Ep. # 85 - The Three "R's" of the 80's: Repo Man, River's Edge & Robocop

On this 85th episode of Fabulous Film and Friends we are going to connect the dots between three seminal cautionary tales from the 80’s: 1984’s Repo Man directed by Alex Cox and starring Emelio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Olivia Barash, Jennifer Balgobin, Dick Rude, Tracey Walter, Sy Richardson, Vonetta McGee, Richard Foronjy, Tom Finnegan, Eddie Velez, Del Zamora, Zander Schloss, Fox Harris and Jimmy Buffet. Then 1987’s River’s Edge directed by Tim Hunter starring Keanu Reeves, Crispin Clover, Ione Skye, Daniel Roebuck, Joshua John Miller, Josh Richman, Roxana Zal, Jim Metzler, Tom Bower and Dennis Hopper and topped off with Robocop, also from 1987 and starring Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Kurtwood Smith, Miguel Ferrer, Paul McCrane, Ray Wise, Jesse D. Goins, Felton Perry, Del Zamora, Dan O’Herlihy and the inimitable Ronny Cox. 

I’m Gino Caputi and returning to the program to break down all this cynicism and disaffected young adulthood are my sister Roseanne, the lit major, Joe Field, the author/hypnotist and back again after a long fitful stint in suspended animation, the photobug and funny man Gordon Alex Robertson!

Okay before we suit up and start taking names, the synopses:

In Repo Man, Otto, an LA punk, gets fired from his job as a grocery clerk but finds his true calling when a tough-talking stranger named Bud convinces Otto to join his team of auto repossession agents. Bud, Otto and the entire network of the repo men run into an existential crisis when a mysterious car that has a reward of 20k is believed to have an alien in its trunk. 

River’s Edge is loosely based on true events and catalogues a turmoil of emotions or lack thereof that a group of teens encounter when they discover one of their friends, John aka Samson, has murdered his girlfriend while another friend, Layne, swears them all to secrecy. 

Robocop looks into the future where the Detroit police are privately owned by a corporation called Omni Consumer Product. After Alex Murphy a brave but naive officer is killed in the line of duty by a ruthless crime lord named Clarence Boddiker, Murphy’s body is given to OCP for a pilot program that transforms Murphy into a cyborg called Robocop. The program seems to work and Robocop starts cleaning the streets until he realizes all is not right in his programming and there are sinister forces that led to his creation, including a pact between OCP VP Dick Jones and Boddiker’s gang.  

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