Bee-dee-bee-dee-bee-dee-bee, it’s Burl, here to review
another robot picture! Ha ha, this one is called R.O.T.O.R., and it’s one of those pictures the starting point of
which was clearly a couple of fellows saying “Hey, RoboCop and The Terminator
– those pictures were popular! Ha ha, let’s combine the two into something
completely new!”
Except of course it isn’t completely new! In fact, the
results are always pretty shopworn when somebody starts with a brain-matrix
like that! With R.O.T.O.R. you’ve got
to add a really profound filmmaking incompetence to the mix, and spice it with
some bizarre and frequently entertaining narrative decisions!
Over a pixilated robot maquette we learn that crime is simply
out of control and that robotic policemen stand the best chance of turning the
tide! Then we meet a cowboy scientist named Coldyron – ha ha! – who likes to
blow up tree stumps on his ranch before putting in a day’s work at the police
robot lab! He’s trying to perfect R.O.T.O.R., a vicious, killer cop-bot being
covertly financed by shady military-industrial interests!
The robot isn’t ready and won’t be for some time, which
angers Coldyron’s boss, the officious Mr. Buglar! It looks like it’s up to Coldyron’s
gormless assistant and the assistant’s assistant Willard, another, friendlier
robot, to finish the job! But ha ha, nobody reckons on Shoeboogie! Nobody ever reckons on Shoeboogie! But who is
Shoeboogie? Shoeboogie is the janitor, a lascivious Red Indian who dances with
Willard, tries much too hard to pick up a lady in a lab coat, then accidentally
brings R.O.T.O.R. to life by putting his Walkman headphones down in the wrong
spot! Zzzzap! R.O.T.O.R. rises from his plexiglass coffin, jumps on his special
velvet-rope-quarantined motorbike and gets down to business!
Ha ha, the funny thing is, R.O.T.O.R. looks pretty much like
an ordinary motorcycle cop, albeit one with an especially large and ponky
moustache! He shoots some people and puts a punching on others, and then fixes
his red-tinted sights on one young lady, whom he chases about hither and yon,
grimacing in frustration every time she eludes his grasp! Eventually Coldyron
and his pal, the very bizarre lady scientist Steele, whose hairstyle might best
be described as a snowhawk, marshall their forces and go after the berserk
robot!
Well, this is certainly a bad movie all right, and you might
even put it into the Ridiculous Action category along with Deadly Prey and Raw Force!
It should have been so much more so, though! It’s very slow going in some
parts, with shots being held for a lot longer than they ought to have been
(like the scene where we look at the top of an escalator for what seems like a
full minute before Coldyron and Steele finally appear over the crest of it!),
and a momentum-killing repetitiveness to the scenes of the robot stalking the
lady!
It’s too bad it’s not a little zestier, but I guess you
can’t have everything! It’s still worth a look for the Ridiculous Action
enthusiast, and also for the moustache enthusiasts, who must certainly be out
there somewhere! I’m going to give R.O.T.O.R. one and a half chainsaws set to frappé!
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