Overview: This is one of the many cheesy soft-core porns where a woman in a VR simulation becomes “real” and falls in love with the VR system creator. This genius game designer creates a CD-Rom sex game called “Virtual Girl,” but somehow, the hot chick in the game becomes sentient and wants to boff his brains out. She does every fantasy he desires, and things are great until the programmer realizes he might be cheating on his wife (duh!). He tries to drop her, but the virtual girl then goes all Fatal Attraction on him, and decides to get back at him. The Virtual chick magically transforms herself into a real person in the real world and sets out to destroy his marriage, ruin his job, etc. Truly, there’s nothing all that great here (such as a coherent plot, decent acting and so forth), but there’s at least decent amount of cheesy Skinemax style love vignettes.

Overview: The Thirteenth Floor is one of the truly fun virtual reality (VR) movies out that have been produced. This movie has everything from a fun film noir settings in a VR simulation, to pure mind fuck scenes, to great VR effects. The story catches you from the beginning and picks up speed as it goes. To top it off, Thirteenth Floor is loaded with style.

The Thirteenth Floor centers on a small R&D software company (located, um, on the thirteenth floor of a large building) that has created a completely realistic similated world that has lifelike VR Sims. Corporate owner and computer scientist Hannon Fuller (played by Armin Mueller-Stahl) discovers a secret so important that he’s sure someone is trying to kill him. He hides a message for his protégé, Douglas Hall (played by Craig Bierko), inside of the 1930s game simulation. After Fuller is murdered, things get truly strange. His previously unknown daughter (Gretchen Moi) comes to claim the corporation in order to shut it down, and a Detective (Dennis Heysbert) investigating the murder becomes convinced that Hall is guilty. When Hall , with the help of the lead programmer (played wonderfully by Vincent D’Onofrio), enters the “game” by taking over the consciousness of one of the game sims, he eventually learns the earth-shaking secret. Unfortunately for Hall, one of the game sims has learned it as well, and is not happy about it. At this point, the Thirteenth Floor truly takes off.

The Visuals: The Thirteenth Floor is loaded with high tech visuals in the “real” world and realistic film noir thirties visuals in the simulation. The modern visuals are sleek, with shocking neon greens, blues and reds interwoven into a dark blue-gray environment. Considering cyberpunk comes from a future-noir approach, I found the film noir add-on doubly appealing here.

The Bottom Line: The Thirteenth Floor has a terrific cast and an interesting story that really does work for the most part. While only a few characters are given real depth, the story and effects are able to carry the show. The cinematography is truly terrific, with great use of shadows and interesting lighting contrasts. On top of this, the ending provides us with a very interesting and well done mind fuck that will stay with you for a few days. All in all, thirteenth floor also has some nice cyberpunk musings concerning the nature of reality, and whether or not we would really know if it we were actually a part of some game designer’s grand simulation.

Overview: Existenz is one of the really good twist-your-brain VR game movies. ExistenZ allows us to imagine a rather strange future where games themselves potentially tear down the fabric of humanity. David Cronenberg, master of the weird, has Jennifer Jason Leigh starring as Allegra Geller, a game designer who creates VR games that are inserted directly into the spinal cord from an invasive “game pod” modification into the middle back vertebrae. Entire sets of players use living “game pods” to interact in the VR games. In this movie, Allegra is doing a “focus group test” on her latest game called eXistenZ. Everything appears fine until all hell breaks lose when one of the players gets up and tries to Kill Allegra for destroying the fabric of society.

As the movie progresses, Allegra and Ted Pikul (played by Jude Law), an unsuspecting marketeer are thrown together during the escape. While on the run, Allegra talks Ted into experiencing eXistenZ. To do this, he needs to get a game pod installed in his back. Things go from bad to worse as they attempt to get a pod from a shady guy, and significantly damage Allegra’s game pod, which has the only copy of ExistenZ anywhere on it. As the movie progresses, Cronenberg makes sure the viewer never really knows if the characters are in the very real looking game, or are actually in reality.

The Plot and Pacing: The plot is more than passable in eXistenZ, the action is good, and the acting is above average. Jude Law, Leigh, Ian Holm and Willem Dafoe are very solid and engaging in selling this story. The pacing gyrates from massively wierd head-spins to periods of calm and reflection. All in all, it’s enough to keep you captivated.

