Robotor

You've heard the phrase "so bad it's good!" Well, most of the time it isn't true. It's so bad, it's just bad.

But this movie truly IS so bad it's good. The dialog is horrendous and sometimes nonsensical. And they really did try to be clever with it, for instance, there's a scene where the hero is giving a presentation on his robot to some scientists - each scientist's last name, along with the name of the place they work, is the name of a Beach Boy, and the dialog in the scene is full of really labored Beach Boys song references.

Once the robot starts following one woman and she calls the police, none of the decisions made by the hero make any sense at all.

Truly a prize turkey.

Richard Gesswein is Dr. Coldyron (if there's one thing I love about this movie, it's that name), a scientist working in the tactical / robotics department of a Texas police force. His big baby is the cutting edge robot R.O.T.O.R., which (accidentally) gets put into commission way ahead of schedule and predictably goes on a rampage. The good doctor must now go out and find his Frankenstein monster before it can harm too many people.

Man, I've seen a number of "so bad it's good" low budget B movies in my time, but this one really takes the cake. While silly and tiresome at times, it's SO bad it holds a certain fascination. It will likely have its viewers scratching / shaking their heads regularly. It's wall to wall with laughable performances and genuinely bad dialogue (and even some supposed attempts at profundity!). The action is pretty rote: our robotic villain barely roughs up a few people, kills even less, and spends most of the movies' running time relentlessly tracking down Sonia a.k.a. "Sony" (Margaret Trigg), who witnessed the killing of her ex-fiancée.

Gesswein is a dopey, mildly macho hero with a ranch and acres of goofy exposition to deliver. The memorable Jayne Smith plays an unlikely scientist who comes to the assistance of our hero. Trigg is a lovely woman and definitely appealing enough to keep us reasonably engaged through her protracted ordeal. Michael Hunter, who'd had a small role in "RoboCop" (viewers new to this one will likely automatically be reminded of that much more popular film), is the crooked commissioner Buglar, and he's a real ham.

"R.O.T.O.R." must be seen to be believed. If prospective viewers have a high tolerance for general cinematic stupidity, they just might have a high old time with it.

Five out of 10.

Police robotics expert Captain Coldyron (Richard Gesswein) attempts to track down R.O.T.O.R., a renegade robot cop who punishes every crime with death.

R.O.T.O.R. has me completely baffled: it's a dreadful 80s sci-fi film that rips off other better known classics (notably RoboCop and The Terminator), but while there's nothing particularly unusual about that, it is so thoroughly terrible in every imaginable way that it's hard to understand how such a dire film actually came into being. Gesswein's charmless performance; the pitiful action scenes; the lousy 80s music; the embarrassingly bad stop-motion endoskeleton that practises karate; Dr. Steele, the muscle-bound female scientist with the 'skunk-stripe' hairdo; Shoeboogie, the moronic 'American Indian' lab assistant; Willard, the comedy-relief police robot with the peaked cap; the diabolical dialogue (my favourite line being from Coldyron's strangely poetic account to the police "a buttery morning sunlight painted a golden glow through the ranch house windows"; the man sure has a way with words): so much cringe-worthy nonsense in just the one film is hard to take.

Although part of me would like to believe that R.O.T.O.R.'s awfulness was intentional, a calculated attempt to appeal to B-movie fans who lap up such trash, I sincerely doubt it, the film alternating too wildly between complete inanity and total seriousness; part of me would also dearly love this to be a genuine case of bad film-making (the 80s being THE decade for such drivel), but I find it impossible to accept that people can be THAT untalented.

Say what you want about something like "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel" or "Wolverine", but at least they were made by people who knew the basics of movie making. Ya know, little things like making sure that it doesn't suddenly go from day to night to day again from one shot to the next, or the benefits of having two consecutive lines of dialogue that are related logically to each other, or finding actors who don't literally read from cue cards or stare at the floor to make sure they hit their marks.

After hearing about this movie's pure awfulness for so many years, I finally got to catch it on On Demand. I was hesitant to watch it because I didn't think it could possibly live up (or down) to my expectations. Needless to say, it did.

If you do choose to subject yourself to the pure bliss (or pure torture, depending on your tolerance for really bad movies) of ROTOR, make sure you stick around for the very end of the credits. No, there's no post-credits scene or anything, but you can amuse yourself with the fact that they even managed to mess up the copyright frame at the very end of the credits. It just says "(C)" with no year next to it, followed by "MPAA #" with no number next to it. My guess is that the MPAA sent it to the producers and nobody knew that they were supposed to fill it in before they inserted it. For we bad movie aficionados, it's just one more gift from the gods.

My friend Dave and I went to our local newsagents to see if we could hire out RoboCop. This was back in the days when you could rent videos from newsagents, before laws were introduced to stop the assistants from recommending films. Unfortunately for us, such laws had yet to be invented and this lady behind the counter said that they didn't have RoboCop yet, but they had R.O.T.O.R. Now being young and naïve, we looked at the box and saw that both films had similar letters in their titles and R.O.T.O.R. had a picture of a robot man jumping off a bike and firing a gun. WE WERE SOLD!!

My therapist thinks that a lot of my current problems stem back to this film and our decision to hire it. I have tried to block it from my mind, but it's burned in there and it won't go, it just flashes images from the film at me from time to time.

Here's what it just flashed at me:

There's a stainless steel Desert Eagle in it. How do I remember that? Because I think it's the only pistol they had in the film. Watch for the bit when R.O.T.O.R. is in the boat and he's going to fall I the water, and the DE turns into a toy Colt Python. I could just imagine some redneck off screen saying `You ain't getting' my sweetheart, I mean Desert Eagle, wet. That gun an me have a special relationship. She's real pretty.'

From what I remember of the story, this woman makes some kind of driving violation, so R.O.T.O.R. chases her across the country and tries to kill her. His programming has gone wrong so he'll kill anyone who gets in his way. Harsh? Yes it is, but if the punishment for speeding was death then we'd all drive a little more carefully.

Well, the budget isn't quite up to that of Water World, and I think that it was made by a group of friends (one of who was going through that transition of man to woman), but I can't really get mad at these guys 'cos at least they tried.

However, heed my warning. If a motorcycle cop who looks like a bulimic Ned Flanders ever stops you, then run for your life! You might just have met the R.O.T.O.R!!