Overview: WTF!!! That pretty much sums up Sixteen Tongues. This low-budget softcore cyberpunk porn flick has potential in some of its thoughts, but just loses out in editing, movie making basics like clear dialogue and pointless filler scenes. Low budget flicks often free the director to stop paying attention to movie conventions and potentially create something unique. But to make this pay off, some of the basics of crafting still need to be worked.

The Story: In a dystopic, seedy future, where humanity is fleeting, Sitxteen Tongues follows the plight of three emotionally scarred people (one physically scarred as well). Adrian (Crawford James) is a severely scarred police officer who seemingly died in a previous conflict, but was brought back to life, and had his damaged skin repaired by replacing it with sixteen tongues. His tongue skin, which forces him to taste his own clothes and everything he touches, has since made him go crazy – he hears voices and every now and then, and randomly goes on murderous rampages. Ginny Chin-Chin is a bio-modified assassin droid who has had sexual implants causing her to organism every time she blinks her eyes. The implants help her resist the urges to kill, but she still is driven to find her maker and rip him into shreds. Alik is a hacker extraordinaire, and is Ginny’s lover. She spends her time trying to find Ginny’s maker, but also has the ability to user her equipment to ghost-hack into other’s minds.

All three characters are emotionally traumatized. Alik and Ginny spend half the movie fighting about whether they really care for one another. Adrian is caught up in his own paranoid delusions. Through a chance encounter to get ice, Ginny and Adrian meet up. Ginny goes to his room (which has porno films playing non-stop) and finds out he’s a cop. She thinks he can help her in finding her maker, so she gives him oral favors in exchange for potentially helping her. While Ginny is having sex with Adrian, Alik hacks into Adrian’s TV signal and watches them. More arguments ensue.

Eventually things come to a head due to Adrian’s paranoid delusions. In scanning Ginny’s bar-code, he knows she is a dangerous murderer, and for some reason, begins to think Ginny is actually responsible for his murderous rampages. Confrontations occur, and things spiral out of control from there.

The Set: The entire movie takes place in a few rooms in a seedy hotel with porn posters covering all the walls. The hotels don’t look at all futuristic, aside for the credit card swap machines everywhere. They do at least look very seedy and lived in, although the random people sleeping on the floor was probably overkill. Also, we eventually learn that complete sexual deviants fill virtually every hotel room.

The Nudity: Fair warning – Ginny Chin-Chin spends well over half the movie either in the buff, in a sheer shower-stall plastic outfit, or in her fishnet get-up. She definitely looks hawt in this, whereas Alik, also nude some of the time, is made to look as nerdy as possible. In addition, we are treated to other random nude chicks we see as the movie progresses. Blood and gore are also in high supply here.

The Props: While at first glance, this movie borders on hard core by having an oral sex scene, if you look closely (or watch the extras), you can see that this is a prop. The dildo prop has various warts on it and spurts blood. Adrian’s facial skin grafts look pretty cool, and generally look like a part of him. Alik’s hacker tools, while extremely low-tech, at least pass some minor degree of believability.

The Sound and Lighting: If there’s a place that Sixteen Tongues falls flat on it’s face, it’s the sound. The actors are clearly not that experienced, and tend to mumble their lines. Worse, McCrae, the director, doesn’t seem to mind. With this combination of poor quality sound reproduction and mumbled lines, the viewer is left to decipher the dialogue in many of the scenes by watching reactions. Adrian and Alik are the worst at this. There are a few scenes of each where the view has no possibility of figuring out what is said. The lighting is also atrocious. Constantly we get over-exposed actors or actors completely blotted out by a bright light behind them.

The Bottom Line: Some of the ideas with Sixteen Tongues are pretty interesting. The hacker approach is very similar in some ways to Neuromancer in that it really doesn’t seem to recognize a modern internet, but instead goes towards this almost inaccessible cyberspace that only specialized hackers can use. Unfortunately, some ideas, including the Android assassin bit, and the briefly mentioned bacteria-taking over the body and mind bit are barely even explain. While the plot is problematic and the acting sub-par, it’s the basics – lighting, editing and sound that really doom Sixteen Tongues. Again though, Jane Chase as Ginny Chin-Chin does look pretty smokin in her various get-ups. So if you want to see a bizarre, edgy, low-budget approach to cyberpunk with lots of nudity and gross scenes sprinkled throughout, you might get some enjoyment out of this.

