George Lewis, not George Lucas! But that’s an easy mistake to make as this is The Humanoid, a shameless Star Wars rip-off featuring Lord Graal. He’s a bit like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs.
Watch as gargantuan Richard Kiel from James Bond, becomes the titular hero.
Also on the program, Open Grave, a military experiment gone wrong film in which a man awakens in an open grave and doesn’t know how he got there. He meets up with survivalists and they don’t know how they got there either.
And lastly, Babysitter Massacre, an homage to 80s slasher flicks.
Robocop features the incredible Peter Weller (who has since earned a Ph.D. at UCLA, in Italian Renaissance art history) as the eponymous cyborg crime-fighting machine.
Detroit was once a Midwestern economic powerhouse but went into precipitous decline and became crime-ridden (it’s yet to recover). Whether you blame Reagonomics or the endless succession of Democrat mayors since the 1960s, “the D” is a shell of its former self.
What it is though, is perfect fodder for sci fi action films. And Robocop beautifully showcases a city in decline in this movie classic.
We love Detroit though; and we love Robocop.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, RoboCop was written by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner. Alongside Peter Weller, there’s Nancy Allen, Dan O’Herlihy, Kurtwood Smith, Miguel Ferrer, and Ronny Cox. That’s pretty much a genre movie all star team right there. Ferrer was in Traffic, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. And Cox starred in that stone-cold all-American classic, Deliverance.
Set in the near future, RoboCop centers on police officer Alex Murphy (Weller) who is brutally murdered by a gang of criminals. Really, how other way can you be murdered but brutally? He is subsequently revived by the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP) as a superhuman cyborg law enforcer, from which the movie gets its name.
Themes that make up the film include include media influence, gentrification, corruption, authoritarianism, greed, privatization, capitalism, identity, dystopia, and human nature. It received solid reviews and was cited as one of the best films of 1987, spawning a franchise that included merchandise, two sequels, a television series, a remake, two animated TV series, a television mini-series, video games, and a number of comic book adaptations/crossovers.
Arguably, one of the worst war films ever made. But who wants to argue?
Strike Commando is one of the worst films of all time, period, featuring the legendary Reb Brown.
While operating behind enemy lines, Brown (Sgt. Mike Ransom – yes, we’re not kidding. That is his name) learns of a Russian presence in North Vietnam. And that presence, a hulking galoot killing machine goes by the name of (say it with us): JAKODA!!!!!!!
Ransom has to fight this Russian bear, as well as the Vietcong, all the way back to home base in this Bruno Mattei-directed mega flop.
Loud, inept, stupid, laughable and bat-shit crazy, Strike Commando is an absolute must-see.
George Lewis, not George Lucas! But that’s an easy mistake to make as this is The Humanoid, a shameless Star Wars rip-off featuring Lord Graal. He’s a bit like Dark Helmet from Spaceballs.
Robocop features the incredible Peter Weller (who has since earned a Ph.D. at UCLA, in Italian Renaissance art history) as the eponymous cyborg crime-fighting machine.
Arguably, one of the worst war films ever made. But who wants to argue?