RoboCop: A year after David Cronenberg synthesized all of his obsessions into a major Hollywood production (The Fly), Paul Verhoeven did the same with RoboCop. They both got lucky: grand canvasses and mountains of money to explore the same ideas they’d been steadily developing in a series of smaller independent films (although not fully “underground”). There’s plenty of Verhoeven in Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and Showgirls too, but only in RoboCop is he able to spread out all the way.
Peter Weller plays the titular cyborg, a cop blown to bits by Kurtwood Smith and his goons (including a pre-Twin Peaks Ray Wise). Best known as “Red,” the dad on That 70’s Show, Smith gives his best cinema performance in RoboCop, a hilarious and edgy heavy, the kind of guy who walks in on two call girls and screams, “BITCHES, LEAVE!” Unbeknownst to Weller, the cops are in cahoots with Omni Consumer Products, who, before refining RoboCop, try out an unmanned droid called the ED-209; during a demonstration at a board meeting, the droid accidentally kills one of the executives, spraying him with automatic machine-gun fire (when the droid has been turned off, someone yells “CALL THE PARAMEDICS!” an early iteration of a joke in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers). Miguel Ferrer, also pre-Twin Peaks, is an executive who sees this accidental death as a way up the corporate ladder, and he pours all of his time and energy into developing a newer, better RoboCop.
This is the second or third scene in the movie, one that subverts audience expectations and manages to “set the tone” for a film that moves effortlessly between action, drama, slapstick comedy, social satire, speculative science fiction, and pyrotechnic special effects set pieces.
Weller finds Smith and his cronies in a warehouse, but he’s quickly turned into mincemeat; found by new partner Nancy Allen (her first day on the job, of course), Weller barely survives, though just enough to be “resuscitated” as RoboCop, a “super crime fighter” with zero access to any pre-cyborg memories. He doesn’t know who he is or why he does what he does as a RoboCop—he just follows orders. It’s not as moving or effective as a tragedy of lost identity as The Fly, but Verhoeven casts a much wider net than Cronenberg does in his film; RoboCop fires in all directions, ridiculing American media and consumer culture without ever becoming self-righteous or didactic, all while functioning as a Hollywood action movie at the highest level. The critique of capitalism is right there, but it never obscures the characters or undermines the plot.
Verhoeven’s exit from American moviemaking after 2000’s Hollow Man is lamentable, even if he’s gone on to make some fine movies in Europe like Elle, Benedetta, and Black Book. Imagine if Ridley Scott exiled himself instead, or Baz Luhrmann, people with nothing to say about the world we live in; slagged as a sleazy hack, Verhoeven left without regrets or any real bitterness (unlike Brian De Palma), and while I’m sure he has zero interest in coming back, American movies desperately need something as sophisticated and as fun as RoboCop in 2025.
The Hills Have Eyes: Wes Craven is the most overrated director in the American horror canon; to my mind, he’s only made four great movies: Scream, Scream 2, Scream 3, and Red Eye. That’s more than most directors, but take someone like John Carpenter, who has just about as many great movies as Craven: even when he’s spinning his wheels (Prince of Darkness, Christine, In the Mouth of Madness, Vampires), he never dips below a certain level of quality—the mark of a great director. Carpenter’s misfires—Memoirs of an Invisible Man and Ghosts of Mars—are interesting enough as curios. Compared to Craven, Carpenter has a far more sophisticated visual sense, more developed in every way; the same is true of contemporaries David Cronenberg and even Tobe Hopper, whose debut, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, proved that amateurs and first-time filmmakers and actors can produce an airtight masterpiece.
Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, his second film, is an obvious rip-off of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is no indictment—there are plenty of very good, even great, Jaws knockoffs like Alligator, The White Buffalo, and Joe Dante’s Piranha. All of these movies, even Piranha, had more money to work with than Craven did with The Hills Have Eyes or his iconic (for whatever reason) debut, The Last House on the Left. Quentin Tarantino was barely 10 when he saw The Last House on the Left at a Tennessee drive-in, and it was one of only two movies he couldn’t handle and “had to tap out of” (the other one was Bambi). “I was there alone, sitting on the gravel by a speaker, watching Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left. So for me, The Last House on the Left and Bambi are sitting on the fucking shelf right next to each other. Both take place in the woods, and both had me saying, 'I gotta get out of here!’"
I hadn’t seen anything like The Last House on the Left when I was that age, but when I finally caught up with it a couple years ago, I was surprised how poorly-executed it was in every way; more than the unbelievably irritating music, an ironic counterpoint to the horror on screen that just takes the air out of it, it was the way the film was shot, blocked, and acted: VERY BADLY. If a movie is well-shot, it has to do a lot to lose me. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a remarkably well-composed film, as much an instruction in cinematic technique as Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie and Kurosawa’s High and Low. And that’s to say nothing of the “music,” that gloriously creepy photo flash squeal, its sculpted low end rumblings.
The Hills Have Eyes is just as bad as The Last House on the Left, with horrendous amateur actors, unconvincing—and un-moving—special effects, and a complete lack of basic visual grammar and visual panache. Craven shoots his movie like a snuff film, and while that may work for John Waters’ trash trilogy (especially Pink Flamingos, which is far more unsettling than anything Craven ever did), in a proper horror movie it just comes off as the failure of an amateur. Craven was luckier than he was talented, and his reputation was made off of these two (lousy) early efforts and the sleeper hit franchises Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Hooper created the modern slasher without knowing it: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is as much a blueprint for independent filmmaking as it is a great movie. Craven was in the right place at the right time, but he wasn’t the right person to bring cannibals and killer hillbillies to drive-ins and grindhouses across America.
So what separates those four good movies from the rest of Craven’s chaff? Quality cinematographers: Mark Irwin shot most of Scream before being replaced by Peter Deming, who handled the first two sequels as well; 2005’s Red Eye was shot by Wes Anderson’s regular collaborator Robert Yeoman. Craven didn’t write any of these movies, either—what exactly was he so great at? It’s not like he had impeccable taste: Cursed? Vampire in Brooklyn? Music of the Heart? His other horror titles are known more for their names than for their content: Swamp Thing, Deadly Blessing, The People Under the Stairs. Even the metatextual Wes Craven’s New Nightmare remains obscure, but I should give it a chance… ONE MORE chance, Wes…
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits