A deep dive into the sequels, reboots and rip-offs that followed Paul Verhoeven’s cult classic.
With the recent news that Elon Musk’s Neuralink company has successfully implanted a wireless chip into the brain of a human subject (clearly these people have not seen The Terminal Man, which was coincidentally released on Blu-ray the same week) it seems timely to look back at the legacy of one of the greatest films to deal with the fusion of man and machine, especially with Eastwood Allen & Christopher Griffiths’s mammoth four-hour documentary RoboDoc: The Creation of Robocop now available.
Allen & Griffiths had previously collaborated on Pennywise: The Story Of It (2021), Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story (2022) and the similarly comprehensive You’re So Cool, Brewster! The Story Of Fright Night (2016), and their latest undertaking is a dream come true for any RoboCop fan. Pretty much all the main cast and crew are interviewed including the usually reluctant Peter Weller. The wealth of information included is fascinating, and the Blu-ray comes with an extra hour of bonus material. There are a few minor oversights. There is no mention that Two-Lane Blacktop director Monte Hellman did uncredited second unit work on the film, or that Catherine Hardwick – who would go on to direct Thirteen and the first film in the Twilight saga – worked on the T.J.Lazer sequence, but considering what is included in the documentary, these are nitpicks. It’s still essential viewing if you are at all interested in Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic. What the documentary deliberately doesn’t include is any discussion of what happened after the film was released: the sequels, the remake and the film’s wider cultural impact… in other words the rip-offs, so we thought we’d step up and fill in the details on what came next (we will be skipping Stephen Maddocks’s 2009 National Lampoon spoof Robodoc, but it’s best to be aware of it to avoid any confusion with the documentary).
The original film was followed very quickly by an animated TV series, produced by Marvel. Though Edward Neumeier did oversee some of the show (both Neumeier & Miner are credited as co-creators of the cartoon) this version was essentially (and controversially) a children’s show, severely downplaying the violence of the original and the film’s satirical edge. There was a strange movement in the 1990s that saw children’s cartoon series adapted from R-rated movies – everything from Conan and Rambo to The Toxic Avenger and Police Academy – that raised concerns amongst moralistic parental organisations, and this was foremost among them. With Robert Bockstael and Susan Roman providing the voices for RoboCop and Anne Lewis, the 12-episode series isn’t exactly bad, but it’s a mere echo of the source. A second animated series followed in 1998 called RoboCop: Alpha Commando which shifted the story even further from the original narrative.
After the success of the movie, Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner were commissioned by Orion Pictures to write the inevitable sequel, who insisted that it had to be completed by the end of 1987. That deadline was further complicated by the fact that they had also been commissioned by Oliver Stone to write the script for Company Men, his film about the C.I.A. and their dealings with the Contras in Central America. Neumeier & Miner did deliver the script for the sequel on time, a rough draft of what was at the time titled RoboCop II: The Corporate Wars. The script began with RoboCop effectively being destroyed during a bank robbery. Twenty-five years later he is discovered in the ruins of the now-defunct OCP and revived after being connected to NuroBrain, the sentient computer system that manages the Plexes that America has been divided up into. He is subsequently caught up in a power struggle involving a president who was once a former comedian, a ‘super-entrepreneur’ called Ted Flicker and several of Flicker’s subordinates making a grab for power.
The script was not liked by Orion. Because of this and the inability of the writers to develop their first draft due to the subsequent writer’s strike in early 1988, producer Jon Davidson’s solution was to hire comic book author Frank Miller to write a script for RoboCop 3, and then re-purpose it as the official sequel – but it would still be several years until it hit cinemas. The absence of an official follow-up led to a vacuum which was quickly filled by the rip-offs and cash-ins you would expect, and the first was naturally from Italy.
Bruno Mattei had made a career out of reworking hit films. His 1980 zombie film Hell Of The Living Dead was ‘inspired’ by George A. Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn Of The Dead, his 1983 peplum The Seven Magnificent Gladiators with Lou Ferrigno & Sybil Danning was a response to the success of Conan The Barbarian, and just the previous year, he’d reworked Rambo: First Blood Part II as Strike Commando. Often, these films only resembled their inspiration loosely, suckering viewers in with the title and poster artwork and then delivering something only vaguely connected to the film – or films – allegedly being copied. Mattei’s 1988 film RoboWar is a case in point. While the film does feature an out-of-control cyborg that was obviously inspired by RoboCop, the main plot about mercenaries in the jungle was lifted from John McTiernan’s Predator. A year later, Mattei and screenwriters Claudio Fragasso & Rossella Drudi would go one better with Terminator II (more commonly known under the title Shocking Dark) which was a rip off of Aliens, with a dash of The Terminator for good measure. RoboWar was quickly joined by a handful of even lower budget movies.
