The Vindicator (1986)

[akiratubo]

Carl has problems.  His boss is a jerk.  His otherwise sweet synthesizer setup constantly picks up stray signals.  His wife has a new-age friend he can't stand.  If that weren't enough, he gets caught in an explosion at work, which burns off most of his skin and kills him.  Then, on top of that, his evil co-workers resurrect him as a super-strong, nigh-invulnerable cyborg with the uncontrollable urge to KILL anything that touches him.  Of course, that means that he's going to escape the lab, kill a few innocent people, and get chased by a hit squad.  Just when poor Carl thinks it can't get any worse, his a***ole boss turns himself into a cyborg, too, and Carl has to fight him to the death.  Man, it sucks to be Carl.

As you might have noticed, The Vindicator bears more than a passing resemblance to RoboCop.  According to the IMDB, The Vindicator came out in February of 1986.  RoboCop was released in July of 1987.  I'm not sure if RoboCop was in a sufficiently advanced stage of production for The Vindicator to rip it off so thoroughly, or if it was actually the other way around.  It could be that Ed Neumeier saw The Vindicator while he was messing around with his script for a short film about a huge robot that shoots up a corporate meeting and said, "Ah-ha!"  There's a scene in The Vindicator where Carl smashes through a wall to grab a bad guy before tossing him out a window that's almost shot-for-shot identical to the scene where Murphy does the same to the terrorist in the mayor's office.  There's also a scene where Robo-Carl removes his helmet to show a woman his real face that is shot almost the same way as Murphy's unmasking.  There's no way the Canucks behind The Vindicator could have had that much insight into RoboCop unless Paul Verhoeven was mailing them copies of the dailies, or something.  Incidentally, the CEO of the evil corporation turning himself into a cyborg is a detail that made it into Frank Miller's earliest draft of the RoboCop 2 script.

I'd kind of like to believe that Ed Neumeier and Paul Verhoeven sat down to watch The Vindicator (and maybe The Toxic Avenger, too) before getting to work on RoboCop, because the thought of such a trashy little flick inspiring one of the best movies of all time warms my little heart.

[lester1/2jr]

good movie. I've seen it twice but have never seen Robocop 

[FatFreddysCat]

I saw this on Fox Movie Channel (now known as FXM) a few years ago.  It was pretty odd how many parallels there were to Robocop.

I posted a review of it to IMDb back then, I think I said something like "it looks like a rough draft of Robocop that was made by sixth graders" 

[Javakoala]

And this is another one of those movies that hasn't had a legal DVD release in the US. It's a shame because I rather liked it.

[claws]

And this is another one of those movies that hasn't had a legal DVD release in the US. It's a shame because I rather liked it.

20th Century Fox released a nice anamorphic widescreen DVD in Germany last year



So odd they didn't release it in the U.S.