, it looks like some sort of rock band or metal band, but I just don't know. Now, our star of this is, of course, Peter Weller, playing essentially a dual role, Alex Murphy, and then the Robocop that Murphy becomes, and then Robocop's attempts to reconnect with the Alex Murphy. He once was. Weller was born in 1947, American actor and director who's acting, goes back to the early 70s, and he's still active today. We previously discussed him in more depth in our episode on Panos Cosmatos, the viewing.

As we go on to discuss Weller in this role, a point of comparison that I think is maybe worth making is to the actors who play Batman, where there's a dual role, where there's like, you know, you have your face revealed in one sense as Bruce Wayne, but then also for part of the movie, you are just a mouth and chin.

Yeah, so luckily, Pierre Weller has a very handsome mouth and chin, very expressive. I think the other interesting thing that was surely intentional is that, especially at the time, he was a very gaunt actor, a very thin man, which you need a skeleton to go in the middle of all of that.

gear that he ends up wearing in the Robocop suit. So I think that that probably was a huge factor as well. You need somebody that can literally be the skeleton of this thing.

Now, as Murphy, he's basically just a likable good cop that we don't really get to know all that much. We learn more about him through Robocop as he tries to reconnect with his past. And this results in various moments where Robocop the cyborg is trying to connect with the remnants of his own humanity and his memories of his family. And I think Weller does a really great job in those moments. I kind of weld some tears

up in those moments myself. And then also just in terms of the action scenes, I think it's a very nice physical performance. So there are certainly times where the robot movements look silly, walking around as Robocop, and I think maybe they're supposed to. But there are also some great flourishes that really bring this metallic halt to life. I think about the way that he positions his hands when he's firing that enormous pistol of his. I don't know if this is something that actually makes sense.

In the use of a pistol but it looks really good when robo cop does it well there's a strange kind of ballet to the way that he moves like he doesn't just raise his arm to shoot his robo cop gun he.

If you know what I mean, Rob, there are some shots where he can almost kind of like, he raises both arms, like he raises his other arm as a kind of counterbalance. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, it does feel very mechanical like this, like his upper torso is the turret of a tank, you know? Yeah. But also, so I see, yeah, it is mechanical and it almost looks like he's doing a counterweight or counterbalance, but it also kind of looks like a dance, like it, like ballet or something where the arms both go out.

Yeah, if they had not done those things, I think Robocop, the character would have been a lot more just visually unappealing. So I was noticing a lot of that in re-watching the film. Now, Weller came back to play Robocop again in the sequel, Robocop 2. But by Robocop 3, he was played by a different actor, Robert John Burke, of best known probably for thinner and dust devil.

I'm to understand that Weller was unavailable because he was filming Cronenberg's Naked Lunch at that point. Robocop 2 is interesting. I think it is quite good, but it's very different than the first Robocop and has a different kind of mindset. Robocop 3, I've never seen, but on paper seems like it could be hilarious, so I kind of want to get into it.

It has a great cast. And it's interesting, too, in that by three, they're like, you know, kids love Robocop. Maybe let's make one that's not rated R. And so that's what they did. But yeah, I've never seen it. But I would like to love Robocop, too. It really ups the ante, especially on the stop-motion violence.

Yeah. So three has, what I know about it is that I think it has rocket ninjas and it is no, its reputation is quite terrible. Yeah. But it has Stephen Root in it. So it's kind of got to apply a Stephen Root rule. How bad could it be if Stephen Root is in it?

I should also note that Weller has returned to voice Robocop in recent years. I believe they put the character into one of the Mortal Kombat games. And there's a new Robocop video game that I am not technologically equipped to play. But I've read some interesting things about it. It sounds like it does an interesting job of sort of drawing from all three films to create a like a fourth narrative that you can play through.

I don't know that the satire is there. So if you've played this new RoboCop game, write in and tell us what you think. All right.

Next actor of note is Nancy Allen, playing the cop Anne Lewis. Born 1950, American actress who kicked off her film career in 1973 is the last detail. She followed this up with supporting roles in a string of horror movies, including 76's Carrie, then a string of roles in films of the films of Brian De Palma, 79's Home Movies, 1980's Dressed to Kill, and 81's Blowout.

After Robocop, she appeared in both Robos sequels. She was in Poltergeist III in 88. She was in 1998's Out of Sight. She was in Children of the Corn 666, Isaac's Return in 1999. And her last acting credit was in 2008. So it sounds like maybe she's sort of quietly retired from cinema.

Is Children of the Corn 666 the 666 movie in that series? It might be. I feel like there are that many of them. I've attempted to look. I don't think I've ever seen one. I love Stephen King's original short story. It's very creepy. But it's hard to figure out where to even contemplate beginning with the Children of the Corn movies. Why would it take Isaac that long to return? I don't know. I think maybe

So I really, really love Nancy Allen as Lewis in RoboCop. Maybe my all time favorite buddy cop partner in a buddy cop movie. So the movie shows kind of multiple ways that the police characters react to the pressures that they're under in this plot. Some of the cops in the movie just become unthinking functionaries of OCP.

just keep their heads down, do what the boss says, they don't ask questions, even when they are essentially ordered to assassinate Robocop later in the movie. Others are shown having emotional crises, like there's one guy who just always in every scene seems to be freaking out. Lewis is an interesting, like she keeps cool under pressure and she thinks for herself and she uses compassion. She's the one who's able to understand what's going on to see that Robocop is actually Murphy when she like,

gets in his face and says it's humor fee. Yeah. And to see that there's some part of him that is still human and to save his life when Dick Jones is trying to have him destroyed in the third act or second or third, I don't know, later on in the movie. And I think Nancy Allen does a great job with this role. She's tough down to earth, plays a smart human. I really like her in this role.

Oh yeah, she's really the heart and soul of this movie in many ways, in a very real sense, in an intentional sense. And it's also great that she's not written as a love interest. She's a capable action hero in her own right, in an action movie, but her compassion is really her main strength. And without her, if you take her character out of this, you don't get any kind of a positive resolution for the characters in the setting.

I agree. I think a lesser movie would have tried to have some kind of romantic relationship between the two and it just that that's not what this relationship is about and I'm glad they didn't go that direction.

I watched a featurette on the Arrow Blu-ray where they're interviewing her about this role. And Nancy Allen does point out, it's very interesting how she ended up getting the part, the sort of callback experience and so forth. But she said she showed up in Dallas and they were like, how about a shorter haircut? Because she had longer hair. And she's like, OK, she goes out and gives her haircut. And then she's like, oh my god.

