A Year of Garbage Movies #97, RoboCop 3 (1993)

I have never seen any of the RoboCop movies in their entirety, and so I entered this movie a little concerned that I couldn’t give it a fair assessment without the context that the other two would provide. And then I saw the CGI in the first five minutes and stopped worrying about that.

It’s tempting to give RoboCop 3 a pass on the god-awful graphics because of how immature the technology was at the time and because of what type of movie it’s supposed to be. I really don’t think anyone went to see RoboCop 3 in theaters expecting “Cyber-Citizen Kane”, so why not take the new toy out for a test drive on the brainless cyberpunk movie? Then you realize that it’s not much different from what The Lawnmower Man (which I’ll have to suffer through later) served up the year before but with twice the budget.

Putting the CGI aside, there’s actually nothing that jumps out at me as particularly vile about this movie. Don’t get me wrong; it’s bad, but in more of a “make this marketable for children” way than a “we made all of the props out of Styrofoam and Elmer’s glue” sort of way.

So,

Pros:

• It was probably really good for the environment to round up all the remaining Commodore 64s in the world and use them to render the special effects in this movie.
• It was a nice chance to catch my wind from the rapid plunge in quality from the first two movies on the list

Cons:

• Painted an overly optimistic picture of what Detroit would look like in the future
• Bought heavily into the whole “Japan will destroy us economically” fear of the 80’s and 90’s (I’m looking at you, “Gung-Ho”(1986))
• The resistance is easily brought down because every soldier seems to carry around a projector transparency with a map to their headquarters. That seems like “Resistance 101” material right there.
• Approximately 4 million bullets are fired in this movie, and yet no one ever hits anything, not unlike a Storm Trooper. On the flip side, in one scene he literally strafes two mercenaries attempting to molest a teen girl with a stream of machine-gun fire and he somehow manages to light up the two guys without hitting the girl in the middle.
• RoboCop’s sidekick hops into a car with him upon realizing he’s headed to a rebel strong-hold. Armed rebels. In a stronghold presumed to be fortified and defended. She is handed body armor but says “Nah, I’m off duty” before heading over…

#96 is “Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2”, which is the first actual dip into the horror genre on this list. Given that I first saw this in the “5 Nights, 1 dollar” rack at the local movie rental place almost 20 years ago, I fully expect that this is a heart-felt masterpiece full of Oscar-worthy performances and absolutely no random, nude skull-humping sequences.