R.O.T.O.R. 1988

I am ROTOR. You are guilty.

From time to time, I come across a film I barely can register any enthusiasm in writing about. R.O.T.O.R. was a film I was actually interested in because I have this warped enjoyment in unashamed rip-offs from popular mainstream fare highly established at the particular time in the 80s/early 90s. While I think the Italians were the best at producing extremely wrong-headed rips from American mainstream action/horror flicks, featuring characters and dialogue that had to be seen and heard to be believed, I always hold hope I will discover a low-budget offering from the United States that can deliver enough action and violence to give them a run for their money. This is rarely the case.

American indies often failed more than succeeded at doing the same thing as the Italians. Charles Band is probably the closest to the Italians in doling out lots of small studio product similar to whatever was popular in sci-fi/horror/action. R.O.T.O.R. is an obvious/blatant example of such a failure. It attempts to piggyback off the success of Robocop/The Terminator (Terminator is even mentioned in the dialogue for Petesake!) with a Dallas cop in charge of a project that would equip the police force with a new breed of officer..a cyborg that would operate from a code of ethics and reasoning/logic to function as humans, halting crime while alleviating the human loss factor. 

Because crime was on the rise, a philosophy regarding the use of a cybernetic being in the likeness of a human cop in exchange for saving many lives of real human beings in uniform developed into a legitimate project, with funding and expectations of high caliber. But higher-ups want the project completed under a ridiculous timetable and eventually an accident releases a flawed prototype not yet equipped with reasoning skills, its programming dictating immediate response to a supposed criminal situation through violent means producing a threat to innocent people. 

R.O.T.O.R. (he looks like your basic motorcycle cop riding a tricked-out bike) spends a large amount of his time chasing a young woman who gets into a heated argument (one of those silly arguments about being employed or something; it was so asinine, I just couldn’t care to put stock in it) with a fiancé the cyborg cop shoots in the head. She was considered a party to his crime (maybe he parked wrongly or some shit, whatever the crime was, it wasn’t so severe he deserved to get a bullet in the forehead). She proves to be quite elusive as his attempts to corner, capture, and kill her mostly result in failure. Meanwhile Coldyron (sounds like Cold Iron), the project head before his resignation, will try to save the day by enlisting the help of Dr. Steele, a female warrior and one of those responsible for lending her genius to the R.O.T.O.R. project. She is actually Coldyron’s “brawn”, actually engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the runaway robot wrecking machine at the end. Margaret Trigg is Sonya, the civilian trying her best to stay one step ahead of the cyborg, while Texas yahoos get in the machine cop’s way, suffering the consequences for getting in its face.

Robotic Officer Tactical Operation Research is what R.O.T.O.R. stands for. With an appropriately rotten rating of 2.1 on the imdb, R.O.T.O.R. has this really long opening with the hero getting up out of bed, tending to his various ailments with lots of pills, feeding his horse coffee, going into work after leaving his ranch, guiding a room full of really bored suits through his cyborg project by showing them stop motion animation of one of his cybernetic skeletal cops before skin is applied, going over the project, talking with his acid-tongued superior (he’s a repulsive lout who speaks to the hero like he’s a lowly intern who spilt coffee on his tie), getting into a fuss-and-yell argument with him after the orders to get the project done in a manner of weeks, ending with his resignation and replacement by an overwhelmed scientist/assistant not capable enough to handle the R.O.T.O.R. project on his own.

Some decent action scenes towards the middle and end can’t salvage some really dopey dialogue exchanges between Coldyron and Steele, not to mention, the representatives of Dallas and its surrounding areas in Texas give the city/state a bad reputation. The police force itself has plenty of dopes on the payroll. Too many scenes where we hear lines of toxic to the ears parlayed over long, drawn out night shots over the big city and drives through rural Texas, and there’s even Coldyron and Steele waxing philosophical about how to deal with the plight of civilization, as crime has become a plague, also concerned regarding whether or not their project was a mistake, due to how R.O.T.O.R. has been misused/mishandled. Because the script and direction lead to painful scenes that work as a slow acting poison, R.O.T.O.R. will probably work best for masochists who get their jollies from such a waste of time and effort. 

Like I said, ‘Once you go red, you never get outta bed’

This movie offers plenty of just random shit like this local civilian just shopping at a store, the momentary victim of some hoods before she gets some spinning kicks and martial arts licks in. Or this group of numskulls (including a bodybuilder who plays tough and is set down in short order by ROTOR) who get their ass handed to them by ROTOR while he’s pursuing his “criminal”. A technician, a sexist Native American scientist in lab coat who "speaks street", opening a switchblade comb for his hair while making a move on a not-too-impressed fellow scientist, while numerous thugs often show up (along with other bizarre characters like a hamburger cook with rabbit teeth who gets his face slammed on a grill, and a local who gets scared and hops in the back bed of a truck), stuck with some really stupid dialogue and behavior.

I miss phone booths in movies.

This robot's right out of The Jetsons.

I’m like a cemetery, I’ll take anybody.

Is it his?

Well, it ain’t PeeWee Herman’s.

In these movies, there has to be some sort of flaw that causes a disruption in the robot cop’s programming; in this film’s case noise from a car horn does the trick. It allows his quarry to get away when she seemed doomed to fall at his hand. With Coldyron and Steele showing up at just the right time to help Sonya at the end of her rope as ROTOR has finally caught up with his hunted female, the programming clear (find, pass sentence, and execute judgment), a plan using rope and a car (and that horn) might get them all out of a jam. Going for the emotional jugular, Coldyron will have to suffer the consequences of being associated with scumbag superiors who want the ROTOR program kept secret, kept hidden from public knowledge, using a hitman to do so.