The Bottom Line: ExistenZ asks the question whether we truly know when we are in reality or not? This is interesting in that if direct VR type connections get made to the human nervous system as Kevin Warwick’s work suggests might be one day (soon) possible, this question becomes significantly more pertinent. All in all, this makes for a wonderful cyberpunk flick with some terrific scenes and interesting thoughts. With a production budget of only 15 million, the visuals are not always high tech (there are a few cool beasties though), but the story serves to aid in suspension of disbelief.

Overview: Screamers is a low budget near future outer-space movie with some cyberpunk elements in it. We get all powerful corporations and some interesting android/robot self-replicating development. While it has some serious story issues, and doesn’t always have the best acting or FX, there’s still enough here to make it pretty interesting, especially if you’re a fan of RoboCop star, Peter Weller.

The Story: Screamers takes place in a dystopic near future (2078)e environment, where mining colonies on remote planets have been at war with the N.E.B. Corporation for the past 20 years. After a new substance that made space flight possible, called Berynium, was discovered, the N.E.B. Corporation sent out mining teams to the planet “Sirus 68” to mine the Berynium, but unfortunately, it was discovered that the Berynium was accompanied by massive does of radiation. The miners and scientists on the planey Serius 68 revolted, and soon a larger alliance was formed to fight the all-powerful N.E.B. Corporation.

N.E.B. responded by dropping nuclear bombs to kill the alliance soldiers on Serius 68, and then sent in ground troops to finish the job. The alliance responded by developing “screamers.” Screamers are small sentient robots that can burrow underground at a high rate of speed, and then come up and chop humans to mincemeat. The alliance developed a self-sustaining lab that allowed the robots to self-replicate and included learning algorithms to improve their attack capability. The alliance also included an identification beacon so that the screamers would not attack alliance soldiers. Unfortunately, the screamers have begun to learn, so much so that they have started developing their own models, and worse, have started to disregard the identification beacon.

Commander Joe Hendrickson, who has been on Serius 68 since the beginning of the conflict figures out that the war has forgotten Serius 68, and has decided to try to visit the commander of the N.E.B. forces in order to make a ceasefire. Unfortunately, as he discovers in his trek, the N.E.B. forces are the least of his concerns.

The Visuals: Screamers is a cross between Alien inside visuals and a desert-like Road-Warrior setting (without the punk stuff), or perhaps better said, a Pitch Black setting. Orange is the color du jour. In general, the look and feel of the internal set designs are far less realistic than the outside world. Some of the inside sets would look right at home on a sci-fi TV series. The creatures are pretty low budget too.

The Believability Factor: Although originally based on a Philip K. Dick short story, there are enough problems with the story here that cause you to pause. In addition to some real whoppers regarding the overall plot (for instance, if humans could build adaptive learning robots, why didn’t they just get the robots to mine the radio-active Berynium?), and some serious acting issues on the part of some of the minor characters. Still, both Peter Weller (RoboCop) and Jennifer Rubin are good enough to make this worth watching. More so, the evolution of the robots, while often “magical,” is done at least well enough to make you take pause and actually have a deep thought or two about it.

The Bottom Line: I’m really torn in deciding whether to give Screamers a 5 or a 6 star rating. This is not a great movie, but there’s just enough here to make watching it worthwhile. If you’re in to dystopic futures, especially ones involving outer space, you’ll probably want to see this. If you’re in to developing AI type movies, this also should hold interest for you. In terms of “cyberpunkness,” the same thing applies – there’s just enough here to include it as watchable cyberpunk, although you’d be find just calling this a space-sci-fi movie.

Overview: In pursuit of me desire to see all cyberpunk-like films out, I was seduced into getting this flick. Terminatrix is basically the original terminator movie remade with in naked Japanese chicks. In Terminatrix’s vision of the future, an evil artificial intelligence has taken over the human race, and sex is fully regulated to stop overpopulation. But one woman, seeing the injustice in this system, rebels (This is the John Conner stand-in) and starts the resistance by convincing everyone to have massive orgies of their own free choosing. To stop this, the AI sends a hot Japanese cyborg chick - the Terminatrix, played by Japanese Exploitation Queen Kei Mizutani, back in time to have find the father of the chick who leads the orgy resistance. The Terminatrix has the ability to make people impotent by fucking them and breaking their dicks off (this also seems to kill them as well). To find our future heroine’s father, the Terminatrix doesn’t know his middle name, so, um, she goes through the phone book in order to kill the male Sarah Conner stand-in. In an attempt to stop this foul plot, the resistance is able to send a single hot naked human chick (Reece’s replacement - I must say, she looks a lot better than Reece!) is sent back to stop her and to save the father (Sarah Conner substitute). Our Reece substitute can tell who Terminatrix is by checking out her ass, so she is forced to go around lifting up all the women’s skirts!