Cullen Blaine’s 1988 film R.O.T.O.R. has a great poster, but that’s about it. The title stands for Robotic Officer Tactical Operation Research, and the story is mainly inspired by RoboCop, but elements of The Terminator and the Judge Dredd comic (the latter also being an inspiration for the original Robobcop) are also worked into the story. While there’s no denying that R.O.T.O.R. is a pretty shoddy film with some terrible action sequences in which the supposedly lethal killing machine stumbles through rubble and across victims with no sense of balance, but it’s lovably bad. It also gets extra points for the sarcastic and bizarrely flirty robot that helps out around the office and the ultra-low-budget stop-motion sequence where the robot exoskeleton performs a tai chi demonstration.
Even though the poster for Godfrey Ho’s 1988 film Robo Vampire outrageously uses the image of RoboCop himself, the actual design of the robot featured in the film leaves a lot to be desired. A drug enforcement agent is resurrected as an android after being killed on a mission and sent after the drug smugglers who murdered him and abducted an undercover female agent. Those expecting a Vampire cyborg are in for a disappointment. The android agent is actually referred to as Robo Warrior and as with RoboWar, this is more of a jungle adventure. The thing that makes this bizarrely fascinating is the bad guys’ use of hopping vampires straight out of the Mr Vampire series to guard their operation and the fact that much of the footage was lifted from Vinik Pakdivijit’s 1984 Thai action film Against The World. It’s too strange to not be worth checking out.
J.R.Bookwalter’s 1989 Robot Ninja features a comic book artist who becomes so enraged at the mocking TV adaptation of his work that he decides to start fighting crime dressed as his own creation after witnessing the violent murder of a young couple. This is another film that seems to owe its existence to RoboCop due to the similarities in the title, but its main inspiration is vigilante comic book characters like Batman and The Punisher. The Batman connection is further underlined by the cameo appearance of Burt Ward from the original TV series (alongside Linnea Quigley). What is interesting about Robot Ninja is that it anticipates Matthew Vaughn/Mark Miller’s 2009 film Kick-Ass, with the title character saying, “I am the Robot Ninja and I kick ass” before carving up one criminal. Bookwalter’s film has developed a dedicated cult following over the years, and he followed this up with Zombie Cop in 1991.
Also released in 1989, Cy-Warriors features a humanoid robot combat soldier named CY-W who was supposed to operate perfectly in all conditions but has mysteriously gone AWOL in the Caribbean. A ruthless colonel, played by Henry Silva, is dispatched to recover the missing soldier, unaware that he has been taken in by a young brother and sister. Cy-Warriors is mainly notable for being the directional debut of Giannetto DeRossi, the man responsible for the makeup effects in David Lynch‘s Dune, Zombie-Flesh Eaters, The Beyond and several other Lucio Fulci films, which makes the fact that the film is so light on effects so surprising. While the influence of RoboCop is clear, this plays better as a precursor to Universal Soldier released three years later, a fact that is more interesting than anything in the film itself.
The one film that you would expect to be a brazen rip-off of RoboCop is, in fact, one of the furthest from the original concept. Like Bruno Mattei, Albert Pyun was a master of the low-budget cash-in on popular trends, just with much more flair; but his 1989 film Cyborg was an unfortunate exception. Essentially just a riff on the post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies of the era, the title character played by Dayle Haddon is at best peripheral to the narrative, the film effectively being a showcase for Jean Claude Van Damme. This was corrected in Michael Schroeder‘s 1992 sequel Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow which was superior to the original and featured an early performance from Angelina Jolie in the central role. Pyun would follow Cyborg with Nemesis in 1992, the first in a quartet of films he made through the nineties by which time the official follow-up to RoboCop had finally arrived.
The development of the 1990 Robocop sequel was not at all smooth with Irvin Kirshner only being brought in as director at quite a late stage of production. Frank Miller, who had previously written the acclaimed Batman comics Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, had his original script for the sequel rejected, and what he did eventually deliver was rewritten by Walon Green (Frank Miller’s original rejected script eventually provided the basis for a nine-issue comic series titled Frank Miller’s RoboCop in 2003. Though I haven’t included them here, the many comic book spin-offs and re-imaginings of the original narrative are numerous and a story in themselves). The two leads returned with Manhunter‘s Tom Noonan cast as Kane, a drug kingpin who is intent on flooding the city with a new designer narcotic called Nuke while OCP tries to replicate the success they had with Officer Murphy and create a new cyborg cop. When RoboCop is ambushed and dismantled by the criminal gang, and then turned into a figure of fun by the OCP bosses, Kane himself becomes OCP’s new RoboCop after being fatally wounded during his arrest. As with the first film, there is plenty of violent action (enough for the BBFC to insist on 31 seconds of cuts before issuing an ’18’ certificate) but outside the graphic violence, things were already getting rather juvenile – never more so than when Robocop made a guest appearance at a WCW event, partnering with Sting to promote the film – and this was a huge disappointment after the original film.