Overview: Gunhed is a Japanese live-action Mecha-Transformers movie done up in low-budget, gritty cyberpunk style. Unfortunately, it gives us a set of almost irreconcilable issues. On the one hand, the low-budget robots are pretty cool, as are a number of other low-budget FX. Yet, these are packaged in a barrage of incoherent plot points and truly strange sound decisions (the Japanese actors speak Japanese while the American actors speak English). When you see “Adam Smithee” in the director’s spot, you know something has gone wrong – in this case, the answer is clearly the editing. Gunhed may qualify for the worst editing of all time.

The Story: A Robot War ensued an a small robot production island in the Pacific in the year 2025, where sentient supercomputer, Kyron 5, has decided that Mankind was irrelevant. A mecha battalion of Gunhed warriors – huge transformer style tanks – were dispatched to eliminate Kryon 5. They didn’t succeed, but Kyron 5 was essentially marginalized, so no more force was sent. Now, 13 years later, due to a depletion of world resources, the key component that creates supercomputers, Texmexium (I shit you not – this is the name!), is in short supply, as are spare microchips. A group of scavengers have decided to enter the “forbidden zone” and go to the Island in the hopes of collecting Gunhed chips, which are now worth more than gold.

When the get to the Island, they quickly learn that Kyron 5’s protections are degraded but still seem in place. At first Kyron 5 doesn’t recognize their presence (you’d think it would notice a plane landing, but I guess not – nor do we find out why they didn’t just bomb the Island from the air back in 2025). But quickly it’s defenses, headed up by a fly-eyed looking “bio-droid” come to challenge the scavengers. Along the way, the find the remnants of a Texas Air Ranger helicopter, which still has a passenger, Sergeant Nim (Brenda Bakke). As things progress, most of the scavengers die in gruesome ways, until only Sergeant Nim and a mechanic named Brooklyn (Masahiro Takashima) survive – but due to the Island’s defenses, they are stuck there unless they can destroy Kyron 5. Also, they have stolen the Kryon 5’s supply of Texmexium (perhaps this is constructed from stale tacos), and now the Biodroid wants them back.

But that’s not all! Apparently some kids live on this Island (where they came from, we have NO idea), and they’ve decided to help Brooklyn and Sergeant destroy Kyron 5. But wait – there’s more! It turns out that one of the Gunhead tanks from 2025 appears salvageable, so Brooklyn attempts to revive Gunhed while Sergeant Nim goes off to do something unspecified (but at least it looks important). An incoherent sequence of actions ensues, whereby Brooklyn tries to bring the Gunhed to destroy Kyron 5. As he gets close, their biggest challenge awaits – Kyron 5 has resurrected a Gunhed of his own!

The Editing: Gunhed could have potentially been a decent, low budget movie, but the editing kills it. Continually, we see random actors popping out in places that don’t make sense, and whole streams sequences are rendered incoherent based on completely haphazard editing choices. I’m going out on a limb and guessing that at some point, the script was relatively simple and straightforward, but due to the editing, Gunhed was transformed into an absolute mess. But perhaps this is just the English version - does anyone know if the Japanese version is different?

The FX: Yes, the effects are all low-budget, and yes, it appears as if the entire movie takes place in a small factory, where the same locations are used over and over again only with different camera angles, and no, the tanks really don’t have any flexible movement. Still, even with the problems and all Gunhed has some enjoyable shots. The biodroid is pretty low quality, but the factory looked realistic enough, and every now and then, you get some cool, low budget effects. The Mecha-transformer fight is especially fun. .

The Bottom Line: The fact that the actors speak different languages but apparently understand each other perfectly really describes the state of Gunhed – it’s interesting but never seems to hang together well. Most egregious is the Biodroid, which has swallowed one of the scavengers whole, and now has to deal with someone inside itself stopping it from killing the rest of the people (the hows and whys of this are never explained). The appearance of the kids pretty much destroy all possibility of a believable story. On the other hand, we get Brenda Bakke doing her best sultry Lauren Bacall impression, which works somewhat well. Unfortunately, her partner, Masahiro Takashima isn’t up to taking a leading role. Watch this for the Mecha fight if you like, but the movie as a whole just doesn’t work.