I got my haircut way too short. I got a terrible haircut for this movie. I don't think it looks terrible, but it is very short. So it's interesting to think about that, looking at the character. I think it ultimately works really well for the character, but at the time, I think she was a little horrified. She was like, I think I've gone too far. I think this was the first movie I saw in Nancy Allen in. So I just think of this as her natural haircut. So when I see her in other stuff with longer hair, I'm like, oh, here she has long hair now.

All right, let's get into some of the corporate characters here. And we'll also come back to a few cops. We've talked about this actor before, but Dan O'Hurlay plays the old man.

Oh boy, the villain from Halloween 3 shows up as a, I don't know, is he a villain? Yeah, he's a sort of unwitting villain in this movie. You don't see him. He's not as direct of a schemer as some of the other corporate villains. He's more just kind of like sitting there presiding over all of the wickedness that goes on, mostly oblivious to it.

I, you know, going into this and perhaps the character changes a bit in the sequels. I don't remember. I've probably seen Rebel Cup two more than I've seen any of them. So maybe he's more of a villain in two, but in this one, I feel like he is essentially God or perhaps Zeus, you know, he's

The corporate meeting rooms of OCP are in a place where skyscrapers touch the heavens, and his appearance at a meeting is spoken of in terms of a holy visitation. And we never hear his name. He's just the old man. It really does feel like he actually comes down for these meetings from heaven or from Mount Olympus, carrying with him the aloofness and distance of a divine father who wants the best for his creations. He wants to create Delta City. Remember, he's the idea man. All of this

Robot cop stuff is just in service to this grand dream that is going to make the world better at least for some people He wants to fix his creation, but he doesn't really understand mortal existence all that well

You're right. And I think the comparison to Zeus is apt because in some ways he is kind of an arbiter of justice or a moral authority in some way, but he doesn't really seem to have much understanding of morality at all. It's like he is like an amoral arbiter of justice.

Yeah, so it's an interesting role to look at. Again, thinking of it's easy to go in and think about his role in Halloween 3, where he is this evil corporate guy. And we also talked about him in the last Starfighter episode we did. He plays a good guy in that. He's covered in alien makeup.

Yeah. In this, I guess I would say he is functionally a bad guy in terms of the effects of his behavior, but he doesn't have bad guy energy on screen. He's just sort of like an oblivious God who's bumbling around destroying people without really realizing it.

Yeah, and ultimately, he's not a power to be overcome by our heroes, but to be appealed to. Yeah. So we'll talk about that when we talk about the climax. But yeah, Dan O'Hurlay, great actor of stage and screen. He lived 1919 through 2005.

But then we are true villain or one of our true villains on the corporate end of things here is the character dick Jones played by Ronnie Cox dick Jones is one of my all-time favorite movie villains I love him and I love all the corporate villains in this movie

But dick jones is great and ronnie cox in this role he ronnie cox was simply born to play business creeps in paul verhoeven films uh... what one of my other favorites is his role as cohegan the villain who runs the for-profit ours colony in total recall uh... and this is a spoiler for total recall so if you don't want to spoil uh... close yours for a second but in that movie

If you'll recall, he wants to prevent the use of an alien device that will make the atmosphere of Mars breathable because he wants to protect his racket selling oxygen to the Mars colonists.

You now think of Ronnie Cox, you think of characters like Jones, but apparently he was playing somewhat against type on this one. He'd been mostly known for playing pleasant white collar type characters. He made his screen debut in 1972, John Borman, Thriller Deliverance. We see him playing the guitar, and he's actually playing the guitar in that dueling banjo scene because he's also a singer-songwriter.

He is the character in deliverance who has like the strongest moral compass. The others are more or more like ruthless and practical. And he's like, no, we've got to go to the authorities and explain what happened and admit what we did and all that. And you know, Bert Reynolds has to argue with him and say, no, we got to cover it up. Which again, yes, I guess seems against type to me because I was more familiar with him playing characters like Dick Jones. But yeah, I guess you could look at it the other way around as well.

Yeah. The same year, 72, he also pops up in The Mind Snatchers, a sci-fi film that has a cast that includes Christopher Walken, Joss Ackland, and Tom Aldridge. So some interesting names in there. I've never seen it. Fair amount of TV work followed, but he popped up in 79s The Onion Field, 82s The Beast Within,

84's Beverly Hills cop, it's sequel, and then he did Robocop. Subsequent credits include not only Total Recall, but 1990 Captain America film, the TV series Coprock, Star Trek the Next Generation, and I don't remember this, but apparently has an uncredited role in Deep Blue Sea. Is he basically playing Dick Jones in that? Like he's a corporate... I would have said. ...overlord, yeah.

Yeah, because it's kind of like post-Robocop. That's one of the main reasons you're thinking about casting him. I'm like, I'm guessing, and basically probably printed money there for a while. You can imagine Deep Blue Sea is just in the Robocop universe, like they're making smart sharks. That just seems like another thing OCP would do. Yeah.

I don't think I said his birthday, he was born in 1938, and he's still out there. I think he still performs. As a musician. As a musician. And I think he may still be active as an actor. I don't recall offhand.

Oh, but we have another corporate character to talk about here. The character Bob Morton played by Miguel Ferrer, who lived 1955 through 2017, American actor and son of Jose Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney, which of course made him George Clooney's cousin. George Clooney apparently showed up with him to a lot of these auditions back in the day. They were living together. Yeah.

What if a young George Clooney had been in Robocop? For Air had a real knack for playing Scoundrels. Started off in early 80s television and some forgettable films. Pops up as a first officer in Star Trek 3. After Robocop, he appeared in 1989's Deep Star 6, one of the many underwater horror films of 89. I think he undergoes a harrowing explosive decompression in that film. Oh, man, that's probably right.

He was in 1990s, the Guardian, 92s Twin Peaks Firewalk with me, 94s The Stand, the mini-series. This man did three episodes of Tales from the Crypt. I think that's commendable. I'm not sure who else did that mini. He was also in 96s Project Alpha, 97s The Night Flyer, Mulan in 1998. He did The Voice of the Main Villain. He was in 2000s traffic.

and he pops up in Iron Man 3 in 2013. He did a lot of voice work late in his career and appeared in the 2017 Twin Peaks Revival. Miguel Ferrer is also great in this movie. Like I said, I love all the corporate villains. He's a perfect foil to Dick Jones. So Ronnie Cox is older, colder, more calculating. And Miguel Ferrer's character, Bob Morton, is a young hot shot who thinks he's the next big thing. And they play off of each other well, but they're like both so detestable.

