RUNAWAY (1984) / CERT: 15 / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: MICHAEL CRICHTON / STARRING: TOM SELLECK, CYNTHIA RHODES, GENE SIMMONS, KIRSTIE ALLEY / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
It’s the near future and robots are everywhere, working in offices, cooking our meals and minding our children, and even building skyscrapers. But, just like anything manmade, robots are liable to malfunction and, when they do, very bad things can happen. That’s why there’s a police division known as the ‘runaway’ squad, whose sole purpose is to track down and turn off the robots who have gone nutso. And Sergeant Jack Ramsay (Selleck) is their star player.
Today, Ramsay has far more than glitchy robots to worry about. Just as he’s teaching his perky new partner (Rhodes) the job, a robot goes full-on psycho and murders an entire family. Pretty soon, the body count’s rising and it looks like the psychopathic genius Dr Charles Luther (KISS star Simmons) is at the centre of it. And Luther isn’t just hacking robots with dodgy microchips, he’s also invented a smart microbullet that locks onto its target’s body heat, meaning that however fast the victim runs, and wherever they run to, the bullet will always find them. But best of all are Luther’s robot spiders that can climb any surface and inject their target with a lethal dose of acid before exploding.
Ramsay’s got Luther’s microchip templates, and Luther wants them back. Even if that means kidnapping Ramsay’s son, trapping the cop at the top of an under-construction skyscraper, and sending his spider assassins off to finish the job. Between terrifying tech and a debilitating case of vertigo, Sgt Jack Ramsay’s about to have a very bad day.
It’s fair to say that Michael Crichton’s career as a screenwriter/director never came close to eclipsing his work as a bestselling author. Westworld was a great high-concept idea that hadn’t aged well until the TV series, and only 1978’s marvellously fun The First Great Train Robbery still holds up to repeated viewings. However, it’s good to see Runaway finally getting some UK Blu-ray love because, even though it’s a sub-sub-Blade Runner rip-off served with a massive pile of cheese with extra cheese on the side, it’s still a terrific piece of low-budget, switch-your-brain-off, comfort-watching hokum. And who doesn’t want to live in a world where robots that look like photocopiers run amok with handguns, microbullets are confusingly four times the size of ordinary bullets, and hero cops try valiantly to perform emergency ER on a mangled robot maid haemorrhaging hydraulic fluid? It’s batty, it’s brilliant, Kirstie Alley smoulders as a wannabe femme fatale, and why the heck Cynthia Rhodes wasn’t a bigger ‘80s film star is one of life’s great unanswerable questions.
