R.O.T.O.R. (

1987

) ½

Refrigerated Old Takeout Offal Receptacle? Reinforced Opossum Tanks Of Richmond? Refine Origami Techniques Or Respond? Robotic Officer of the Tactical Operations Research? Yeah, that’s it, though the killer Robot in today’s feature does very little in the way of research, it spends most of the film’s runtime assaulting its coworkers and murdering speeding motorists.

R.O.T.O.R.’s creator is the cowboy/police captain/scientist Barrett Coldyron, of the Dallas police force. For some reason the film is very intent on establishing the cowboy aspect of his character, devoting a solid 5-10 minutes at the start of the film to show Coldyron rising early and taking care of chores on his farm. It’s probably the result of some obscure state by-law that states all locally produced Texas films must have a cowboy as a hero, regardless of setting, period, or content. After all the horses have been tended to and a sufficient number of stumps cleared away, Coldyron moseys on into his office and gets to work at his day job: developing an advanced robotic policeman for the Dallas Police department. They already have a bunch of clunky older model robots that look and sound like the robot butler from Rocky IV (1985), but despite being able to pass the Turning Test with ease, these things are not really suited to fieldwork. That’s where Coldyron’s next model comes in, dubbed R.O.T.O.R., the machine will be a fully-functional policeman capable of administering law and order in the anarchic wastelands that Colyron sees as one potential future. The robot’s skeleton is a rather impressive piece of stop-motion animation that, for me at least, evokes the skeletal warriors at the climax of Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Too bad we won’t be seeing much of it during the film’s runtime, instead the robot will be encased in a nondescript humanoid form. The machine is nearly indestructible, capable of the full range of human movement, and impossibly strong. It’s an impressive piece of hardware, but the brain is still a long way from finished. Fortunately, the project has another four years to iron out the wrinkles, at least that’s what Coldyron thinks anyway.

Unbeknownst to the cowpoke mad scientist, the bloodsucking bureaucrats higher up on the police food chain have siphoned off most of the money from the project. Somehow, Colyron’s boss Bulger hopes to hide this fact from the taxpayers by delivering the robot policeman 1400 days ahead of schedule. Colyron thinks trying to perfect a killer robot in 60 days is a recipe for disaster, and tells his boss just that. Bulger isn’t exactly in the position to un-embezzle the funds though so rather than sign on to a certain failure Coldyron quits, leaving his remarkably less capable number 2, a scientist named Houghtaling, and his lazy robotic assistant in charge of the project. It isn’t long before these two chuckleheads screw everything up and activate R.O.T.O.R. even further ahead of schedule.

The robot works far better than I would have expected given the accelerated development cycle and accidental activation. Not only are his physical functions fully operational, but the software that allows him to recreate the recent past just by looking at his surroundings is in full working condition. Seriously, the robot can just look at a car and tell who got out of it and where they went afterward. It’s equal parts stupid and awesome, and consequently emblematic of this entire movie. R.O.T.O.R. walks out of the police building after picking up his badge, gun, uniform, and motorcycle, which raises the question of why the police had this kit put together if they weren’t expecting to activate the robot for another four years. The stuff is definitely intended for the robot too, as the locker he pulls his gear from has the name “R.O.T.O.R.” emblazoned on it, as does the motorcycle. In no time flat, R.O.T.O.R. has found his first lawbreakers, a bickering couple of newlyweds speeding down the highway. Obviously, whoever programming R.O.T.O.R.’s threat assessment software was really phoning it in, as the robocop decides that speeding is an offense worthy of summary execution. After killing the husband though, his wife Sonya discovers R.O.T.O.R.’s secret weakness: car horns. One blast from a car horn will incapacitate the killer bot for a couple of seconds, making it surprisingly easy for Sonya to escape. R.O.T.O.R. isn’t about to give up though and proceeds to chase Sonya for the next few days. How a robot incapacitated by car horns manages to drive on the highway is beyond me though.

Once it becomes obvious to the authorities that their experimental Judge-Dread-bot is on the loose and administering comically excessive violence, Coldyron is called back onto the case. I don’t see why this step is necessary though, as Coldyron doesn’t exactly acquit himself well in his first run-in with the robot. It’s not like R.O.T.O.R. is an especially difficult adversary either, all Coldyron has to do is lean on his car horn while he inserts the robot’s deactivation chip. Despite every conceivable advantage, Coldyron decides that he’s outmatched and calls in help from his colleague Dr. Steele. Steele shares the same absurd career path as Coldyron being a body-builder/mathematics professor. The pair chase off after the rogue robot, hoping they can catch it before it kills the poor woman who it has been chasing for the last week. Because heaven forbid Coldyron enlist any help from the police department he belongs to and that produced the robot monster.

There are two kinds of acting on display in R.O.T.O.R., wooden and cartoonish. Coldyron, is a master of the former school, delivering every line in a half-whispered scowl that reminds me of nothing so much as a frustrated substitute teacher already counting down the seconds until the final bell. It’s absurd enough that this is supposed to be our leading man, given his complete lack of charisma, but he only looks more ludicrous when surrounded by scores of actors trying desperately to chew the scenery. Bulger is just the most ridiculous of the lot, but it seems to have spilled over even onto the walk-on extras with two or three lines, like the guy that asks Coldyron to recertify his weapons training. It’s telling that the best actor in the movie is the robot and not even the titular killer robot, but the bumbling sarcastic assistant robot that helps Houghtaling debug the R.O.T.O.R. project before things go horribly wrong. His mechanical voice is just sophisticated enough to get across all the laziness and sarcasm in his demeanor. The flat, robotic delivery gives him one hell of a deadpan making his corny humor all the funnier.

Of course, good acting would be wasted on the train-wreck that is this script. About halfway through I began to suspect that not only was the movie about an artificial intelligence run amok, but it was also written by one as well. Consider the following snatches of dialogue: “You look like you got both eyes coming out of the same hole!”, “You fire me and I'll make more noise than two skeletons making love in a tin coffin, brother.”, “The streets are gonna eat you boys alive. Teeth, hair, and eyeballs.” Who even talks like that? Maybe this is just more folksy Texan slang, but to my ear, this dialogue is dipping into the uncanny valley. That’s to say nothing of the character names. The word document I’m typing in is a mess of red underlines, it’s worse than the review I wrote of Wizards (1977) and that’s a fantasy movie in the Tolkien model. In addition to the absurdly named main character, his boss (who almost has a normal name), and his assistant there are a plethora of minor characters and walk-on roles with names that look like they’re a random assemblage of letters. We’ve got Officer Mokie Killion, a research scientist named Kipster, and a guy who’s hitting on her named Shoeboogie. There’s a dude named Glorioso and another cop referred to only as Officer Melon. Who is naming all these people? Gwyneth Paltrow?

Despite that, I really cannot fault the complicated AI program that wrote the script, it produced a highly enjoyable, though extremely bizarre, film. Take the throwaway scene where Coldyron foils a gas station robbery and kills the robber who’s taken a hostage. A normal movie would just have their hero blast the robber and spout off a cheesy one-liner. R.O.T.O.R. does that sure, but then it has the woman taken hostage turn around and start karate kicking the remaining gang members! It’s the kung-fu priest from Dead Alive (1992) all over again, only this time there’s no indication that this is meant as a joke. This movie is loaded with these kinds of decisions. What’s really amazing though, is that despite all the nonsense in the script department, the film itself is well made and technically sound. Such contrast only makes the whole thing more absurd though. Seriously, if you haven’t seen this thing you need to check it out.