This Controversial '80s Sci-Fi Action Franchise Is Streaming For Free On Prime Video

Head on over to Amazon's streaming service, where an '80s action classic is waiting to be brought online. It might've been seen as a barbaric, bloody mess upon release, but it was locked and loaded with a statement ahead of its time. 

Released in 1987 and directed by Paul Verhoeven, "RoboCop" became a genre staple and launched a franchise that led to two sequels, a television show, and, thanks to that legacy, a 2014 remake. Nothing could surpass the original, though, which saw Peter Weller as Alex Murphy, a Detroit city cop whose life as a law enforcer, husband, and father is cut short in horrific fashion by low-life criminals who shoot him to smithereens. Worry not, though, as this is the near future, where robotics are the next big thing. Thanks to technological advances and good old-fashioned corporate greed, Murphy's remains are entered into a new program that transforms him into the future of law enforcement: RoboCop.

Marking his first feature production in the United States, Verhoeven came out guns blazing, so much so that excessive violence almost marked the film for death. In the eyes of censorship boards, the sci-fi action movie pushed the boundaries of action, and it nearly earned an X rating, dashing its chances of landing with mainstream audiences. It was only thanks to Verhoeven's tweaking that it ended up becoming what it is today.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, actor Kevin Page, who falls victim to a heavily armed law enforcement robot named ED-209 and gets punctured to pieces by bullets, recalled how Verhoeven had to snip up the scene, as well as the one with Murphy getting massacred. "He finally got the R in the last round of submitting to the ratings board by cutting four seconds: two seconds of me being shot on the table and two seconds of the back of Peter Weller's head coming off," he explained.

The process was long, with Verhoeven having the movie reviewed eight times by the MPAA and making the aforementioned edits before it got an R rating. For the director, he only saw the funny side of the ED-209 sequence, even if the ratings board didn't. The idea of the machine shooting, and shooting well beyond reason, veers into Chaplin-style "Modern Times" territory. "I thought it was very funny, and the contemporary audiences laughed at it," the director told Esquire. "But with the cut version, nobody laughed because the joke wasn't as funny anymore. The MPAA forced me to take all that out. They made it worse for the public by making it impossible to laugh it off. That was working with the MPAA."

But while the excessive violence got reworked, one plot thread thankfully never even made it into production. It involved a secret affair that we're glad RoboCop forgot — one between Murphy and his partner in crime aversion, Anne Lewis.

In what felt like a progressive creative choice for the time, Murphy's partner in the field was Anne Lewis, who, like most, quickly realizes that RoboCop still remembers life before being encased in metal. However, Verhoeven once toyed with the idea of the two being more than just friends. 

In an interview with The Guardian, the director admitted to trying to squeeze in Murphy and Lewis having an affair post-robotization. "I originally thought Nancy Allen, who was playing RoboCop's partner Anne, should have a secret affair with him — which was very Dutch of me," confessed Verhoeven. Ultimately, though, there was one detail that couldn't be overlooked — how exactly the affair would, well, happen. "Ed wrote a new draft, but it didn't work. It felt so un-American. If you look at RoboCop's costume, there's not much there in terms of genitals anyway."

Well, that would spark issues and undoubtedly create further complications with Murphy, whose emotional thread is focused on remembering the family he left behind, who had no knowledge of his recent modifications. Instead, more focus was applied to the gunplay, gore, and one of the most brutal deaths in sci-fi movies involving toxic waste. This over-the-top perspective is what Verhoeven was adored for, and it led to the Philip K. Dick adaptation "Total Recall" and the so-bad-it's-brilliant alien-war movie "Starship Troopers." With hits like that, we should be grateful we got as much gore as we did in a movie that, even with some modifications, remains such a classic.