Yeah, yeah, like Morton comes off as more likable in some regards, but it's because he's less directly awful and also doesn't resort to direct murder, though is also is very culpable for human deaths. So it's like they are both horrible, but they're different shades and degrees of the same awfulness. Yeah, Morton's this ambitious, coked up business bro, who's definitely going to high five you in the men's room, but

You know, at the end of the day, he's totally going to sign off on civilian or police deaths if it lets him advance up the corporate ladder. Yeah. These are two corporate characters, one more villainously either. Both of them, both I think you could think of as villains, but are, they're essentially both lawful evil to a certain degree. We also have to a little have a little chaotic evil in this. And that's where we have the character, Clarence Bottaker, played by Kurt Wood Smith.

Yeah, this raises another interesting theme of Robocop, which is it depicts a world of an alliance between sort of big capital and big crime, like the criminal bosses and the corporate bosses essentially are working together against everybody else.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Other antagonists in the film though are very much part of the corporate machine, you know, it's like they're, to large degrees, they can just be like, I'm just trying to climb up the corporate ladder here. I'm just doing what I have to do. I am part of this company. I'm part of OCP.

Yeah, Clarence Bodiker is very much of the criminal world and is just evil. Just doesn't seem to love anything in life. It's just full of hate and violence. Even his cronies are not safe. He does seem to genuinely love crime like he loves his work. Yeah.

Now, Kurt Woodsmith, the born 1943, is an American actor stage screen and TV that may be best known to many for his role as the dad on that 70s show, but this was his big breakout film role. And this was another case where, according to some of the extras I was looking at, it was very much against type. This is not a guy who'd done a bunch of villain roles. They were thinking about other sort of established villainous actors like Michael Ironside, but

They ended up liking Kurt Woodsmith, apparently, because Verhoeven liked how he kind of looked like Heinrich Himmler in The Little Glasses. He liked the idea of this being like a more of a cerebral villain.

to be the to to be the adversary of robocop who obviously nobody's gonna, gonna best robocop physically no human as anyway as we'll see. So you need somebody who's more scheming someone who's more of a hyena. I can see how this movie would have been again diminished if it had gone a different direction if you had the standard boxy tough guy in the heavy roll. Not to

just Michael Ironside. I mean, I love Michael Ironside, but the casting of a slightly nerdy looking, but still imposing actor like Smith here is really inspired for this role, and it makes the character as memorable as he is instead of just another violent henchman. The Himmler image does come through. There seems to be something not just

brutal, but kind of transcendentally evil about the Bodiker we got. And it's also there in his name. He's not like, you know, Biff Drago. He's Clarence Bodiker. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great performance. He's just so, so nasty, so sadistic and like the scene where he's eventually apprehended by RoboCop roughed up and brought in and he's like spitting, he spits blood onto the police desk.

It's just a wonderful performance. He followed up Robocop with roles in 1988's Rambo 3, Dead Poets Society in 1989, Star Trek The Undiscovered Country, 92's Fortress, 93's Boxing Helena, and 95's Under Siege 2 Dark Territory. Plus lots more. Under Siege 2 Dark Territory. That's a movie with hacking in it. Yes, if you haven't seen it. It's about hacking.

All right, getting back into the cop characters a bit. We have Robert Duque in this playing Sergeant Reed with 1934 through 2008, another mainstay of all three Robocop movies. His acting credits go all the way back to the original Outer Limits in the 60s. He worked a lot in TV and film. He did one of the voices on the 1960s Harlem Globetrotters cartoon.

and he had a memorable turn as the villain in the 1973 black exploitation film Coffee, which starred Pam Greer. He acted in three Robert Altman movies, 75's Nashville, 76's Buffalo Bill, and the Indians, or setting Bull's history lesson, and 1993's shortcuts. In this he plays the police sergeant who is putting up with impossible pressures imposed by OCP as they've come in and taken over.

So yeah, it's a pretty standard role, but you know, notable actor. All right, getting back into the criminal world here, we have Ray Wise playing Leon Nash. This is one of the criminal henchmen, Tabodica.

Born 1947-wise, was probably best known for his role of Leland Palmer and Twin Peaks, but he also played the doom Dr. Alex Holland and Wes Craven's swamp thing from 1982. Other credits include 82's Cat People, Jeepers Creepers 2 from 2003, X-Men First Class from 2011, and Wrong Cops from 2013. Like a lot of these actors, he was apparently going in a somewhat different direction here, like a little bit against type in the casting of this movie.

Yeah, he also has a kind of weird energy as a henchman, but it works. Yeah. We also have to mention, we mentioned Emil already. This is one of the other violent members of the gang, has more of an anarchist vibe to him. You know, he's got the punk haircut and so forth. He is also a spoiler alert. He's the guy who gets melted by toxic waste.

The extent to which Robocop is a melt movie is non-zero. There is a melting scene, and Emile is the poor soul who melts.

Yeah, played by Paul McCrain, born 1961. He made a big splash, you know, unintended because he does splash in this movie. But he made a big splash in 1980s fame. And he was also a lot later a long time cast member on ER. He doesn't melt in either of those films, but he did follow up RoboCop with 1988's The Blob. So maybe he hadn't had quite enough melting yet at this point in his career.

I did see in some of the extras they were like, oh, he was really down for all this makeup. He was down for this melt scene. So he both melts and splashes in the same role. Yeah. It's weird rewatching this film knowing how horrible this character's fate is. And even in

Because we're shown how horrible this character is. He is not a nice guy, but his fate is so disgusting that you can't help but feel a little bad for him and see him at least as some sort of a tragic character. You want to be like, oh, dude, you're making all these terrible choices in life, and we know where they are leading you. Well, his friends are like, Bodiker in the gang, and it just shows how

Unloyal they are to each other when the way they react to him like he's melting and he runs up on ray wise and ray wise is just like help me. Ray wise is just like don't touch me man. Now going back into the corporate world in the midst of all these villains and all it's easy to miss some how great some of these other small performances are yes you have this character Donald Johnson.

who's this corporate OCP, yes man, and also just sort of a business goblin. He's always there in these scenes. He's never the central point of the scene, but he's there. He's attending all these business meetings, and he makes every scene better.

