Robocop

Robocopⁱ is a remake of The Room except as a (very campy) spaghetti western. Yeah, that's... exactly right.

The "science"/"fiction" elements as perceived by the naive observer are entirely not worth the mention ; the important parts are formally the "cowboy duel" scene in that mud pond, the closer ("nice shooting, kid") etcetera and structurally the patriarch -- wrong son -- right son triangle. You know, like in the fairy tales (of which camp is the direct as well as necessary post-industrial continuation) -- the year is still 19something and so we're still captive in pre-post-modern narrative structures whereby Cain's ovine captivity is somehow defulatively "fixed", an' The Heavenly Father Of Idiots And Imbeciles recognizes reality for what it actually is, quietly (but decidedly) dropping Abel off the menu. Meanwhile, needless to say, everyone's given up on such lofty hopes.

Also noteworthy for one of the first appearances of what will later yield the urban zombie, thrown a curt "Don't touch me, man!" in the middle of the Los Angeles black man's monkey businessⁱⁱ epidemic.

Can you believe this thing was a BIG DEALⁱⁱⁱ, thirty-odd years ago ? Yet it most definitely was ; and if you look carefully you can also see the little fractures and sutures explaining exactly why.

1. 1987, by Paul Verhoeven, with a very service-oriented, thoroughly babyfaced Nancy Allen. [↩]
2. Apparently I never reviewed the dude's take on Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody". Really... it wasn't all that good. [↩]
3. I mean it, Matrix-level big deal, the cheap cinematic surrogate of "mind blowing", for a previous generation. [↩]