ROBOCOP (1987)

"I'd buy that for a dollar!"

In the future things are all fucked up.  Crime is through the roof, corporations have taken over everything, cats and dogs are definitely not living together, mass hysteria.  So, in order to gets things back under control (and therefore make themselves a lot of money), the Omni Consumer Products corporation (who own the Detroit Police Department and want to fully privatize Detroit into a manufactured municipality called "Delta City") comes up with the brilliant idea of taking a recently murdered cop, wiping his memories and turning him into a crime fighting zombie/robot.

That works out well for a day.  The new "RoboCop" goes around (in the high point of the film) kicking criminal ass (and even shooting one guy in the dick!!!), but then his memories start to resurface and things go south.  At the same time, there's a power struggle among the OCP executives that spills over into violence on the streets, since one of the biggest criminal kingpins in town is protected and funded by one of the scumbags on the OCP board.

For an 80's action flick, ROBOCOP is entertaining enough.  The violence leans more towards being gratuitous in a black comedy/social commentary sort of way, than it does in being a straight-forward action movie.  I'm sure there's some kind of social message in there somewhere (probably about how giant corporations are bad, m'kay?), but I really don't care.  I'm just here to be entertained.

Solid acting by a strong cast, good pace that lags some in the middle, a Metallica poster, some dude buying that for a dollar, portion of a song by a Ministry side-project (P.T.P), RoboCop getting kicked in the RoboNards, a David Lee Roth poster, a few hyperquick tits that weren't even worth taking screenshots of, some blood, a cocaine bottling machine that looked like it was dumping 40% of the coke onto the floor, a poster for the Cure, bitches leaving, explosions.

Worth a watch, but I'd really love to see an extremely dark and ultraviolent remake with less troubled memories and more killing the fuck out of bad guys.

Part 2 - RoboCop 2 (1990)
Part 3 - RoboCop 3 (1993)
Remake - RoboCop (2014)

HOLLOW MAN (2000)

Scientist Kevin Bacon, while on a strict diet of Twinkies, develops a serum that can make you invisible.  After some animal testing, he decides to try it out on himself and guess what?  It works!  Unfortunately, they can't figure out a way to make him visible again.  During this time Dr.` Bacon descends into madness and eventually starts killing people.

Coming from the director Paul Verhoeven, the man behind STARSHIP TROOPERS and ROBOCOP, I was hoping that he would have a fresh and unique vision of the invisibility story, but no, HOLLOW MAN is just you're standard stuff and by the end it's pretty much a weak slasher film with Bacon stalking people around a science lab.

Impressive special effects (for the time), Elisabeth Shue with short hair, Twinkies, Bacon listening to horrible music, a tasteless joke about Superman attempting to rape Wonder Woman, that one woman from "Nip/Tuck" topless, messy science, silly story that gets sillier as it goes along, old computers, average pace.

Worth a watch if you're really bored, but overall it's pretty forgettable.