Yet he smiles a lot. He just brings a real positive energy to these board meetings where robots murder his colleagues. Yeah. Yeah. And is largely unfazed by it. He's like, uh, business, business has got to keep moving. Looks like we hit a snag. We, uh, we'll, uh, we'll, we'll do better next time.

Yeah, yeah. This character is played by Felton Perry, born 1945. He was also in 1973's Magnum Force. He did a lot of TV, played a lot of detectives, and was a cast member on the 1980s series, The Greatest American Hero.

Now Robocop has a lot of great special effects and one notably terrible, but in a lovable way special effects. So I feel like we got to talk about the effects a bit. Yeah. And as always, we can't mention everybody. Like this, this especially is a film where you had a whole crew of very talented artists in different fields and we can't possibly cover them all. So we're just going to cover, I think like three main names that should be mentioned. First, we've already mentioned the melting.

and the makeup involved there. Rob Botin has special makeup effects credit on this. Born 1959, a true cinematic gore master. And I think this is the first film we've looked at on Weird House that has directly involved him. His makeup credits include so many great things, Squirm from 76, the original Star Wars from 77, The Howling from 81, John Carpenter's Thing from 82, Legend from 85, Total Recall from 1990,

He also did creature designs on 1980s, Humanoids from the Deep. That's a Fish Man movie. 97's Mimic and 1998's Deep Rising. His work on the thing is especially iconic. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is just a master of practical makeup effects, you know. These are things that, you know, you got to throw him into the same conversation with names like Screaming Mad George, you know.

just an absolute master. He doesn't seem to have worked much in the 21st century at all, though, at least in terms of being credited on things. And I have to realize, I don't know, we always stress this, but it's my understanding that sometimes it affects people's names, don't actually make it into the final credits on things. So I don't know, maybe he's working in other capacities behind the scenes. But according to the databases, outside of working on an episode of Game of Thrones, his work in recent decades has been sparse.

Do we do we know or just assume that between is largely responsible for the email melting scene. I didn't double check it it's probably there's so many extras. Okay the arrow release I didn't get to watch them all but i assume he had to have played a pivotal role in that it's just too disgusting looking.

Okay, but another main effect. So there are a lot of great special makeup effects in the movie. Also, there are interesting makeup effects clearly involved in realizing the unmasked Robocop effect when he takes his visor off and you can see Peter Weller's face jutting out of this robot exoskeleton. I'm sure that

took a lot of effects work to make it look as good as it does. But there is another big thing in the movie which is the rival project to the Robocop project, Ed 209, one of my favorite aspects of Robocop, which is achieved largely with the help of stop motion effects that look great and are some of the funniest special effects I can think of seeing.

Yeah, this is such a great creation. Ed 209, sometimes referred to in the credits as Ed 2000, so I guess maybe at some point in production, they call them Ed 2000, I don't know. Ed 209 is better, ED 209, if you will. But Craig Hayes is credited as Ed's creator and designer

and also designer and constructor of the large prop for Ed 209. So when we see Ed 209 in the film, he's either standing there as a physical, practical robot that's, I think, actually made out of wood and other materials. And he doesn't move around much, like just basically the top half rotates to point guns at you, that sort of thing. And then the rest of the time, as we'll discuss, he's a stop motion effect.

But Hayes was involved in designing it. Apparently, you know, looked to various things like looked at trains a little bit and other mechanical vehicles and in robots to sort of design it. But also looked at the orca that the head of Edton 209 is apparently partially based on the orca. I can see that.

Yeah, so Hayes did visual effects work on other notable films that he worked on Jurassic Park as part of Tippett Studio. He also worked on Hollow Man, Blade 2, and 2003's The Matrix Revolutions. Now, I mentioned Tippett Studio. Yes, Phil Tippett is credited as the creator of the Ed 209 sequences, more specifically, the stop motion sequences.

If you're not familiar with Phil Tippett, born 1951, he is one of, if not the best-known living masters of stop-motion and monster special effects. Somehow this is our first Tippett film, I believe, on Weird House Cinema. We've mentioned him in passing, you know, connections on other films.

I don't think we've talked about him in depth before. This is another situation where we can't list all the classics that he was involved in. But his creations have come to life in such films as some of the Star Wars movies, 1986's Howard the Duck.

a notable stop-motion monster at the end. 1988's Willow, both Robocop sequels, Jurassic Park in 1993, Starship Troopers, and of course, his own project, which was made over many years. I haven't seen it yet, but finally released in 2021, Mad God. Really good stop-motion in this film.

And we'll come back to talk a little bit more about Ed 209 later on and just how incredibly looks. But finally, the music here is by Basil Polodores, who lived 1945 through 2006, American composer best known in film for his work with John Millius.

who he met at USC studying filmmaking and composing. He also worked several times with Paul Verhoeven. He worked with Milius as early as 1970 on a student film, and then later on 78's Big Wednesday, 1982's Conan the Barbarian, of course. That, in my opinion, is his masterwork. That is such an incredible and just perfect score for that movie.

but he also worked with Milius and Red Dawn from 84 Farewell to the King in 89 and Flight of the Intruder in 91. With Verhoeven, he worked with him for the first time on Flesh Plus Blood from 85, followed this up with Robocop and Starship Troopers in 97.

Other scores of note include Renee Cardona Jr.'s Tintorera from 1974, the shark movie, or A shark movie, we should say, B shark movie in any respect. Also, the Michael Crichton scripted extreme close-up in 1973, the Blue Lagoon in 1980, Cherry 2000 in 1988, and the 1989 miniseries Alonesome Dove.

So for this movie, solid, catchy, and sweeping score, I think a highly effective score. It has the right bombosity for Robocop. Yeah, I love the Robocop theme. I think it's perfect for the film, and it's sonically evokes exactly the feeling of the world and the plot. It sounds like a doomed attempt at heroism in a bleak world ruled by bad men. Yeah. All right, you want to talk a bit about the plot?

Yeah, let's dive right in. Now, this is one of those where I think it does not make sense to do a full scene-by-scene recap of the movie, but rather, in this case, we're going to discuss a bit about the broad outline and some themes and highlights from the movie. One thing we've got to talk about is the media segments in RoboCop. RoboCop repeatedly

breaks the action with news reports, commercials, and clips of TV shows from in-universe as if we were characters in the world of Robocop watching the same TV they do.