Overview: Heavy Metal represents one of my great teenage film memories. Back in the day, before the porn repository known as the internet was formed, Heavy Metal was edgy stuff. As a young teen, Heavy Metal was everything a kid my age wanted to see – sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, violence, defiance of authority, and hot chicks! Add the most awesome hard rock soundtrack, and Heavy Metal became the drug of choice for young folk back then. That it was animated somehow made it alright with the parents. Make no mistake – Heavy Metal is not high brow fare, nor is it particularly well made. But it is definitely a very fun guilty pleasure.

The Story: Heavy Metal is a series of somewhat interrelated vignettes about the journey that ultimate evil makes, this time in form of an evil sentient green orb, called the Loch-Nar. The Loch-Nar captures a little girl in present times for reasons unknown till the end, and shows her a series of stories about how the Orb has corrupted people of all races in all times and places.

In each story segment, we get a strange, otherwordly setting in which the orb enters, corrupts and then leaves. Often a hero stops the orb from fully corrupting everything, but always the orb leaves a stain. The atmosphere is one of interrupting and ongoing scene with something truly unusual that occurs. But it’s the ending vignette, Taarna which is the best, and also the one that finally gives us insight into why the Loch-Nar has captured this little girl. Taarna isn’t really cyberpunk in any way but a few of the visuals, but it is a lot of fun.

Is it cyberpunk? Clearly, some of the vignettes, many in fact, are more fantasy than cyberpunk. So why do I have this movie listed? While some of the vignettes do have the cyberpunk feel, most clearly Harry Canyon, Heavy Metal absolutely belongs here due to its magazine roots. Both William Gibson and Ridley Scott credit visuals in the Heavy Metal Magazine is very influential for helping create their settings. Most cited is the Moebuis illustrated “The Long Tomorrow” comic. As you can see by the link, the Long tomorrow gives us a gritty neo-noir, near future comic that’s edgy, dangerous, and lots of fun. And more importantly, the atmosphere – the mood in Heavy Metal throughout seems pretty cyberpunk.

Heavy Metal is Male Fantasy Material: Heavy Metal is NOT sophisticated - far from it in fact. Heavy Metal caters to the sophomoric, prepubescent male, and emphasizes gratuitous nudity, hot chicks kicking butt, nerds who grow massive bodies and get laid, android-hot chick sex, etc. Heavy Metal falls right in line with the old “Gonad the Barbarian” style books, so in this way, it really isn’t cyberpunk. Cyberpunk as a sub-genre dramatically improved the quality and intelligence of what we found on the scifi-fantasy shelves. Heavy Metal the movie does not, although many of the stories do provoke an interesting thought or two.

The Animation: Each story segment is written and animated by completely different teams, although some of the voice actors such as John Candy appear in many episodes. Some of the segments seem pretty simple, whereas others have more than decent texture. All in all, Heavy Metal represents a mixed bag, but at the time, it truly was on the revolutionary side. While French director René Laloux’s most awesome animated movies were far better, outside of them, few things touched Heavy Metal. The fact that Heavy Metal included the themes and visuals teens were looking for back then transformed it into the ultimate cult rebellion flick.

The Sound Track: Heavy Metal still should be considered among the best sound tracks for a movie. It SOOO added to the atmosphere. We get a heaping dose of great hard rock from the likes of Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, Sammy Hagar, Cheap Trick, and Don Felder’s most awesome rendition of Heavy Metal (Takin’ A Ride). In addition, we get great little 80s tunes like Devo’s “Working in a Coal Mine,” Journey’s “Open Arms,” and Stevie Nicks’ “Blue Lamp.” Truly, if you’re interested in experiencing 80s counter-culture at its fantasized finest, Heavy Metal is the movie to watch.

The Bottom Line: Heavy Metal is not a great movie, but it is a lot of fun. While it has a few vignettes that are clearly cyberpunk in nature, the majority of the movie is unsophisticated SciFi-Fantasy. Still, the visuals and atmosphere are more than interesting, as are the diversity of animation styles. Heavy Metal should be seen more for the vision this film represents from the Magazine. This, as much as anything is responsible for the genre we now call cyberpunk.

