R.O.T.O.R.

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.

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.

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.

ROTOR is an absolutely beautiful disaster. It is astoundingly hilarious because every other decision made in the making of the movie will make you scream "WHY?!" or questioning your sanity, or both.

The premise is that Captain Coldyron has created ROTOR, AKA Robotic Operations Tactical Operations Research.which as the movie goes on makes less and less sense. Instead of exciting or thrilling action or chase scenes, we get a board room meeting where Coldyron explains his project to a bunch of people, followed by a scene where he's on the phone with a jackass politician forcing him to get ROTOR ready way ahead of schedule.

About 13 hours into the movie, we're finally introduced to ROTOR, whose one weakness is of course... car horns. His first act of breaking his ethical subroutines involves murdering a whiney speeding doofus, leaving his poor fiancé to fend for herself for the rest of the film.

In all the scenes with ROTOR, things are just laughable, especially where somehow the character Sonya escapes from him with no explanation whatsoever!!!!(It's something you'll have to see for yourself). Oh, also, ROTOR apparently has Doctor Strange's time stone because he can see through the fabric of space and time. There's also an absolutely hysterical scene with Coldyron having lunch with his lady friend and instead of advancing the plot, it just serves to waste our time, especially since the only thing we hear is an obvious 80's song.

ROTOR is an absolutely laughable mess. It's great to watch with a party of friends or just when you're home alone looking for one of those movies that truly fits the bill of "So bad it's good."

There are bad movies that are funny. Bad movies that are boring. Bad movies that are offensive. And then there are bad movies that are just plain incompetent. You can't get angry at these movies, because it's obvious they were made by people who simply didn't have the talent or the budget to make something even halfway decent. "R.O.T.O.R" is one such movie. You know where you stand right from the beginning, where you can spot the most ludicrously mismatched day-and-night shots since "Plan 9 From Outer Space". Thankfully, the "filmmakers" don't take themselves too seriously, as is immediately evident by the continuous flow of campy and corny dialogue (about half of which is hard to understand anyway, due to its mumbled delivery). The leading actor gives an amazingly narcotized performance...and as for R.O.T.O.R., well, if Robocop had been so inept he wouldn't have lived to be in the sequels. I'd give it 0.5 stars out of 4.