Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 16, 1990 TAG: 9007160084
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: VINCENT CANBY THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Robocop 2" continues the adventures of the half-man, half-machine Detroit police officer introduced in "Robocop."
Among other things featured in Robocop's newest campaign for law and order are a 12-year-old boy who is a drug lord, a new drug-of-choice called nuke (self-administered through a needle gun held against the neck) and dozens of dazzling deaths.
"Total Recall," the latest cinema overstatement from Arnold Schwarzenegger, is set in the supposedly not-too-distant future on Mars, where the natives (descendants of colonists from Earth) are revolting. They are waging guerrilla warfare against the ruling corporation and its leader, a man who charges outrageous prices for second-class air.
One result of the second-class air: a population of mutants, among them a prostitute who uses her three breasts as a come-on, a little girl with the face of Charles Laughton's Quasimodo and the guerrilla leader who exists as a head that, from time to time, erupts from the middle of the stomach of another man.
Among the on-screen superdeaths in "Total Recall" are those of several people who explode when tossed out into the vacuum that is the natural environment of Mars.
If you have the impression that movies today are bloodier and more brutal than ever in the past, and that their body counts are skyrocketing, you are absolutely right. Inflation has hit the action-adventure movie with a big, slimy splat.
Using a handy pocket-sized counter, the sort used to count the heads (still attached to bodies) in a crowd, I recently made a survey, inventorying 13 representative movies for the number of deaths (most of them shown in explicit detail) that each contains.
Nine films are the sort of action-adventure movies that have come to dominate today's market.
For comparison, I have included a watershed western (Sam Peckinpah's "Wild Bunch"), two current films that can be identified as comedies ("Another 48 Hours" and "Dick Tracy") and one old-time gangster picture ("Public Enemy").
In some cases the totals are approximations. In both "Rambo" films there are times when the same person, being photographed from two different vantage points, appears to die twice. There are also moments of high confusion when it is not possible to gauge whether the victim has been been temporarily deactivated or is certifiably dead.
It should be noted that "The Wild Bunch" was made in 1969, the year after the industry's Production Code was replaced by the somewhat more flexible Film Rating Board. This may explain the enthusiasm with which Sam Peckinpah so liberally used violence (a lot of it seen in the poetic terms of slow motion) to dramatize the decline and fall of the Old West.
Even by today's standards the film's body count is high, but there is not a moment when the audience laughs at the spectacle of death as it does during "Total Recall." The violence of "The Wild Bunch" is as sorrowful as it is shocking. The film is a classic.
Though the "Die Hard 2" total includes 230 people killed at one blow, the jump from the modest 18 killed in the first film is still impressive for your average, bloated-budget action-adventure movie.
It is clear that the producers of sequels feel compelled to raise the body count in each succeeding chapter, as exemplified in the "Rambo" saga. Yet the point of no return can eventually be reached.
"Rambo III," which breaks the 100 mark, did not do quite so well at the box office as the earlier "Rambo: First Blood Part II," which got by with a comparatively self-effacing total of 62 dead.
The producers of "Robocop," who did nice business with a mere 32 fatalities in 1987, increased the body count by well over 100 percent for the sequel.
You can be sure that something ineffably peculiar is going on when "Dick Tracy," which will probably be one of the most benign movies of the 1990s, has a higher body count than the original "Death Wish," which remains one of the sickest movies ever made.
Like the Dow Jones averages, these tallies are indicators - riveting ones. They show what has happened to the action-adventure movie in recent years. Rather like the once-human policeman in "Robocop," it has been turned into something else.
by CNB