Overview: Some low-budget movies make it with a terrific story and just the right quality of effects; others come close; and others still get worried about not quite making it, so they decide to spew insane plot twists at the viewer in the hopes of increasing the tension. Unfortunately, Johnny 2.0 takes this tact. The movie was “teetering on the edge” of being decent, but fell off the wrong side. Instead of going with the stream of increasingly unbelievable plot twists, had they spent just a bit more on beefing up the story, Johnny 2.0 could have gotten some real kudos.

The Story: In the present, the experimentation with cloning begins to take off when scientist Johnny Dalton (Jeff Fahey) teams up with Frank Donahue (Michael Ironside) to create a small cloning start-up that has terrific potential. They are able to speed up the cloning process, and more surprisingly, are able to take an MRI scan of a person’s brain in a way that can record their entire set of memories. Unfortunately, anti-technology terrorists attack their complex and severely hurt Johnny, causing a massive, bleeding head injury.

Johnny wakes up later to find that almost 20 years have passed, and that he is no longer Johnny Dalton – he’s a clone. Now referred to as “Johnny 2.0,” Johnny’s memories extend only to the injury 20 years ago when he had a scan of his memory. Now, the earth has become a dystopia, where countries have broken down, and only the corporations exist to maintain order. Worse, the “real” Johnny Dalton has either been taken by terrorists, or worse, has joined them, and has taken all his research, including a software program that removes imperfections in clones. Now, unless Johnny 2.0 can find and return the original Johnny Dalton, his body will start to break down within the week!

While the story starts off in an interesting way, and generally keeps a decent pacing, as things get tense, instead of resolving things in an innovative way, the viewer is continually assaulted with the most extreme plot twists. OK, one or maybe two might work, but Johnny 2.0 just doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. Worse, in key scenes the rationale for certain characters starts to resemble the massive space invasion force surrounding Naboo in The Phantom Menace – they all seemingly took a lunch break when the counter attack came, leaving only one ship to defend their forces. When all is said and done, it’s simply not possible to suspend disbelief.

Johnny 2.0 Clone Technology Musings: For all its faults, Johnny 2.0 does have some interesting musings about cloning. The idea that clones can be sped up, and enhanced (by removing eye imperfections, improving the immune system, etc.) is interesting. More interesting is the idea that our memories can be recorded and re-inserted into a new host. Unfortunately, Johnny 2.0 doesn’t address idea with any degree of thought. In Johnny 2.0, the brain is essentially seen as an empty hard drive just waiting to be filled up with new memories. Even existing people apparently can have their memories wiped and re-inserted with new ones. Had this technology been combined with the rapid growth process, whereby a clone could be created while having their brain slowly become adapted to the imprinted memories, this would have worked lots better. Unfortunately, shortcomings in the ending narrative precluded anything unique here.

Even with the faults, Johnny 2.0 poses an interesting idea – that our existence could be perpetually extended by a combination of cloning and brain scanning. In Johnny 2.0, it’s the evil corporate head who is trying to cheat death, but if such a technology were created, one can only imagine the change we see in society. Imagine the chances we individually would take.

The FX: For the most part, the FX was what you’d expect – low budget TV fare. It wasn’t too distracting though, and pretty much worked for what was intended. Some of the effects, like the force field walkthrough scene was pretty forced though. One wonders why they would spend the money for a high-tech force field instead of a wall, especially when it can be penetrated so easily. They also seemed to try to stick VR helmets on everyone – this is more a sign of the times as VR stuff was hot in the mid nineties.

The Bottom Line: While the concept is interesting, this made for TV movie is poorly implemented. Although, there is enough here to get a modicum of enjoyment, and the movie does start off well enough that I feel compelled to give it at least a 5 star rating, especially considering it’s low budget. The actors were at least adequate (Michael Ironside of Total Recall fame was definitely the best of the bunch), so consider giving it a watch if nothing else strikes you.

Overview: Oh how the mighty have fallen. In Robocop, we get a violent, satirical look at a future with an interesting story, complete with cyborg musings and incredible visuals. In Robocop 2, we get a tripe, over-the-top monstrosity that devolves into a Godzilla versus King Kong movie. Where Robocop provided a biting commentary on the state of corporate influence and advertising, Robocop 2 settles for a simplistically evil, nonsensical, corporate stooges who are far more interested in screwing society than they are making long term profit. Put simply, Robocop 2 is a mess when compared to its original.

