R.O.T.O.R. opens with a title card that in part reads, “Our objective was to build the perfect cop of the future … but, something went terribly wrong.” There is no establishing who “our” is, so one could choose to take it — and I do — as a half-hearted apology from the filmmakers for the movie, for something indeed did go terribly wrong: It was made.

Its poster art may be a blatant horizontal flip of Mad Max, but the sci-fi action motion pictures that R.O.T.O.R. would not exist without are RoboCop and The Terminator. Famously, RoboCop was set in Detroit, yet lensed in Dallas, and R.O.T.O.R. unspools in a way that suggest its makers saw “them Hollywood folk” shooting around Big D and thought, “Well, heckfire, I can do that!” Technically, they did; creatively, they didn’t.

The acronym of the title stands for Robotic Officer Tactical Operation Research — a legally in-the-clear way of saying “robot cop with a porn ’stache.” Heading up this division is police Capt. Barrett Coldyron (Richard Gesswein), a real shit-kicker type of Texan who lives on a farm and smashes the stereotype that robotics experts can’t look like the guy who runs the mechanical bull at establishments where patrons are encouraged to let their peanut shells fall to the floor. English does not appear to come easily to Coldyron, but that could be because Gesswein’s entire performance was dubbed by someone else.

What Coldyron (pronounced “cold iron”) and his team have assembled is not a finished model, but a flawed prototype that is accidentally jolted into action and unleashed upon the populace when the department’s jive-talkin’, sex-harrassin’ Indian janitor named Shoe Boogie (“Once you go red, you never get out of bed”) drops his switchblade comb into the educated white people’s fancy plug-in machines. A large-scale tragedy set in motion by a hair detangler — that’s a cinematic first, right? I’d like to credit the actor playing Shoe Boogie for his part in history, but he is (wisely) uncredited.

A quick aside: What the hell kind of name — for an Indian or anyone — is Shoe Boogie? R.O.T.O.R. scribe Budd Lewis (the Robert Z’Dar vehicle Dragonfight) appears to be handicapped in that arena, given other characters’ names of Houghtaling, Moulie, Mokie, Buglar, Grotes, Glorioso, Kipster and Statum. Are those Texans or elves and sorcerers from a fantasy epic I’m doomed to loathe?

Back to a project I already do: Rather than cure Dallas of its problem with rapists and robbers, the on-the-loose R.O.T.O.R. (played by three people, including Ticks stuntman Brad Overturf) contributes to it by murdering innocent civilians — “like a chainsaw set on frappé,” quips Coldyron. Luckily, R.O.T.O.R. has a Kryptonite: car horns!

Eventually, Coldyron gets an assist from scientist Dr. Steele (Jayne Smith, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders), who resembles Tyne Daly as an American Gladiator. I hope I’m not spoiling anything by saying the last shot teases the steroidal-looking, skunk-mulleted Steele as the cyborg at the center of R.O.T.O.R. II. If you own lucky stars, thank them that a sequel never came into existence, because one feature outing from Cullen Blaine was pollution enough. For his single, ill-fated foray into live-action, the animation director brought the imagination, action and suspense from all those episodes of The Get Along Gang. In other words, it is S.H.I.T. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.