R.O.T.O.R. - (1987)
Directed by Cullen Blaine
Written by Cullen Blaine & Budd Lewis
Starring Richard Gesswein, Margaret Trigg, Jayne Smith
& Stan Moore
"We're not knocking over tin cans here. This is reality!"
It would be easy for me to slip inter hyperbole describing
R.O.T.O.R. It's a film that's full of incompetence, and it's obvious that many aspects of filmmaking here being handled by amateurs who did not know their craft, but at times a joke or moment works - and above all, it contains a large amount of very strange elements that don't mesh. I have to emphasize the word '
strange' -
R.O.T.O.R. stands as a very unique kind of film, and one I really have no other to reference it with. It was released in 1987, and very much wants to model itself on
The Terminator, but was filmed well before production on
Robocop ever started, although that film's inception in story terms goes back to the early 80s - I don't think this film was modelled on Paul Verhoeven's classic, despite the similarity.
R.O.T.O.R. seems aware of it's own limitations, but all the same, attempts to be a serious action film first, and comedy second.
The plot is very simple, and starts with a couple driving through the country coming across a bruised and bleeding man, and a comatose woman, after observing an explosion in the distance. The man is taken to police headquarters where he tells his story - his name is Barrett Coldyron (Richard Gesswein) and he was head of a police division experimenting in robotics, and the construction of the first robotic police officer - geared for what is predicted to be a very combative future. When he refused to fast-forward plans to finalize all of the testing and deliver this robot, R.O.T.O.R., he was fired, and subsequently the new people in charge accidentally set a chain of events in motion which culminated in R.O.T.O.R. waking up, taking to the streets, and gunning down citizens. As R.O.T.O.R. chases a young woman he failed to kill, Coldyron and scientist Dr. Coren Steele (Jayne Smith) eventually took to the streets to try and bring the violence to an end.
There are some aspects to
R.O.T.O.R. that are charming, for instance Willard the Robot, who exists as a sentient-type character in the film, and has most (if not all) of the genuinely funny lines. At one stage, over the phone, as the carnage that has been unleashed first becomes clear, the robot starts to tender his resignation before Coldyron hangs up on it. But as always, the film seems to want to balance that out by having a character like Shoe Boogie. Shoe Boogie appears to be a white person with brown make-up on pretending to be black, but further muddies that up by stating that he's actually Native American. Added to this blatantly racist moment in
R.O.T.O.R. is the strange way Boogie mixes up what a "blood eagle" is, getting not only that wrong, but also the fact that a "blood eagle" is a Scandinavian mode of execution, and not Native American. This moment in film history becomes all the more strange when you factor in that people have been looking for the actor who played this part for over a decade. He's not in the credits, and to this day, has never been found.
If you want more unusual facts about this film, they're not in short supply. Take for example the scene where Coldyron conducts a robotics presentation before characters named after members of The Beach Boys. In the dialogue, Beach Boys song titles are awkwardly shoe-horned in as if the screenwriter, director or actors are playing some kind of game*. When writing to a friend once, who was familiar with
R.O.T.O.R. I pointed this out after discovering it, and he mentioned how unusual it was to be still noticing these things after so much time. As if it was an enigma and we were still peeling back layers. I ended up forwarding the info to the trivia section of the IMDb, but must admit to feeling a little ashamed to be spending so much of my time on this. A film that never had a theatrical release, and went straight to video. When I first read a review, and decided it was strange enough to have a look at, I remembered unknowingly seeing that video cover around - it had wide enough coverage even just on VHS, and I'll never stop thinking about people who hired it in good faith, expecting a proper movie instead of what they ended up getting.
The acting is most always sub-par to godawful, and the dubbing just rubbed that aspect of the film into the dirt, especially as far as Richard Gesswein and Coldyron is concerned. Gesswein is one of the 'only ever one credit' personalities you find from time to time, and at one stage the dubbing seems to have been accidentally left out, with shocking results. The film also has it's own soundtrack, which is predictably poor and includes some banal, bad, but functional songs such as 'Hideaway' and 'What You Do To Me' and a little number called 'Changing The Channel' by Larry's Dad - and by that I'm assuming it's a band name, and not literally someone's Dad who produced it, but with
R.O.T.O.R. who knows. Horrifyingly, the cinematographer was Glenn Roland, who was the director of photography on the
notorious film
Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS. Despite having experience, there were still quite a few shots that felt off. Everything in this film is off, either slightly, or by a long way.
