"Help me... help me!"
"AAAH! DON'T TOUCH ME, MAN!"
"AAAH! DON'T TOUCH ME, MAN!"
RoboCop was one of the few films to almost be given an X rating solely off of the violence alone. There's a reason for that.
- Early in the film, before his resurrection as the title cyborg, Murphy is captured by Boddicker's gang
, who proceed to graphically dismember him with shotguns. First, Clarence shoots off his right hand. Then Emil shoots off the rest of his right arm, and he and the other members of the gang proceed to empty their shotguns into his torso. Murphy is conscious and screaming horrifically throughout, up until Clarence steps in and finishes him off with a pistol round to the head. Such is the sheer brutality of this scene that even in its edited-for-television version, it is still hard to watch.- Imagine the situation from Murphy's perspective. He has gone from being in control of the situation to suddenly surrounded by hostile, shotgun-toting thugs. The look of fear on his face shows that he knows full well he is not going to make it out the room alive. The thoughts in Murphy's head at this point would be knowing that he won't see his wife and son again. All for the sake of carrying out his duty as a police officer.
- Now imagine the situation from Lewis' perspective. She went from being incapacitated by one of the thugs to helplessly watching her friend and colleague being brutally tortured and murdered. The feeling of watching and not being able to do anything to stop it.
- The scene was even referenced in the cartoon series. Kids show or not, it's still a shock.
- If you've ever been sedated for surgery, or experienced a near-death experience, you may be able to more easily imagine what Murphy goes through: You're brought into an emergency room, horrified that your family will lose their father. You see a film of an unseen vehicle taking you away from your family as they wave "good bye" fully expecting to experience death...
- Then, all of a sudden, you experience a sort of static before some undetermined time later being powered up and off like a computer several times, with an unknown amount of time between those powerups and powerdowns and while on seeing and listening unknown scientists and executives messing and talking about nasty things to do on you, being unable to talk and much less move. At the end you're seeing the world through an interlaced camera feed, with your fundamental memories removed from you, and experience broken traces of your removed memories. Your family believes that you have died, and you are left wondering who you are.
- Kinney's death when the ED-209 malfunctions. Yes, it's meant to be Bloody Hilarious, but come on, you'd be scared shitless too if you were in the same situation in that short moment before getting gunned down relentlessly by something you thought was safe.
- Even worse, ED-209 doesn't stop its deadly force countdown when he runs to some of the other board members to beg for help. Had they not pushed him out of the way before the countdown ended, they would've likely shared his fate.
- During the final shootout between the titular cyborg and Clarence Boddicker's gang in an abandoned chemical plant, Emil is shot at by RoboCop and crashes the panel truck into a vat of toxic waste... and survives. The effect of the waste on him (as seen in the image above) is both nauseating and terrifying, he is visibly melting and dissolving, while alive, staggering around and moaning desperately for help. It is almost a relief when, later in the sequence, Boddicker (while being chased by Lewis) accidentally runs over him, and he promptly explodes from the impact, showering the windscreen in what appears to be brown water, rather than blood.
- Imagine the situation from Clarence's perspective. He's just trying to make a getaway, when all of a sudden, this nauseating and terrifying creature stumbles in front of his car. Even scarier for him than it is for Leon since at this point, the creature is no longer recognizable as Emil.
- Pause the scene where Emil is run over, and you can see what's left of his face as his head glides across Clarence's windshield.
- Said effects were based upon the nightmarish visuals from The Incredible Melting Man for added horror.
- The stop-motion animation of the ED-209. The jerkiness accentuates its creepy robotic motion. The way it moves puts it right in the Uncanny Valley.
- It even sounds creepy; at one point in the film, when it gets turned over on its back and can't turn itself the right-side up, it lets out these horrific pig-like squeals. While giving commands Mr. Kinney in the boardroom, it lets out a few tiger-like growls.
- And to top it off, the ED-209's leitmotif sounds like something out of a horror film.
- Boddicker getting stabbed in the throat by RoboCop's bayonet jack and collapsing and screaming while his blood sprays all over the place including Robo by the time he collapses. RoboCop is practically covered in it after just one stab to the neck. Ouch.
- Emil's reaction to RoboCop after finding out who he really is. While awesome in our POV as Robo finds out who he is and what Emil along with the rest of the gang did to him, in Emil's POV it's much more scary. Emil was just doing what was normally routine, a robbery, then he meets RoboCop which is bad enough, but then he hears the line "Dead or alive, you are coming with me." Cue an Oh, Crap! from Emil as he is facing the man he and his friends killed. His first reaction is to shoot at him, but unlike before, the bullets simply bounce off. To Emil, it's a metallic vengeful ghost coming for him."...I know you. You're dead! We killed you! We killed you!"
- Murphy without his RoboCop visor. His head is essentially just a human face stretched over a metal skull.
- The moment you realize he doesn't even has a head anymore; he is just a brain, some medula and a primitive digestive system. His heart, lungs, circulatory and respiratory systems are replaced with cybernetic implants; has no eyes, cannot taste, doesn't "breathe". The "face" they give him still has the bullet hole that killed him. When he tries to arrest Dick Jones, Directive Four kicks in and is shutting him down, which would in effect either kill him or put him in a And I Must Scream state until reactivation, entombed within his robotic body with no sensory input he'd most likely than not go crazy within a few hours.
- How about the fact that those at OCP felt it was a fine, fool-proof idea to provide the ED-209, an experimental prototype that hasn't even been tested yet, with live munitions. Not just bullets, but apparently live missiles as well.
- And it's not just OCP who's woefully incompetent and negligent toward health and safety. The Mediabreak segments share some lovely details with us, such as the Family Heart Center, who provides bionic hearts and whose commercial emphasizes extended warranties and health tax credit over basic functionality. There's products like Magnavolt, a security device for cars that turns the front seat into an electric chair, and Sunblock 5000, a sunscreen designed to protect in a world without the ozone layer but which will also cause skin cancer if used frequently. The worst is easily the Star Wars strategic defense network; a system designed to protect the United States from nuclear missiles and it experiences a power outage and a laser cannon misfire that starts a devastating blaze in Santa Barbara, killing 113 people.
