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Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film “RoboCop” is one of the most violent, bullet-riddled, neck-stabbing, genital-shooting,\u00a0entrance-wound-making, thug-mutating, CEO-murdering movies ever made. Although made as a criticism of the gross ultra-capitalism of the Reagan administration, it still plays well today, functioning as a commentary on unchecked corporate malfeasance and the ever-increasing militarization of the police. It was initially advertised as a standard sci-fi\/action flick, but over the years, it’s proven to be one of the most important movies of its decade. It took the zany Dutch filmmaker behind “Showgirls”<\/a> to unpack the horrors of U.S. violence.<\/p>\n Even at the time, critics keyed into the satirical elements of “RoboCop,”<\/a> and few recoiled from its abundant violence. The Washington Post’s critic<\/a>\u00a0loved its “droll underpinnings,” happy to see a corporate yes-man get shot full of holes. Roger Ebert<\/a> similarly noted that the shooting scene was meant to be \u2014 and actually was \u2014 quite funny. He gave “RoboCop” three stars, observing there’s “pointed social satire, too, as the Robocop takes on some of the attributes and some of the popular following of a Bernhard Goetz.” (Goetz was a notorious real-life vigilante active shortly before “RoboCop” hit theaters.)<\/p>\n So, there was little moral handwringing about “RoboCop,” at least from U.S. film critics. There was one critic, however, who once insisted that a screening of the movie be shut down partway through because she found it too startling. Specifically, it seems that one of the critics for the Los Angeles Times, likely Sheila Benson (who was a staff writer when “RoboCop” opened in theaters), was left a little off-balance by a fake commercial within the movie. As relayed in\u00a0Esquire<\/a>‘s\u00a02014 oral history of “RoboCop,” she\u00a0thought a reel from the wrong film was being shown when a stop-motion animated dinosaur suddenly appeared on-screen.<\/p>\n