Following the release and reasonable box office success of RoboCop 2, another wave of cash-ins arrived. Curiously, not only did they all feature female cyborgs, but they were – for the most part – more interesting than the official sequel.
Released in 1991, Eve Of Destruction has a connection to RoboCop in that it stars Dutch actress Renée Soutendijk, who had appeared previously in several of Paul Verhoeven’s earlier European movies including Spetters (1980) and The Fourth Man (1983). Soutendijk plays both the Eve VIII battle robot of the title and the scientist who created her. Lacking any inhibitions and programmed with her creator’s memories, Eve becomes the ID version of the reserved scientist, intent on righting past wrongs when she is damaged during a bank robbery. The problem is she is also armed with a nuclear device. Directed by the British filmmaker Duncan Gibbins – best known for his music videos – Eve Of Destruction features some great action sequences, an interesting subtext and, thanks to Soutendijk’s performance and a red leather jacket, a pretty striking lead character.
Made as a direct-to-video feature in 1991, Ernest D. Farino‘s Steel & Lace featuring Clare Wren takes the basic RoboCop narrative and distils it into a lean revenge story. When the gang who brutally assaulted her goes free, a young woman kills herself only for her brother to seek retribution on her attackers. A gifted scientist and an expert in robotics, he transplants her brain into the body of a battle-capable cyborg who proceeds to dispatch all the men responsible in a variety of inventive and gruesome ways. Farino had previously worked as a visual effects supervisor on The Terminator and Cyborg, and his feature debut is considerably better than Albert Pyun’s take on the female cyborg. Bruce Davison and David Naughton supply oddly starry support for this type of film.
In the 1991 film Robotrix, A mad Japanese scientist transfers his consciousness into a robot, kidnaps the son of a visiting dignitary and embarks on a rampage across the city murdering sex workers. When he kills a Hong Kong policewoman, she is also resurrected by a rival scientist in the body of a robot that looks identical to the slain cop. Directed by Jamie Luk, Robotrix has all the prerequisites of a Category III film of the era, including violence, extended softcore interludes, inappropriate humour, jarring tonal shifts and gratuitous sexual violence. Adult film star Chikako Aoyama is pretty entertaining in the central role and Amy Yip (star of Erotic Ghost Story) gets to take centre stage in the film’s bizarre comedic set piece concerning an undercover sting in a brothel.
In T.J. Scott’s 1993 film TC 2000, some unexplained catastrophe has forced most of humanity underground, and guards known as Tracker Communicators are assigned to repel the many marauding gangs who inhabit the surface intent on taking over the underworld. Key amongst these guards is Jason Storm (Billy Blanks) and when his partner is killed during one such incursion, he discovers that she has become part of a programme to resurrect the TCs as cyborgs, engineered to play a part in some wider conspiracy. The transformation of Bobbie Phillips’s murdered TC into a cyborg is lifted from RoboCop, but it’s just one of many influences the film proudly exhibits including Logan’s Run, the Italian post-apocalypse films inspired by Mad Max 2, the Judge Dredd comics and Verhoeven’s post-Robocop film Total Recall. Bobbie Phillips can certainly lay claim to being one of the cinema’s most attractive robots, and Blanks – who starred in the mini-action classic Back In Action the same year – acquits himself well in the martial arts fight sequences alongside Enter the Dragon‘s Bolo Yeung. Not a great film, but compared to what came next in the official Robocop series, its flaws can be overlooked.
Director Fred Dekker had made two well-regarded cult movies, Night Of The Creeps in 1986 and The Monster Squad in 1987. When it was announced he would take over directing duties for Robocop 3, there was reason to hope this would be something good. As Peter Weller was busy filming David Cronenberg‘s Naked Lunch, Dust Devil star Robert Burke stepped into the title role, while Nancy Allen returned as Officer Lewis. Unfortunately, the problems started immediately. The graphic violence of the first two films was toned down drastically to qualify for a teen-friendly PG-13 rating, while Nancy Allen was unceremoniously killed off early in the film setting RoboCop on a quest for revenge that just can’t pay off as it did in the first film. Worse still, the effects – particularly in the flying sequence at the climax – are embarrassingly awful. Everything seems cheap and compromised, The resulting mess was completed in 1992 but shelved until the following year when production company Orion went bankrupt. The year after RoboCop 3 limped out of cinemas, a new live-action TV show began screening, but as with the first animated and the second sequel, the show was tailored specifically for a juvenile audience. It only ran for one season, though several episodes were later re-edited and misleadingly issued as feature films on VHS.