The Story: In Robocop 2, the OCP Corporation is bent on nefariously taking over ownership of the city so that it can squeeze every dollar out of the populace (which, interestingly, is already poor). As part of their plan, OCP tacitly supports the distribution of a new addictive drug called “Nuke.” With the cops on strike and the evil drug lord Cain distributing the drug and destroying the populace, only Robocop is there to protect Detroit from complete anarchy. But even Robocop is removed when a new scheming corporate businesswoman at OCP will do anything to get to the top, including screwing the CEO, ruining Robocop and replacing him with the Nuke drug lord, Cain. I could to into more details, but truly, the plot sucks too much to bother.

Robocop Stripped: “Christ, he’s been stripped,” is the line the policeman delivers upon seeing Robocop as a heap of parts. I couldn’t agree more. The plot points in Robocop 2 are idiotic at best. OK, so the bad guy and his 12 year-old kid beat Robocop. Of course, the logical thing to do is to drop him off, living parts and all at police HQ, right? And of course it makes sense for a Lawyer to control the Robocop project, even though there aren’t any legal issues involved. And just as logical is the corporation that gambles its entire viability on a psycho-maniac dead drug addict to be its corporate face and protector of the public, while destroying its investment in Robocop by programming him with silly parables (Gee, any reason they didn’t just re-assign Robocop to the military?). In topping this silliness, at least we know that Robocop, human brain and all, is able to easily withstand a drop from the top of a skyscraper. Interestingly, Robocop 2 tells us that the most expensive part of running a city is the police department, not the building of an ENTIRE NEW DOWNTOWN, which, we are told, will instantly pay for itself because its population will be paying for an addictive drug! I could go on, but clearly, the plot isn’t supposed to make sense. One wonders what the original script looked like as its pretty clear that Frank Miller’s script was modified significantly.

The Bottom Line: While most of the key characters return (Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Dan O’Herlihy, Felton Perry), they are joined by a cast that includes a parodied lunatic for a mayor (Willard Pugh), a kid for a bad guy (always the touch of death), and shallow scheming, horrible acting corporate bitch (Belinda Bauer). The interesting questions from the first movie are again posed, but this time in a sophomoric, absurd fashion – so much so that they divorce any interest in the potential answers. The FX, including the stop-motion animation are still decent enough to keep the movie from being a total waste, but just barely. If Robocop was intended as a total goof (meaning the actors realized this), it would have worked better. Instead, we get a story that qualifies as a parody while the actors seem to think they’re making a credible remake. The result is less than stellar.

Overview: One of the truly unique movies in the cyberpunk genre, Robocop seems to be slowly receding from our conscious. No longer (in the US) is it carried at places like Best Buy. This is truly a shame because Robocop offers us one of the best instances of near-future cyborgs on film, and in the process, raises some pretty interesting questions. One top of this, Robocop offers some really fun satire along with an in-your-face realistic violence tone throughout that only adds to its mood.

The Story: In a very near-future setting, general law and order has broken down. In the crime-ridden city of Detroit, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) has taken over the public safety duties. To cut costs, they have decided to explore options for automating the police force. One option supported by Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) the number 2 guy at OCP, involves the development of a fully automated mobile weapon system called “ED 209.” While ED 209 is an absolute badass, it screws up in the final demo and ends up peppering one of OCP’s employees in the process.

Enter up and coming executive, Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer). Bob takes ED 209’s demise as an opportunity to convince the CEO to give the Robocop project a try. This involves taking a “just-dead” cop, and embedding the key parts of his body (brain, lungs, heart, etc.) into a robotic body that interfaces and “controls” the mental processes through controlling prime directives. Detective Murphy (played wonderfully by Peter Weller), who has just died in a gruesome death at the hands of Detroit’s crime lord (Kurtwood Smith) becomes the new “volunteer.” His memory is erased, his limbs are removed, and then becomes OCP’s corporate property as their latest innovation.

Murphy is transformed into a fully encased crime fighting machine. Robocop is released on the streets to start kicking ass. Unfortunately, Dick Jones doesn’t take his defeat gracefully, and begins to cause trouble both for Robocop’s creator, Bob Morton, and finally for Robocop. It turns out that OCP’s plan for managing detroit’s crime situation isn’t all above board, as there appears to be some linkage between OCP and Detroit’s crime lord. Robocop’s troubles get even worse as he begins to remember who he was in a past life.

