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I'm trying to find the name of a lower-budget science fiction film that was available for viewing on demands on MIT student cable in the late 1990s. I suspect the film was made earlier in that decade, and it definitely seemed to have been influenced by RoboCop.

The plot involves characters is a somewhat dystopian near future. One of the characters (named Hawkins, I think) is initially in a wheelchair, and that is interfering with his relationship with the woman he loves. (He watches virtual reality simulations of himself having sex with her when he's alone at home.) Maybe halfway through the movie, he decides there's no hope for their relationship, so he lets the bad guys turn him into a RoboCop-like cyborg. I think he ends up fighting the other main characters, but I don't remember how the movie ends.

The film was clearly shot cheaply but competently. The color palette was rather drab, I think, and there were few indoor sets. It's possible that the film never got a normal release of any kind, since I don't know where the students at MIT cable got ahold of it.

So does anybody know what this film was?

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I'm going to guess this might be the 1992 film, Prototype.

Movie poster

Set in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles of 2057, Hawkins Coselow, a crippled soldier, along with his ex-lover, Chandra Kerkorian, share vivid psychosexual dreams. Dr. Alexis Zalazny, who is working on a cybernetic program that will help him walk again. The program sort of works, but everything goes deadly wrong when the man becomes a killing machine that can interface with any computer. He ends up killing several people belonging to a resistance movement.

Trailer:

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  • That's the one. I recognized the mullets in the trailer. – Buzz Dec 3 '15 at 15:06
  • @Buzz: Cool. It was one of the results I got when Googling the terms you'd mentioned. At first, I was surprised to see just how many sci-fi movies had a wheelchair-bound character named Hawkins, but then I looked at the dates and they're all after Stephen Hawking came to be part of the public consciousness. – FuzzyBoots Dec 3 '15 at 15:39
  • Your Google-fu is better than mine then. I couldn't locate it myself. – Buzz Dec 3 '15 at 15:53
  • Heh. You never know what combination of keywords will get you what you want. Then, you have the fun part of sifting through it, particularly if you start getting hits on things like "100 Dystopian Sci-Fi Movies to See Before You Die" where they keywords are present, but in 5 different movies. – FuzzyBoots Dec 3 '15 at 16:10

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