The dialog, the aesthetics, the zany characters, the acting is all so brilliantly bad. The thing is, the movie leans into the horrible qualities of the film so heavily that it stops acting as a film and acts more as a performance art piece, and creates a masterclass of entertaining yet unwatchably stupid action, mental story lines and an overall shockingly great movie.

It's gory, corny, campy fun so if you're expecting something that's intended to be taken seriously you're watching the wrong movie.If you like B-movies you'll probably like this.

The film explodes in a way only comic book adaptations can do. Immediately the viewer is slapped over the face with the knowledge that everything in it is going to be over the top, with black and white superheroes, talkative villains and a whole lot of weirdness. But the movie just piles the weirdness on and on and on. The end result is something that leaves you feeling dirty and unsure. What the hell did I just watch and what was it trying to say?

You see, the title character is a type of zombie super cop who deals with crime in that simple and unrealistic way that comics seem to find reasonable: kill everything that moves. "It's bad out there" gives the police department card blanche to release a Nazi Frankenstein on the crime lords in the city. In a way it is the same plot as Robocop. Only this cop is barely conscious, stuck in a loop of police righteousness and eternal violence, spewing the same motivational phrases that he has used for decades. And here lies the twist.

In Robocop there were always insane criminals to massacre and a human soul inside the killer machine sent for them. In Downe the criminals and the cop both feel less than human, just grotesque caricatures exposing the hideousness of our own desires and viewpoints. Downe is like a mindless Judge Dread and we end up cheering for a killer zombie. Or feel really awkward about the film.

I think so many people rated the film low because they didn't get it. They saw it as a failed Robocop when in fact it was a parody of it. To me the film indicates an absolute hatred of the comic book clichés, something meant to shame the immoral and brainless reductive process that produces so many of the storylines we find there. If that is what it tried to do, then it succeeded for me.