Android Cop Is The D-Grade RoboCop/Almost Human Ripoff You’ve Been Waiting For
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Earlier this year, the mega-cheap production company The Asylum released the schlockfest Sharknado, the Syfy mini-phenomenon that made one temporarily forget that The Asylum built itself upon making mockbusters of whatever thrillers and big-budget sci-fi flicks were waiting on the horizon. But everything they’ve released around that time, from the Jamie Kennedy realty thriller 4Closed to the Richard Greico-starring humans vs. aliens actioner AE: Apocalypse Earth, has been kind enough to remind us how terribly unoriginal this company can be. And now we have the trailer for their latest epic, Android Cop, which manages to rip off not just one but two projects that are big on genre fans’ minds: the upcoming RoboCop reboot and Fox’s droid drama Almost Human. And there’s a good chance that some of you will be more excited by this than watching Alex Murphy’s tale get retold on the big screen.
There’s a pretty good reason for it, too, as the film has legitimate non-has-been stars in Michael Jai White (Spawn) and Charles S. Dutton (Alien 3). Recently starring in TV series such as the conspiracy-laden Zero Hour and the A&E quasi-western Longmire, as well as the upcoming reimagining of the classic tale The Monkey’s Paw, Dutton is as dependable a background actor as you can get. And I’m a huge fan of White, whose crowning achievement was as the blaxploitation-spoofing badass Black Dynamite. He’ll also be seen in the upcoming season of Metal Hurlant Chronicles, as well as Fast & Furious 7. Add in The Lying Game‘s Randy Wayne and Cult‘s Kadeem Hardison, and you’ve got a cast that certainly wouldn’t draw millions to theaters, but doesn’t deserve to fester inside of an Asylum movie.
The plot follows White’s buffed-up cop getting paired with an “advanced, autonomous artificial intelligence neural net law enforcement droid” that he calls Andy (White), and the two of them head into a section of the city called The Zone, where the disease-stricken population has been cordoned off, to get to the bottom of the cause for the disease. Along the way they’re joined by a woman who is threatening whatever kind of upper-tier lawman Dutton is playing. You see, I can’t even find the character names on IMDb because the movie isn’t even listed on there. In fact, I can’t say for certain that drinking too much last night didn’t cause me to hallucinate this trailer from beginning to end. I’ll have to trust you guys for that. But even I couldn’t dream up this ridiculous spelling flub. Seriously, trailer makers? Do we pronounce this with a hard “C” or what?
Unprofessional errors aside, this trailer doesn’t look so insanely terrible that I want to ask White how many thousands of bets he lost in order to star in it. But it’s nothing special either, filled with gunfights and fake-looking CGI explosions rather than White just beating the crap out of everyone. I shouldn’t find myself wanting the dialogue to be more inane and terrible, but I do. The Asylum makes bad movies, but not necessarily boring ones, and here’s hoping there are quite a few tricks up this film’s robotic sleeves. But I probably won’t know about them, as I’ll never watch it. Zing!
Compare it to the latest trailer for RoboCop and let us know in the comments which one you’re more excited about.
