For Christsake, I know I shouldn’t  be but I’m in absolute stitches – I’ve been reading articles on a well known search-engine written about this amazing film and I’m really belly-laughing? Let’s see if I can find something suitable. Oay– how about:

“Gobble gobble...accept her...”

“I think she likes you...but he don’t...”

“They’re going to make you one of them, my peacock...”

And of course, probably the most well known: 

The film version of The NeverEnding Story made a big impression on me when I was young and undoubtedly influenced my future career as a writer.  

First of all, The NeverEnding Story is a damn weird movie, directed by a German named Wolfgang Petersen in 1984 and filmed mainly in West Germany (remember when Germany was totally bi-polar?) except for the Bastian scenes (aka the “real world scenes”) which were filmed, for some reason, in Vancouver. The film itself is a story within a story that hinges on a fantastical world bleeding into the “real” world (very meta) and has a funky 80’s electronica soundtrack—its theme song undoubtedly haunts a lot of people to this day. Even the fact that the E in The NeverEnding Story film title is capitalized is a little weird (the book’s title is simply The Neverending Story.)

When I saw the first entry in Jim McLeod’s new blog ‘The Film That Made Me’ I became aroused (in a cinematic sense of course) and asked him if I could also contribute, as I’ve been a lover of film since I was a small thing with an excitable imagination and a strange desire to dress up. He said that yes, I most definitely could. I was very flattered and rubbed my hands with glee. Then I started to reel (!) under the enormity of the task of choosing just my one and only, all-time, most magnificent, most affecting movie ever. Nevertheless I resolved to give it a go. Entering into the subtly lit and erotically scented ambience of my inner sanctum, I excitedly began perusing my wall of DVDs. All of a sudden I was horrified by the huge and almost mythical venture that I had foolishly chosen to undertake. I have approximately 500 movies in various formats on my shelves and now it seemed as if every one of them had, in an unguarded instant, gained a voice and physical form and was nudging the others out of the way with unnecessary force and shouldering themselves into my forebrain. Crying: “Me Sir, Oh please Sir! Choose ME Sir! I’ll do anything!” This was too much to bear. HOW COULD I CHOOSE BUT ONE?

This post contains epic spoilers for the film RoboCop – as in, it’s likely to spoil your 20th re-watch, let alone your first viewing. For this reason, and because the 1987 movie RoboCop is objectively the best movie ever made, if you haven’t seen it, go and see it right now, for the love of God. Then come back once you’ve scraped your brain off the wall and deposited it back into your skull, okay?

Oh, there’s also spoilers for Lethal Weapon, Face/Off, Die Hard, First Blood, Don’t Look Now, and in a cruel twist of fate, the TV show ER. But fuck them, they’re not RoboCop.