Even after Dekker’s film bombed both financially and critically and the TV series failed to find an audience, there were still those willing to sift something out of the ashes of the franchise. The 1995 film The Demolitionist, in which Nicole Eggert stars as an undercover cop killed in the line of duty only to be resurrected as a crime-fighting avenger, is easily the most shamelessly imitative of all the films inspired by RoboCop. The film was the directorial debut of Robert Kurtzman, the “K” in KNB EFX Group, and against all the odds, this is pretty solid entertainment. Nicole Eggert, who was best known at the time for her role as Roberta Quinn in the TV series Baywatch, is pretty appealing in the lead role, and the supporting cast is chock full of well-known genre faces including Bruce Abbott, Heather Langenkamp, Susan Tyrrell, Sarah Douglas, Tom Savini, Jack Nance, Reggie Bannister and an uncredited appearance from Bruce Campbell. In an interesting bit of trivia, Eggert starred alongside Catherine Mary Stewart, Susan Blakely and Lisa Blount almost a decade earlier in an interesting TV movie called Annihilator about humanoid robots and an attempted alien takeover. Directed by noted cinematographer Michael Chapman, the unsold pilot was broadcast in 1986. Even this was more entertaining than Dekker’s film.
So at this point, you have to ask yourself… after Takeshi Miike weighs in on a franchise, does it have anywhere else to go? Coming a decade after Verhoeven’s film, his bizarre 1997 feature Full Metal Yakuza may allude to Stanley Kubrick‘s Vietnam war drama Full Metal Jacket, but the connection is merely cosmetic. Tsuyoshi Ujiki plays Kensuke, a young man with aspirations to be a yakuza, but who is totally unsuited for the job. Despite his ineptitude, he is looked upon favourably by the yakuza boss Tosa and is entrusted with the boss’s wallet when he is sent to prison after attacking a rival gang. After serving seven years Kensuke returns Tosa’s wallet, but both men are killed in an ambush. Kensuke’s body is then acquired by a self-styled mad scientist and resurrected as a cyborg, complete with a bulletproof body, his old memories, a lust for vengeance, and a large penis! There is an argument to be made that Shinya Tsukamoto’s earlier and stylistically connected cyberpunk movies Tetsuo (1989) and its 1992 sequel Tetsuo II: Body Hammer also owe a debt to RoboCop, but they seem far more influenced by David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Shivers. Miike’s re-purposing of the RoboCop narrative, however, is as obvious as The Demolitionist, but far stranger. The depictions of violence are also more extreme, particularly the gang rape typical of so many Japanese V-cinema exploitation movies, but the lengthy conversation between the scientist and Kensuke’s severed head is just as jarring. All this madness would seem to mark the end of the road for the RoboCop brand, but no.
In 2001 there was an unexpected postscript, a mini-series titled RoboCop: Prime Directives. Split into four individual feature-length movies titled Dark Justice, Meltdown, Resurrection and Crash and Burn, it was the first episode that provided the biggest surprise, as it was adapted from Edward Neumeier & Michael Miner’s rejected script RoboCop II: The Corporate Wars. While it’s interesting to see, the limited budget on the series meant that it could only ever be a shadow of what the writers originally intended.
In 2014, José Padilha, who had directed the violent and critically acclaimed Elite Squad and its sequel Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, was signed to reboot the franchise with Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman in the title role. Scripted by Michael Miner, Edward Neumeier & Joshua Zetumer, this new version released in 2014 was not a total failure. There are interesting allusions to the post 9/11 world, the war on terror and remote warfare, but as with RoboCop 3, the insistence on having the film stay within the confines of a PG-13 rating neutered any bite that it might have had. A decade on from the release of the reboot and with the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely that the decision to downplay the violence was a response to the release of Pete Travis & Alex Garland’s Dredd just two years prior. The character of Judge Dredd was a clear inspiration for the original RoboCop film, and Dredd revels in the violence in the same way Verhoeven’s film did, but surprisingly it underperformed at the box office only gaining its reputation years later on home video.
With the planned sequel to José Padilha’s reboot scrapped, Neill Blomkamp proposed a direct sequel to the original RoboCop called RoboCop Returns, but he soon left the project to be replaced by Abe Forsythe before the whole thing ground to a halt. With the rights currently residing with Amazon, there is the possibility of both a new film and a TV series. If Amazon chooses to take the material in a similar direction to something like their shows The Boys and Invincible, there is hope for something that finally does justice to the original film. Until then, watch the documentary, explore the rip-offs, and keep your fingers crossed.
DANIEL STILLINGS
BUY ROBODOC – THE CREATION OF ROBOCOP (UK)
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