The Satire: Verhoeven is known for having an off-beat sense of satire. In a technique later used for Total Recall and Starship Troopers, Robocop does this primarily through its news reports and commercials. These, along with the corporate greed thematics transforms Robocop into a social commentary on the 80s excesses. The Commoditization of society permeates every aspect of human life in Robocop. Corporations are inherently evil and humanity is a cheap sales pitch. Like Starship Troopers, you’ll continually catch yourself smiling at the commercials and news reports, as Verhoeven really has a talent for this type of satire.

The Violence: Fair warning – Robocop is an extremely violent movie – so much so that upon its initial release, they had to cut two seconds of violence to prevent from receiving an “X” rating. Nothing is held back here, as Verhoeven continually strives for hyper-realism. We see limbs getting blown off, blood spattered faces and walls, and in-your-face gore of all varieties from beginning to end. However, the violence doesn’t stick out as a sore thumb – instead it serves to give the near-future city a nourish realism feel. In short, it works within the context of the narrative and surrounding visuals.

The FX and Set Designs: While Verhoeven gives us a somewhat futuristic city, he seems to err on the side of looking “normal.” We see this most clearly in the Ford Taurus police cars (which were brought in after everyone agreed the futuristic police car designs looked too tacky to be considered). However, the set designs are all wonderfully constructed, and all seem work well with one-another. The ED 209 looks terrific, and the stop-motion animation for it generally works. Robocop’s exterior design does look hoaky at first, but you eventually get used to it. On the other hand, Robocop without his helmet looks flat-out awesome.

The Cyborg Questions: Robocop/Murphy give us a rich set of questions to ponder relating to cyborgs, the integration of programming with human minds, and in determining ownership after death.

• Cyborg and Humanity: As Murphy begins to realize who he was, and worse, what he’s become, the question asked is what degree of Murphy’s humanity remains? Murphy’s partner, Anne Lewis (played by Nancy Allen) serves to surface these concerns, as she still thinks that Murphy is inside somewhere. Yet, every aspect of humanity has been taken away from Robocop – he doesn’t have a home, but instead returns to a borg-like podchair at night to regenerate. Even if Robocop eventually considers himself human in some sense, it’s no longer clear what that even means. At best, Robocop is part of that strange category we call “post-human.”

 

• Man-machine interface – Robocop Style: Robocop gives us an interesting look at human brain-matter that has been fully integrated into a cybernetic body. Even more interesting though is the notion that external programming could limit the functioning of the human brain from controlling its new cyborg casing. If we think about it, this isn’t as far fetched as it may initially look: similar to how firewalls block “targeted” information from either entering or exiting a network, Robocop’s programming ensures the human mind adheres to the prime directives. But while the prevention part seems possible, the “directive” nature of the rules seems dubious, as does the erasing of his memory. These perhaps, are far harder to do without destroying the “cop experience” they so desired by picking Murphy in the first place.

 

• Dixie Flatline Construct Concerns: Similar to the Dixie Flatline Construct in Neuromancer, for all intents and purposes, Murphy is dead prior to being transformed into Robocop. At best we can consider him a zombie as his brain matter was re-animated after death. But like Dixie Flatline, he can think and perform sensemaking. Also like Dixie Flatline, he is limited by programming constraints. However, unlike Dixie Flatline, Robocop can still “feel.” So the question is this – if we develop the capability to re-animate someone’s consciousness after death, do they have the same basic human rights as they did when they were alive? Or are they the property of the corporation who revived them? Even weirder, could corpse’s estate executor (or spouse, for that matter) “sell” the corpse’s consciousness to a third party? If this is so, could your conscious be sold after the fact to pay off unpaid debts? Truly, the questions are mind-boggling!

The Bottom Line: Robocop has to be considered one of the essential films of the cyberpunk genre. Some of the action scenes could have been better choreographed (a lot of the bad-guy deaths had the worthless storm trooper feel to them), but truly, the quibbles with this film are minor. Unlike the sequels, which largely come across as pathetic attempts to cash in on the original’s success, Robocop takes itself seriously from beginning to end. Because of this, it really does rise to something special. Even though Best Buy no longer considers Robocop worthy of carrying, don’t let this fool you – assuming you can stand the violence, Robocop deserves to be watched.