Yeah, and these are extended sequences. I'd forgotten just how long they are. Like you're watching Robocop World Television for minutes on end, including right at the top of the film. And it does a great job of positioning you within the world of the movie, of course, giving you a little backdrop for what's going on elsewhere in the world, what's going on in culture and media. But at the same time, in some ways counterbalancing the violence that we see on screen, but also driving home the satire.

and keeping satire on your radar as you are interacting with the gritty details of the plot. There's a way that when you see the news reports in the media segments, just lightly gloss over what sounds like actually horrific events, that makes you see the violent events of the plot differently.

Yes, yeah. But anyway, yeah, but a big part of what they do, especially the beginning of the film, is just world setting, establishing what kind of world is this taking place in? And I would say the news segments from the world of Robocop depict a kind of hyper ragonite near future. So there is an idea that there's

escalation of the Cold War, massive military buildup, a lot of focus on weapons technology, and a supply side free for all, where everything is run by for-profit corporations and cash is king. And the first thing we see in the movie after like a sweep over the city in the title is a news segment. And so to set the scene of this world, it mentions, there's a segment about how the remaining enclave of the apartheid government in South Africa

has unveiled their possession of a French-made neutron bomb and has announced their willingness to use it against the people to protect white minority rule. There is another report from the new, quote, Star Wars orbiting peace platform.

And this appears to be a play on the so-called Star Wars Missile Defense Initiative, except in the movie, the quote, piece platform seems to be just some kind of like general orbital weapon system, which they call a piece platform. And then in a later news segment in the movie, we find out that it, quote, accidentally fired a laser barrage at Santa Barbara, California.

during a test and that kills hundreds of people including two former presidents who are not named and then the anchors just say the nation mourns for Santa Barbara and then they move on to something else.

I mean, it's implied that that's Ronald Reagan. We see Ronald Reagan's body there on the ground. I mean, the satire is at times pretty grim. But then it cuts straight from these horrific reports to commercials. And the commercials are for things like one is for the Family Heart Center, which is a clinic focusing on heart transplants with new mechanical artificial hearts.

But the doctor in the commercial at first, he's like, you know, oh, it's time for a heart transplant. And then he transitions into sounding like he's pitching a customer on jet skis. He's like the series seven sports heart by Jensen. Yamaha, you pick the heart. Which I guess also positions where we are in like the cybernetic world.

Yeah, then there is an ad for a family board game called Nukem, a game that looks kind of like battleship, except it's for four players, and it seems like the way you win the game is if you are the first player to use nuclear weapons. The tagline of the game is get them before they get you. Graham, Graham.

Then there are ads for a car. This car has a big footprint in the movie. It is called the 6000 SUX. So that's kind of low hanging fruit joke, but you know, I wouldn't change it. This is apparently the hottest new car in the world now. It is extremely ugly. It gets eight miles per gallon, but it's new. It's huge. You've got to have one. The commercial makes the point that the car is bigger than Godzilla.

Yeah, we have this nice commercial that has the stop motion monster in it, like very much in the Harryhausen style, obviously created by Phil Tippett here, which is a nice nod to those movies that are in a very large way an inspiration for the creation of N209. But then also we see

The TV content, TV shows, the most popular TV show in the world of Robocop, which we see multiple times, involves a man with glasses and a mustache, ogling women in bikinis, and then turning directly to the camera to utter his beloved catchphrase. I'd buy that for a dollar.

So, according to an article that I turned up, though it's not mentioned in the movie, the name of this TV sitcom is, it's not my problem, exclamation point. So, the show is portrayed as just a insipid trash, but multiple times we see characters watching this show, such as there's one moment

where this sadistic murderer, Emil, is watching the show on a TV through a shop window. And I think he's like sitting in his car, watching it, drinking a liquor bottle or something. He seems to find it marvelously entertaining. And then he ends up breaking the glass in the window so he can turn the TV up louder.

and laugh along with the laugh track. So something's interesting about the way Robocop depicts this world of cruel, sadistic men who kill without a thought, and then in their downtime are sedated and entertained by mindless, repetitive sitcoms that just seem to be looping the same scene and catchphrase over and over.

Yeah, that in Neil's scene especially is interesting because it intentionally took time to show you his enjoyment of this show. This is the bottom of the barrel misogynistic comedy that seems to be everybody's favorite.

And I guess it played also, I'd buy that for a dollar. It also kind of ties into the overall capitalist corporate world of Robocop. Everything can be bought for a dollar. Right. It's almost like a mantra delivering the hidden message that my trust and allegiance is cheap. Just give me the cash. Yeah.

All right, let's talk more about the setting here. Yeah, so the media segments are used to establish a lot about the broader world. The specific setting of the movie is the city of Detroit in Michigan, where it seems the situation is there's some overlap with reality that the city was a thriving metropolis.

It has suffered a lot because a lot of the industry that used to be based there has moved offshore or shuttered in some way. So the film is just full of abandoned empty factory buildings that continually visually communicate this theme of just like the loss of former prosperity and so forth. So huge portions of the city have been left out of work, impoverished and desperate. And the city is essentially on the brink of collapse.

So the job of running the local police department has been outsourced to OCP, Omni consumer products. But OCP has set its sights higher than just running the police. Essentially, they have a plan to demolish the existing Detroit and replace it with a new completely privately owned settlement called Delta City, where they will run everything. So in a way, you can see how it is in OCP's interest for things in Detroit to get as bad as they possibly can be.

so that they can buy up all the property cheap and privatize all the local government. At the same time, they need a little bit of muscle, and also they are, as we're told at one point, they basically are the military, so they're working on all of these various military projects as well.

Right. And so amidst this backdrop, we see the OCP headquarters, which is this strange looking building that has a kind of inverted triangle architecture near the bottom, but then it just goes straight up from there. And so it's a very weird looking skyscraper architecture, but it does seem on theme somehow because it's like all of this concrete that like comes down to a point near where it meets the ground. So it's the idea of like this corporation just like crushing the people on the ground.

Yeah, yeah, again, the bottom part of this is Dallas City Hall. But by creating this map painting of it rising the rest of the way up into the sky, it's like it's stabbing into the earth like it's a sword come down from the heavens. And we eventually see multiple shots at different points in the film of people ascending or descending in elevators and some sort of, you know, vast atriums of this building.