Story-wise, there are moments of peak absurdity which I love - such as when Coldyron tells a woman being pursued by the deadly machine to run for her life, and try to keep ahead and not be killed. Does he rush to her aid? Call for backup? No, he goes to the airport, meets his associate, and then they both casually and sedately drive to a hotel to get a room and slowly check in her baggage. They're doing all this as that poor lady is desperately running and fighting for her life - and all we need is for the pair to have a laid-back breakfast before coming to her aid for the picture to be complete. I'm always thinking, "what about that lady?" Screenwriter Budd Lewis forcefully came out to advertise the fact his original script was left in the ditch, and the film deviates so far from it that he has basically no responsibility for what happened with the film. Although director Cullen Blaine has an IMDb page, with birth and death dates, I've heard it intimated that Cullen Blaine is just another derivation of Alan Smithee.
Some of the unintentionally funny lines are great, and I always seem to have a new favourite. Some of the intentionally funny stuff is just plain weird - for example, a diner's cook who has obviously fake, huge, buck teeth. He tries to attack the police officer with a knife, for no obvious reason (seems unlikely) and then has his face pushed onto the hot grill he's working on - completely negating any fun those comical buck teeth were meant to represent. The science in the film is also bizarrely strange. R.O.T.O.R. has the ability to recall past events in any location he cares to visit - pushing sci-fi to limits beyond
Star Trek. Fortunately though, he has a weakness, and loud noises can temporarily disable him. So I suppose it all evens out. There's something a little wrong with everything - from the somewhat anti-climactic battle which at times occurs in the background of other shots, to that memorable heavy who tears his own singlet off to signify his fighting credentials.
Any misogyny must be balanced out by having one of the good guys in this be a beefed up lady (Dr. Steele) and one scene where a damsel in distress turns around and starts disabling her attackers with expert Judo. As far as masculinity goes, our robot is not being played by an Arnold Schwarzenegger type, but a fairly nondescript average-build man with a mustache. He doesn't inspire terror, and the most he does to signify his unstoppable intent is push a few plastic chairs out of the way when he wakes up. His voice as been distorted to sound robotic, but unfortunately that has made it unintelligible. As the film wraps up, a
R.O.T.O.R. II is promised to us, but was never delivered. In fact, it took well over a decade for the film to be discovered by aficionados of camp and golden turkeys. Since then it's name has become much more widely known, but there are still so many mysteries surrounding it.
R.O.T.O.R. aims to be an 80s sci-fi/action film, and both falls short while at the same time very much being it's own strange beast. It's a shoddy product, and when it came to promotion that whole aspect of the film was front and center - because obviously the film's poster had been semi-plagiarized from the one for
Mad Max in the previous decade. I guess you could stretch that to 'homage' - and as you can see below, it was changed just enough to avoid any claims on it :
"You look like you've got both eyes comin' out of the same hole" - that might be a common saying in Dallas, or of it's time, but I've never heard it. Everyone talks a bit like that in
R.O.T.O.R. - in a language all of their own. Not only literally, but figuratively, this film speaks it's own language, and will only have things on it's own terms - no matter how amateur, how bad, or how cheap. Even the film's title insists on being awkward and strange. That old adage about something being like aliens came down to Earth and tried to simulate something humans do, but get everything just that bit wrong and show themselves up. That's
R.O.T.O.R. to a tee. There have been worse films made (
very few, but a few) and stranger films made (again, few compared to this) but here is one genre piece with it's own identity which has been picked up on slowly but steadily down the years, becoming that little bit more famous, and gaining popularity in festivals from Germany ('SchleFaZ') to Spain ('Peor Imposible'.)
Robotic
Officer
Tactical
Operation
Research - somebody actually thought that up, and then decided "yes" - that they'd go with that. I can't think of anything more hard to fathom.
*
Some of the lines go : "...is there some good vibrations to it's molecular tonality..."
"....I get around but I've never seen anything like this."
"God only knows this is spectacular..."
"Who are we who creates such a thing. Heroes and villains?
"What are you planning? Hi tech rock 'n' roll to the rescue of civil law and order?"