Naked Lunch (1991)

 "It's a Kafka high. You feel like a bug."

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I got into the habit of reading novels that were seen as a bit counter-culture, a bit alternative, a bit offbeat. Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, that sort of thing. And, for some reason, I ended up reading a lot of William S. Burroughs including, yes, Naked Lunch. And that isn't exactly an experience I can recommend. Let's just say it's a novel you can only read when you're young...!

This film, though? Oh, the novel and David Cronenberg were made for each other. So much body horror, and not just the (deliciously realised) Mugwumps. No, we have sentient, spymaster typewriters which are highly sexed, which ejaculate and which, er, stand to attention when excited. Because of course we do. This is the perfect canvas for Cronenberg to do his thing.

The film is visually exquisite, as one might expect. Yet the highlight may be Peter Weller's monologue recounting that surreal anal-related sequence from the novel. He truly carries the film in a suitably deadpan performance, believable as Burroughs himself, the still point beside whom all the gloriously surreal stuff makes a weird kind of sense.

No, this isn't a straight adaptation of a novel that is, straightforwardly, unfilmable, with its complex, bonkers plot and even more complex, bonkers subtext... and written by an author who was a heavy user of certain substances. Yet, albeit with the addition of certain elements from Burroughs' life (the notorious "William Tell" act especially), it comes surprisingly close.

Absolutely peak Cronenberg. A film that achieves the impossible, and does so with aplomb.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

 "Evil! Pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension! Grab them!"

Um, what did I just watch?

This is one of those films I've heard things about over the years but never seen. I knew it was sci-fi, I knew it ewas comedy, but... this is literally the sort of B movie I love to watch, except with a proper Hollywood budget and stars. How on Earth did that happen?

I love how straight the whole thing is played, as this sort of comedy should be. Peter Weller, years before RoboCop, is superb here, almost Leslie Nielsen-esque in playing a square-jawed character who may be a top neurosurgeon, quantum physicist, martial artist and rock musician but has no idea he's in a comedy.

None of this applies to John Lithgow, of course, who quite rightly hams it up with aplomb. This is, it's fair to say, not the sort of part he usually plays.

I love how this leans into the absurdity. The Johns! An otherdimensional Planet 10 where the good Letroids are all somehow Rastas and the bad Lectroids are racist white people! The medically challenged President of the USA! Buckaroo randomly findng love with the long-lost twin sister of his late wife! Yep, this is bonkers. I wish they'd actually made the sequel. I also wish I'd started drinking this wine before I started watching, but never mind.

There is, incidentally, lots of actor-spotting to be had. An unrecognisable Christopher Lloyd. A very young Jonathan Banks, decades before Breaking Bad.

RoboCop 2 (1990)

"What about democracy? Nobody elected you."

"Anyone can buy OCP's stock and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?"

It's been six long years since I blogged the excellent first film; a superbly written and shot dystopia about privatisation and corporate greed that was very Paul Verhoeven. It was hard to imagine how a sequel would not disappoint. Yet this doesn’t. It’s a superb film and a fine sequel.

But perhaps we should expect no less from Irving Kershner, he of The Empire Strikes Back: he has, after all, directed the greatest sequel of all time. Here he doesn’t quite reach the same heights but he does something similar- following an iconic director in a self-effacing yet worthy way. Kershner isn’t a director with a distinct style of his own, but as a craftsman of cinema he’s superb.

Hence we get a film that’s very faithful to its predecessor’s style, with the satirical commercials not looming quite so large but certainly present and correct, and with many familiar faces returning to the same Detroit which faces the same dystopian problems, courtesy of a superb script from an at-his-peak Frank Miller, writing for cinema at a time when comics scribes were not so well-respected as they are now.

And, of course, again we have a hard-boiled Hollywood film where, unusually, the message is clearly a left-wing one. We begin with OCP, owners of the privatised  police force, cutting their wages by 40% and cancelling their pensions, leading to inevitable strikes. There’s an uber-addictive drug called Nuke, there’s a kingpin called Cain and a child gangster called Hob, but the real villain is the anorak and grasping OCP, who deliberately engineer for the city to become hopelessly in debt to it so they can privatise the whole thing. And, much as RoboCop may defeat Cain, who has been turned into the body horrific and fourth wall breaking “RoboCop 2”, The film ends with OCP seeming to succeed in this, and getting away with this through a little scapegoating.

There’s lots of touching character stuff, too- the bit where Murphy pretends not to recognise his wife to protect her is heart-wrenching- but it’s all done perfectly in the same slightly cyberpunk corporate dystopia of the first film. This is how to do a sequel. So can we have another one please?

RoboCop (1987)

"Best way to steal money is free enterprise."

Right. The next five Saturdays will be Doctor Who nights. That means no movie reviews until after then, probably. So here's one last review slipped in while I can…

This is a very unusual film, far more so than it appears at first glance. It's an '80s macho action film with loads of posturing, gore and violence, a genre we all know well. Thing is, though, we all vaguely assume, correctly, there's something intrinsically right wing about genre. Interesting, then, that RoboCop should be so centred around a central message. Because this is a film about the excesses of privatisation. OCP has already run prisons and hospitals and now, with inevitable corruption, it runs the police. I look at this film, I look at the creeping privatisation of the police under the UK's Coalition government, and I'm scared.

Not that the film, with its vague near-future setting, is prescient in all things, of course. "Old Detroit" seems rather more populated than the Detroit of 2012. Characters are seen smoking indoors. The fashions are irredeemably '80s. But the political satire is frighteningly accurate; a privatised police force leads, inevitably to corruption. Even before we find out that Clarence Boddicker is working for Dick Jones we're clearly shown that there's a moral equivalence: that quote up there comes from Boddicker. In Old Detroit there's no public service, only profit. And no one at OCP displays and moral sense at any point whatsoever. The difference between Bob Morton and the other executives is pure hubris; they're no more moral than he is. We're given constant contrasts between the violent world of the overtly criminal and the no less disgusting world of the corporate, a world of cocaine, hookers, ruthless competition and (literally, with ED-209!) blood on the carpet. The corporate world is completely unglamorous: Wall Street this ain't. There's a good symbolic reason why we get so many scenes set in the toilet.

All this is further shown by the hilarious news broadcasts, which eerily foreshadow The Day Today but are gloriously dark, with an aggressively nuclear apartheid South Africa and the Star Wars "Peace" platform. This is also a nice narrative device for moving the plot along. RoboCop is a very pacey film. It's also a very violent, gory film, of course (especially Emil and the chemicals!!!), which is the main thing noticed by my eleven year old self when I first saw the film, hired from the local video shop. It feels a long time ago.

It's not perfect; Peter Weller's acting is not unlike a plank of wood. There's also an embarrassing plot hole: why does OCP sent RoboCop to a precinct where he might be recognised as Murphy? But it's witty, brilliantly shot by Paul Verhoeven, and gloriously violent. RoboCop is a true '80s video classic. I hadn't seen it for about twenty years, which is shocking. Don't make the mistake I did!