The following article was part of a submission for a writing job to a website that will remain………anonymous and poor paying.
Meriam Webster defines “camp” as:
“…something so outrageously artificial, affected, inappropriate or out-of-date as to be considered amusing OR a style or mode of personal or creative expression that is absurdly exaggerated and often fuses elements of high and popular culture.”
This fits Robocop perfectly. The story of a dead cop resurrected from the grave by a massive corporation to battle a crime-ridden Detroit is the apex of satire and exaggeration in 80s cinema. The combination of excessive gore, evil businessmen and commercial parodies make Robocop the campiest movie of the 1980s.
When Murphy (Peter Weller) is killed, is an excellent example of the exaggerated use of gore in Robocop. Murphy and Lewis (Nancy Allen) decide to take down the well-armed and highly aggressive Boddiker gang single-handedly. During the bloody execution, Murphy suffers dozens of gunshot wounds. At the end, not only is Murphy NOT a pile of mush, he is very much still alive and screaming until Boddiker (Kurtwood Smith) fires a round into his head. Add to that, the doctors still try to save him.
The portrayal of the OCP executives is also a campy, if not brutal depiction of executives and professionals in the 1980s. OCP executives are portrayed as psychopaths as they perpetually sway from deceitful lechers to sycophantic flatterers at the drop of a hat. The audience first sees this when Dick Jones (Rony Cox) presents the colossal and heavily armed robot, ED-209, to a meeting of OCP executives. In a catastrophic, yet somehow simultaneously hilarious, malfunction ED-209 turns a junior executive into hamburger during a presentation (also an excellent example of gore in the film). The CEO of OCP (Dan O’Herlihy) hardly bats an eye and his response to Jones is, “Dick, I’m very disappointed.”
To which Jones replies, “I’m sure it’s only a glitch, a temporary setback.”
The most brilliantly campy aspect of Robocop is the commercials. Appearing throughout the film, they help to tie the story together while setting the tone of the world of the film. It’s a world of commercialism and big business run amok. Instead of a commercial for the boardgame Risk, we have the 1980s Reaganesque version Nukem where players turn their opponents territory into a nuclear wasteland.
Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop has aged like a fine wine, its themes only deepening each year. Its depictions of gore, slimy businessmen and trumped-up commercialism serve to make it the campiest movie of the 1980s.
Btw here's a glimpse to what it was like to make RoboCop....we'll blow this up in another article soon.
What did you think of Robocop? Let me know in the comments below
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