Overview: You know things aren’t going to be great when a movie copies Highlander 2 for its larger plot points. Absolon never had delusions of being good. It’s derivative from the get go. That said, while the plot, story and dialogue suck, at least Absolon has Christopher Lambert, Ron Perlman, Kelly Brook, and Lou Diamond Philips, who gives an especially good performance.

The Story: In a near-future dystopia, a virus has infected everyone on the planet, and has killed off millions. In saving mankind, a drug named Absolon has been developed which combats the virus. Unfortunately, it must be taken every day. One corporation, headed by Ron Perlman, owns Absolon and now controls the fate of mankind. Everyone must line up daily at distribution centers to receive their “fix,” otherwise they run the risk of developing to phase II of the disease, and are then incurable.

Finally, a “real” cure for the virus has been developed, but for obvious reasons, the stereotypical evil corporation who owns Absolon doesn’t want their market share challenged, so the inventor is murdered and they attempt to bury the cure. Lou Diamond Phillips, who turns in by FAR the best performance here, is Perlman’s “tough guy” responsible for “taking care” of the problem. Lambert plays a grizzled cop who inadvertently stumbles on the cover-up, and subsequently becomes emeshed in the “resistence.” Along with Kelly Brook, who worked on the cure, Lambert tries to rescue the cure so that humanity can escape the inhumanity that Absolon engenders.

The Bottom Line: Other than Lou Diamond Phillips’ performance, there’s nothing quality about Absolon. The story, the cheapy matrix FX, the set pieces, the dialogue and the pacing all pretty much suck. I must say though, I’m a real sucker for Christopher Lambert, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen Phillips put in a decent performance. For this reason, I’ll raise Absolon from 3 stars (where it probably belongs) to a 4 star review.

Overview: The inspiration for Judge Dredd is based off of a comicbook hero, which Hollywood determined needed to be brought to the big screen. Vice working to recreate the comic (apparently the beginning actually does this pretty well), most of the movie is completely derivative. Judge Dredd is a terrific example of an overblown Hollywood, trying to feed us a pile of crap, all dressed up with a super-hero action star and glitzy FX. The story sucks, the acting sucks, and the overall look is cheesy, but at least the FX and deaths are well done. This only barely qualifies as cyberpunk due to the setting which are made up of Blade Runner and Robocop ripoffs.

Judge Dredd takes place in a twenty-second century dystopia, where anarchy reigns supreme. Now, only the fabled “Judges” keep the peace. Judges are the ultimate authorities – they have the ultimate power in determining someone’s innocence or guilt. Here’s the big surprise that Judge Dredd enlightens us to – “power corrupts.” Stallone is the lone “good guy” who holds to the “Law” at all costs. Unfortunately, he is framed by his evil friend, Rico, a judge he previously sent up the river. Now with Judge Dredd out of the way, Rico has full reign to inflict insane terror over “Mega-City One” (and WOW, what an imaginative name for a cyberpunk city!). I could go through the rest of the plot, but I’m guessing you can probably figure it out – here’s the highlights - escapes with help of sidekicks, kicks ass, uncovers plot, beats more ass, and you can guess the ending.

The Bottom Line: The pacing and tone of Judge Dredd just never seem to click. Sometimes it tries to be serious, yet others it faints to a faux-lite side. Unlike the masterful Save the Green Planet, which is able to blend comedy, horror, Sci-Fi, drama and action with aplumb, Judge Dredd fails in its attempt to be multi-tonal. The FX are very expensive, but you only can enjoy them if you ignore the endless stream of plot holes Judge Dredd presents. On paper, the supporting cast (Diane Lane, Armand Assante, Rob Schneider, Jürgen Prochnow, Max von Sydow) should be terrific (aside for Rob Schneider, of course), but most seem to have a hard time taking their roles seriously. If you haven’t seen Judge Dredd, you might be able to make it through life without doing so. If you have, and think this is one of the greatest movies ever made (as some reviews on Amazon and IMDB indicate), I’m afraid our conversation is at an end. Still, if you realize up front that all you’re getting is a trashy nonsensical story, with a tough Stallone kicking ass in cool ways, you might enjoy it.