And these were also created with map paintings. And in the extras on the arrow, blue, they mentioned that Forbidden Planet was one of the influences here in creating this kind of vast interior space.

I never would have made that connection, but that's really good. Yeah. But anyway, okay, so we're here at OCP headquarters. We come in in this corporate board meeting, which is a great scene. We've got OCP Vice President Dick Jones, played by Ronnie Cox. He is showing off his plan to move on to the next stage in their control of the Detroit police force.

He wants to essentially replace the remaining human police force with a violent police robot called Ed 209. He brings Ed 209 out for a demonstration that turns horrific. Robert, I don't know if you want to describe this scene. It's an iconic scene from the film, maybe the most remembered part of all of Robocop.

Yeah, I mean, for starters, we have to mention that Ed 209, and if you don't know what Ed 209 looks like, do yourself a favor and find an image search or a video clip, because it does not look like a policeman. It looks like a weapons platform is not a humanoid in shape. Yeah, it's just a weapons platform that they're clearly eyeing for a larger military market. It was not created expressly with police work in mind.

It is a frightening, uh, bestial machine. So Dick Jones is setting up the demonstration. He gets one of the, uh, one of his colleagues from the boardroom here to, uh, to point a gun at Ed 209 for the demonstration. And there's a little detail. A lot of people noticed that he hands a gun to this guy. He's like, all right, let's see if we can make him do his job. And so the other guy points the gun at Dick Jones and Ed 209 does not react to this. The lack of like people threatening each other.

But then Dick Jones is like, no, no, pointed at Ed 209. And so then when he, when he threatens the hardware, then Ed 209 comes online and like points his turrets at him and says, drop the weapon, you have 20 seconds to comply. So the guy, he said, you know, he is goaded on by Dick Jones, he says, better do as you're told. So the guy drops the weapon.

And then Ed 209 says, you now have 15 seconds to comply. It clearly has not registered the loss of the weapon. So in a horrifically violent turn of events, the robot malfunctions and then ends up just liquefying this guy. It shoots him like hundreds of times.

Yeah, just notoriously graphic scene. And some cuts of the film have the extended goofication of this poor dimmed individual. But yeah, and it's a frantic affair. He's trying to like, you know, run to recover and they're pushing him back in the way, because no one else wants to get shot and caught the crossfire. And yeah, and then finally, the utter failure of the program here.

So the old man looks at Dick Jones and says, I'm very disappointed in you, Dick. And Dick Jones says, sure, it's only a glitch, like completely unconcerned with, you know, the threat this would pose to people is just kind of like, yeah, yeah, we'll figure it out. Don't worry about it. But

This does seem like a pretty catastrophic failure to the old man. And right there next to him, waiting in the wings is Bob Morton, played by Miguel Ferrer, who steps in with his rival project. He's like, clearly, Ed 209 is not ready for prime time. We've got something ready to go, the RoboCop program. And he tells the old man about it. It's ready to go as plan B. All they need is a donor. And he thinks they should have one pretty soon. What does that mean? We're about to find out.

Yeah, it may not be here. Maybe it's a little later that we learned that, yeah, not only are they eyeing donors, but they are making sure that prime police candidates are being reassigned to dangerous zones. Yeah. So that they're going to be more likely to encounter some sort of fatal injury that would deliver their body straight to the RoboCop program. Yeah, they do. They do like a physical and they're like, okay, Peter Weller, he would be a good candidate to go in the RoboCop suit. So we're going to send him after Clarence Baudaker and deny him back up. Yeah.

So here we meet our hero, Alex Murphy, and Peter Weller. After OCP transfers him to a new Metro division, he gets paired with his new partner, Lewis, that's Nancy Allen. They get to know each other. They have some nice friendly banter. But early on, maybe it's his first day at the new division. Not exactly clear.

They respond to a bank robbery in progress, and its Clarence Bodiker's gang. And Bodiker is just the nastiest, meanest criminal on earth. While Murphy and Lewis are chasing them, there's this one part where you see Bodiker just like the gang has no friendship or loyalty even to each other. One of the gang is injured during the shootout when they're in a chase.

Bodiker just like grabs him and goes, can you fly Bobby and throws him out of the van into the police car, which briefly delays them? And eventually Murphy and Lewis pursue the gang all the way to an abandoned foundry. And while attempting to make an arrest, again, no backup is available. As usual, Murphy is caught and then brutally executed by the gang, an awful, horrifically violent scene.

His body is recovered, taken to a hospital, but he can't be revived. He is dead. Yeah, I think shotgun dismemberment is worth mentioning in terms of Murphy's death because it's that extreme. It's another example of the violence just ratcheted it up to a degree where it almost takes some of the punch out of it because it becomes an obvious Hollywood gore fest. I don't know. Everyone's mileage is going to vary on this sort of thing.

Now, next, we get a really interesting sequence in the movie, which is we have Murphy's death. But from here, we start seeing something from some point of view through a kind of grainy, almost computer or CRT image. We see these views of scientists messing with somebody from their point of view, like drilling around on their head and adjusting his vision.

So we're seeing Robocop's point of view, and this is the project run by Bob Morton. Rob, do you anything you want to identify about these scenes where we're like watching Murphy's physical remains become become able to see as they are becoming Robocop?

I mean, it's almost like he's being born again, you know? It's like early memories, childhood memories almost, that sort of sense is he's watching the scientists work on him as he's eventually seeing, you know, there's like an office party, a Christmas party or something that's underway.

And they're interacting with them a little bit, but also there are bits of dialogue though. On the other hand, far from discussing him as a child, I think Morton in particular is like, he's dead now. We can do whatever we want with him. Like he's no longer a human. He is a product. Yeah. He signed the rights to his remains away. That was part of his contract to be a cop and we can do whatever we want with them. It's not him anymore. Yeah.

Also in these scenes, we learn about Robocop's three prime directives. They say, you know, he's guided by the directives to serve the public trust, protect the innocent, and uphold the law. And then there is a fourth directive that is not spelled out. It just says it's classified, but it does flash on the screen. They say nothing about that out loud. It's just something that Robocop sees on his own heads up display. Yeah, this will become important later on.

