4. Robocop 3 (1993)
Robocop with a jetpack. Four words that will send a cold sweat running down the back of anyone unfortunate enough to have sat through
Robocop 3. After Paul Verhoeven's masterfully gory, satirical original was a major critical success and modest financial one - raking in $53m against $13m - a sequel followed three years later, being met with a much-less enthusiastic response, and only scarcely making its $35m budget back, going on to gross $45m. Surprising it is, then, that Orion Pictures bothered with making a third film at all, especially when they were hit with bankruptcy which eventually stalled Robocop 3's release by roughly a year. Fred Dekker was the hack-for-hire chosen for the piece, an obscure horror film director who couldn't find a way to make sense of what admittedly was a scripting problem more than anything else, though the wrangling of the studio certainly did little to help. Peter Weller was working on David Cronenberg's
Naked Lunch and so smartly passed up the opportunity to appear in the title role, and few other supporting actors stuck around, safe for Nancy Allen, Robert DoQui and Felton Perry. Furthermore, after the poor commercial intake of the last film, Orion thought it sensible to reduce the rating from an R to a PG-13, but given the series' regular themes of violence, prostitution and drug use, it resulted in a diluted experience that felt little like the original film. The joke was on the studio, though, as Robocop 3 went on to gross a mere $10m against a severely reduced $22m budget, and received a shambolic 4% on Rotten Tomatoes for the trouble. A reboot set for release next year is currently in pre-production, and after a 20 year absence, we think we've just about recovered from this one.