Overview: OK, so you have Jean-Claude Van Damme – a guy that can’t show any emotions other than staring intensely or screaming anger – but at least he’s an awesome fighter. So all you have to do is provide a simple, semi-coherent story that allows the guy to show his two emotions and then spend the rest of the movie kicking ass. Simple, right? Unfortunately, Pyun’s Cyborg fails miserably in the story department. From beginning to end, the rationale for key events are completely non-sensical, which leaves us a steaming pile of crap with pretty good fight scenes.

The Story: In a bizarre dystopic future that has ultimate anarchy next to people apparently trying to build little houses on the prairie, a modern version of the plague has devastated an already crippled society. But a cure has been found. And for some reason, these people in one location need to get the cure from another location before it can be used. So…the answer to make this happen is to take one of their hot chick key engineers named Pearl Prophet(played by Dayle Hadden) and TURN HER INTO A CYBORG!!! Why the fuck do they turn her into a cyborg in order to play courier, you ask? Does this make her impervious to attacks? No…in fact, she’s completely worthless as far as combat is concerned. In fact, absolutely NO reason is given for this transformation. We are left to assume that somehow, hard drives only work in the future if they are embedded in people’s bodies (there is a focus on her cybernetic eyes, so perhaps they want us to believe that optical cameras only work in the future if embedded in cyborg eyes). Nor do we find out why the cure will be lost if this cyborg chick dies (gee – if this is a Johnny Mnemonic type thing, can’t they just upload it in chick #2?). In any event, her guardian is killed by the “flesh pirates” and now she needs another body guard. It just turns out that Jean-Claude Van Damme, hero extraordinaire’s one happy family moment was crushed by the flesh pirates, so he’s more than happy to go to the rescue. And for some reason, he’s taken a straggler, Deborah Richter, for the ride.

The rest of the movie is a tracking/confrontation movie where Van Damme tracks down Vincent Klyn, leader of the flesh pirates and engages them in fight after fight. Not surprisingly, Van Damme initially gets his ass beat a few times before we get to the predictable ending. In keeping with the whole incoherence theme, in one scene Van Damme is crucified on a ship’s mast (with nails through the hands – the whole bit), but is fully healed by the next evening’s final showdown. Even worse, we find out from Pearl Prophet, the cyborg chick, that her homies back at the fort can kill the pirates anyways, so we are left wondering why Van Damme even bothers.

The Bottom Line: The whole goal of the movie was to get Van Damme going at it with buff surfer Vincent Klyn. Why they even bothered to add a cyborg to this is beyond me, as it simply doesn’t fit with the story. Who knows, maybe this was the only thing they had available in their limited FX bag. Well, cool, why not spend the 20 minutes it takes to actually write a rationale for the cyborg’s inclusion? In short, this film was never going to be great, but with a little amount of coherence, it could have been decent. I do give one star extra for the fight scenes, which gives Cyborg 4 stars.

Overview: If you’re looking for an off-beat, low-budget cyberpunk comedy, Tank Girl is your movie. Talk about a weird flick! Lori Petty finds her calling here as an anti-heroine called Tank Girl, a light spirited soul living in a dystopic near-future caused by a comet hitting the earth. The evil water and power company, lead by Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell) has gathered up all the remaining water sources on earth (it hasn’t rained in 11 years) and is hoarding water (now the most valuable commodity on earth) in order to maintain power over the rest of the surviving stragglers. Tank Girl, while riding around in a tank, leads the resistance made up of some of the most bizarre misfits against the evil water and power company. With Jet Girl (Naomi Watts) in tow, there is nothing they can’t do, but first they want to have some non-sequitur fun!

The Bottom Line: Truly, this movie is just strange. We get everything from bizarre, over-the-top scenes, to dances, to massive killing, all wrapped in truly odd dialogue. Tank Girl and Jet Girl make a terrific combination, but this movie is just not meant to be taken seriously. NOBODY takes the plot seriously - the entire cast knows how wierd this looks and continually seem to provide meta-comments to that effect. While this movie does drag in places, the cast is truly seems to be enjoying themselves, and in the process, they make Tank Girl enjoyable. I must confess - I’ve never seen the comic strip that Tank Girl is based off, but I can’t imagine it’s as zany as the the movie is. Again, this isn’t a great movie by any stretch, but it is pretty fun.