Star Kid

Star Kid doesn't steal from the best; it steals from everything. Spencer's a 12-year-old nobody until he discovers a cybersuit that, after a rocky start, turns him into an invincible fighting machine (The Greatest American Hero). The robot suit has a personality (Knight Rider), looks like C-3PO on steroids, and sounds like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Spencer tries to teach it how to be cool (Flight of the Navigator), though cool is a relative term, since his classmates use words like "gnarly" and "radical" (The Endless Summer).

The suit gives Spencer confidence (Teen Wolf), and he battles an evil alien in an abandoned junkyard (Superman III). After losing at first, Spencer prevails (the Rocky series), crushing the bad guy in a trash compactor (The Terminator) and summoning the suits' alien creators (Close Encounters of the Third Kind). In the end, Spencer realizes that the suit is his only true friend (Terminator 2) but that even without it he's still special (Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood). Star Kid also steals from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers (terrible special effects, choppy editing), My Dinner with Andre (really boring), and Plan 9 from Outer Space (it sucks). By the end the whole thing seems like highway robbery.

-- Dan Tobin