So after this, Robocop is unveiled, they put him out on the beat. And there are just a bunch of scenes of Robocop out on patrol, intervening when crimes are in progress. We see him stop an armed robbery at a convenience store. He intervenes when two men are attacking a woman in an abandoned lot. He resolves a hostage situation at City Hall. And in all of these scenes, Robocop is shown to be in some ways highly effective, in other ways not, like he is successful at stopping the crimes.

But he does so via the application of brutal violence in every case, and he has shown to be cold and mechanical in his relations to victims. Yeah. We see the media segments of him being celebrated, but also, yeah, at the same time, he's not really doing the ideal version of police work here. He's just like a blunt instrument that reaches through walls to grab criminals and so forth.

There's one part where I think they're asking like there's like school children clearly being terrified by Robocop during some kind of outreach program. And they're like, do you have any message for the children? And he says, stay out of trouble. But all of this builds up to a realization. Lewis Murphy's old partner sees through the machine mask. She sees that it's Murphy underneath.

Noticing little ticks, little sayings and movements that mirror things Murphy did. One giveaway is that Murphy was practicing this kind of cowboy gun holster move that was from a TV show that his son liked, called TJ Laser. And then she sees Robocop do the same move. So she realizes who it is. She's like, that's Murphy in there. And she goes up to him at one point. She approaches him in a hallway and says, Murphy, it's you.

And this causes a crisis. Robocop is not supposed to have a personality or any memories. Bob Morton, again, he explains that it's just physical scaffolding. They just need some brain tissue. Murphy no longer exists. It's just brain tissue owned by OCP. That's not a person. It's a machine. But nevertheless, Robocop begins to malfunction by having memories and dreams and glitches.

And this leads up to a scene where he visits his former home that he shared with his family, which is now empty and for sale. There's like a robotic salesman who starts talking when he comes in the door like, oh, this could be your new dream home. And I think some critics at the time might have sneered at these sequences of him, this machine with these strange robotic motions trying to reclaim his past life and remember what it was. They might have seen that as ridiculous, but I found this stuff quite moving.

to each their own, I guess. Yeah, yeah, this is one of the segments that really hit me in the fields. I liked it. I thought it worked. Also somewhere in here, there's a scene where Dick Jones sends Clarence Bodiker, who works for him, by the way, to Bob Morton's house to kill him. He's just like, OK, I'm done with Morton.

Yeah, yeah, like Morton really didn't know what he was messing with. I clearly didn't really think that Dick Jones would send a goon to his house to murder him in cold blood, and that's exactly what happens.

Then there's an interesting middle section of the movie in which Robocop, in this process of rediscovering that he might have been a person at one point and who that person was, he starts to systematically solve Murphy's own murder. So he like encounters Emile, one of Clarence Botaker's gang in the middle of like robbing a gas station.

and he encounters him, and from him he traces him to other members of Bautaker's gang, and eventually to Bautaker himself. And when he captures Bautaker claims that he can't be arrested because he has a protection agreement, he works for Dick Jones, and Dick Jones runs the police.

Yeah, this whole solving zone murder series of sequences is great. Like there's the scene where he goes to the nightclub to collect Ray Wise's character. Yeah, that one's a lot of fun. Yeah, it builds nicely until he's yeah, he's already found Bautica. This is where there's a rough sum up quite a bit and drags a bloody snarling Bautica into police headquarters.

But, so now he has evidence that Dick Jones is behind it all. So he tries to go up the chain to arrest Dick Jones and it doesn't work out so well. He walks into the office, Ronnie Cox is sitting there and Ronnie Cox like holds out his hands. He says, sounds pretty serious. You better arrest me. But Robocop is somehow unable to act.

He, something is preventing him. And here we see the activation of directive for his secret guiding principle, which is that he cannot act against the interests of OCP. So he cannot will himself to arrest one of its officers.

Oh yeah, and then this is where Dick Jones with Villainous Charm brings out Ed 2009. He's like going to introduce you to a friend of mine. Boardroom doors open and out comes this glorious stop motion creation. Ed 2009 is here to finish off RoboCop.

So yeah, for a bit, there's this fight, the struggle where Robocop is sort of immobilized. It's these two killer robots versus each other, but one of them still has a shred of humanity inside it, and it manages to barely escape Ed 209. And then there is a detail in this fight that I've always loved since the first time I saw the movie. How is Ed 209 defeated in this confrontation by stairs? Ed 209 gets to the stairwell, and Robocop runs down it.

And Ed 209, clearly this is a contingency that the designers of Ed 209 had never thought of, and it is unable to navigate going down a staircase and ends up turned on its back and unable to get up. And it's hilarious, it feels so right, and it's the best possible conclusion to this fight.

Yeah, yeah, it hits all the right notes. And in a sense, like it does get into this again sort of light sci-fi about cybernetics and robotics, the idea that ED-209 is a military application that is clearly was not designed for police work. It was not designed to interact in a human world.

and an important part of police work is interacting in a human world. That involves obviously things like stairs, as well as other nuances, like being able to tell the difference between a perpetrator who is an active threat and someone who has already surrendered and so forth.

Yeah. And so I think that I think part of the vision of Ed two, nine is that it is a very dangerous lethal robot, but in many ways it is poorly designed. So it's like it is designed to appeal to the people who award defense contracts more than to like actually be good at its job. Right. But again, great, great finish to this initial combat between Robocop and Ed two, nine.

But at this point, so Robocop is he's able to get down the stairs, but at this point, the OCP controlled police force arrives and they have been ordered to destroy Robocop. And so they try, but Lewis saves him. She comes to the rescue. She takes him off to the abandoned foundry we saw earlier.

and helps him rediscover who he is in this sequence his mask comes off like he removes the bolts and takes off his visor and reveals that Murphy's face is still underneath there. To some extent his brain still is Murphy's brain though it's different and there there's like a really tender scene where she helps him recalibrate his aim and just kind of gives him encouragement that he doesn't know what he is but whatever he is she's there to help.

Yeah, yeah, I really liked this part. Also, the part where after the mask has come off and he has to be left alone, you know, it's a tender moment that is well acted by both actors involved here. And, you know, I totally, totally buy into it and made me tear up just a little bit.

Meanwhile, Dick Jones hooks bodikers gang up with some kind of military grade weapons that they are going to need to destroy Robocop. Jones, of course, wants Robocop dead for two reasons. First of all, Robocop has evidence against Jones and his memory banks, and he doesn't want to be implicated. But the second thing is, of course, if Robocop is eliminated, that'll put Ed 209, that project back front and center.

Yeah, yeah, he's promising to have an ED-209 like on every street corner. So there are already a lot of these in storage just ready to roll out into the city in force.

So, Baudaker and the gang now armed with this heavy artillery, they come to hunt down Robocop at the foundry, but this leads to a bunch of great action scenes. There's like a car chase and there are these shootouts and all that. Together, Robocop and Lewis manage to defeat Baudaker and his gang. This is the sequence that includes Emil getting doused with toxic waste and eventually melting.

It's incredibly gory action scenes. We've said that a million times now, but like, be warned, this is an incredibly bloody violent movie. But as action scenes, they work pretty great. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've seen my share of gore fest and I've seen this film before, obviously, but yeah, when I was rewatching the a Neil melting sequence, it's just like, like I had a

It's just like a grimace fixed into my face for like a good solid five minutes because it's so grim and it's so gross and it seems to go on forever until he's finally hit by a car, by a botter's car and just explodes in a splash of slime. It's awful.

After all this, Robocop goes to arrest Dick Jones because OCP is behind the doll working on Dick Jones' orders, so Robocop comes into a board meeting and he turns the old man against him by playing a tape of Dick Jones admitting the murder of Bob Morton.

Now, you know, OCP may not be very sensitive to, uh, to the harm they caused to regular people, but this is the murder of one of these corporate guys themselves. And I think they're unsettled by that. So, uh, so now Dick Jones actually feels afraid. He tries to take the old man hostage to flee the scene and here there's an interesting conflict because Robocop is still bound by directive four. So he cannot act against OCP. He can't act against Jones, but

And then he essentially hints to the old man what the problem is. And the old man then announces that Jones is fired from his position. So Robocop immediately shoots him out of the skyscraper window. So that's an interesting twist. And then there is a special effect. Well, the special effects generally in this movie are fantastic. There is a famously bad one as Jones falls out of the window and it looks like he has really long arms for some reason.

Yeah, this is a stop motion effect. They use a stop motion model of Dick Jones, which I mean basically, I guess you have to think about stop motion a lot with this film. Like stop motion is here.

and used in this film, not so much because it is loving and well-crafted and is like an art form on its own. It was the best way of delivering this particular effect at the time. And so even with Dick Jones falling out the window, like what are your choices? You either don't show it or you use like a Dick Jones lying on a blue mat and do like a green scaring kind of a thing where he's like, ah, you know, like Mortal Kombat 2 falling into the pit.

which can also look pretty bad or you go for stop motion. And in this case, it didn't quite work. Like you were trying to create something that was too lifelike. But I wouldn't change it. Yeah, I wouldn't change it. Still admired. I love the long arms that it gives me a tickle every time.

This was a time period two where like that sort of shot, I feel like happened a lot. You had a lot of bad guys falling to their death. And then the Joker go down the same way. But maybe, maybe a slightly more convincing effect. I don't recall. Yeah. Falling off skyscrapers. They all do it.

Anyway, so after this, the old man says, he says something like, nice shooting son, what's your name? And Robocop does not say Robocop. He says Murphy. And that's the end of the film. And it's an interesting ending because Murphy has somewhat

reclaimed his humanity like he has acted against the direct interests of his one of his bosses in this case so he is somewhat done the right thing despite what he's being told to do by the by the organization that controls him he has to some degree recovered part of himself in that like he uh... you know he remembers his family he remembers his life even though he's not fully the murphy he was

he realizes some part of him is Murphy, but he's still not completely free. And I think that makes the ending more interesting and bittersweet than if he just had like a total victory over the bad guys. He's still not fully free because he's not able to remove Directive 4. He just has to like outsmart it, find a way around it by getting the old man to fire Dick Jones so he can act.

But again, thinking of Dick Jones as kind of a god or Zeus figure, it's like he has he has scaled to the top of Mount Olympus once more. And I guess we also have a satanic figure literally falling from the from the heights here, but but then the old man.

has to acknowledge him. And in asking him his name, there is kind of like a power there. It's like, this is your chance to reclaim some portion of humanity that we took from you. And he does reclaim at least part of it. Yeah. But like we said, it's not a complete victory. It's not like OCP is completely defeated and the world has changed for the better. I mean, it's a small limited victory, but at least it is that in this otherwise bleak and horrible world.

Yeah, I mean, there's so many great little moments, like the final showdown with Bodiker, of course, where he stabs him in the neck, which apparently they wanted to do something grislier. And this was the less grisly version, you know, and I guess you don't actually see him stab him in the neck.

You just see like way too much blood splashed under Robocop's chest, and then you see Bodiker stumbling away with blood gushing out of his neck. Still incredibly violent, but I'd forgotten that you don't actually see it going into his neck. The spike that he uses to kill Bodiker there is not actually meant to be a weapon. It is the jack that he uses to interface with the police computer.

Yeah, and when he busted out again to load the incriminating evidence, it's still bloody with Bautaker's blood. But shortly after that, there was that scene where Lewis is shot up, and they've defeated the bad guys there, and this is at the industrial site. And Robocop says to her, it's like, don't worry, they'll fix you up, they always do, or something to those effects.

fix everything. I fix everything, which, which ties into this feeling of, yeah, the sort of the partial victory, like the powers that be are still very much in charge and are very much the deciders of life and death and resurrection. But some monicum of victory, some shred of humanity has been reclaimed. So that's Robocop. Would you buy that for a dollar?

Yes, I would, I would buy it for 30 plus dollars, whatever the God made for the, the blue ray is, you know, or, you know, rent it digitally or physically for somewhere in the neighborhood of four or five dollars. Well worth it. Well worth the time.

Okay, that's all I've got. All right, we're gonna go and close out this episode. I think we have one more episode before our Christmas selection, so keep your eyes open to see what we're gonna be covering. You can follow the films that we cover on Weird House Cinema by going to letterbox.com, that's L-E-T-T-E-R-B-O-X-D.com, our username there, it's Weird House, and we have a nice list of all the movies we've covered so far, and sometimes a sneak peek at what's coming up at least in the week to follow.

We're primarily a science podcast here. It's stuff to blow your mind with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. Follow us on social media if you use social media on Instagram. We are STBYM podcast. And I have to say that the social media team has been putting up some cool like trailer, audio visual trailer samples of the films covered on Weird House. So that's another place where you can get a little taste of the movie we're talking about.

about each week. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pauseway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff2blowyourmind.com.

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