Yes, this plot is as cheesy as they come, but let me be clear about this - Terminatrix is a frickin RIOT!!! Why, you ask? On an extremely twisted level, Terminatrix so closely follows the Terminator story that you’re continually busting out in laughter. On top of this, both the writing and production values are far above what you’d normally expect from a movie such as this. Literally, if you’re as familiar with that movie as I am, and have a soft spot for over-the-top cheesefests, you will LOVE this movie.

The terminatrix’s cyborg vision lines are a riot. When having sex (they don’t get explicit here, just frontal nudity) with her victems, the Terminatrix’s “terminator screen” messages show things like, “Not cuming fast enough” or “Whip him.”. When the Reece chick finds the future father, she says, “The future of humanity depends on your penis!” At least he has the good sense to shut the door on her. Also, if Terminatrix’s future prognostication is any guide, the future is tailor-made for male chauvinists. In this “dystopia,” a computer calls you to have sex with random chicks - but here’s the bad part - you have to lay down while they to all the work! Hmm…come to think of it, I can probably imagine worse computer-dominated future scenarios than the one that prompted the revolution.

Funniest scene Hands down, the bathroom cyborg self-repair scene is a riot! You know the one I’m talking about - where Arnold has to fix up his face and stuff? In this version, the Terminatrix has been shot six times in her primary weapon (her vagina), and has to repair it. While rolling her eyes, she forces six bullets to come out of her vagina (they don’t show this other than by the dropping of bullets), then she recharges herself by putting electricity through her nipples. To make final repairs, she fixes herself down below by sitting on a mechanical dildo! In watching this, all you can say is “My God, what a bizarre flick!”

It Matters Where you Purchase This: IMDB doesn’t even have a listing for Terminatrix, so one would think its not easy to come by. At the time of this review, you can purchase it for $27 bucks at Amazon. While funny, $27 bucks is about least $18-20 more than you would want to pay for something like this. But you’re in luck as Deepdvddiscount has it for $5.99! That’s about as large a jump as I’ve seen in available DVD prices.

The Bottom Line Again, I’m rather shocked that Terminatrix has relatively decent production values. The acting isn’t bad either, so much so that it’s like they made a serious attempt at this! I didn’t attempt the dubbing track (I almost never do), but I’m guessing it’s something to stear away from. All in all, Terminatrix is a very fun entry into the cyberpunk (facade) soft-core porn market. And while this clearly isn’t cyberpunk, it is definitely a cyberpunk parody (of the Terminator). Fair warning - this movie will make you laugh out loud - it will not get you in the “mood.”

And my apologies for the lack of screencaps. I honestly tried to take screencaps but it was a waste of time, as all the cool scenes had nudity in them.

Overview: No, this is NOT a great movie, but I love the Rolling Stones, so sue me!

In Freejack, the earth’s environment has become severely damaged, to the point that most people suffer some form of illness. But technology has advanced to the point that someone’s consciousness can be transferred from one person to another. Also, a version of time travel, where a body can be taken forward to the “present” (2009), while risky, has become possible. Now, bounty hunters from the near future raid the past for perfect bodies with flatlined brains to bring forward in time to sell to the highest bidder. Emilio Estevez plays a race car driver who crashes and dies in a spectacular way on live TV back in 1992, but just before he dies, is taken to the future by a shady character played by Mick Jagger.

The Bottom Line: Freejack loses out incredibly on believability, as does it for its insanely fast prediction for both the destruction of the earth and the relatively rapid speed of technology progression. In retrospect, maybe this movie should have taken place in 2049 instead. One wonders Murphy took a cast with Emilio Estivez, Rene Russo and Anthony Hopkins and then churned out something so cheesy. It’s movies such as Freejack that gave cyberpunk films a poor quality image by the early 90s. Still, Jagger is pretty fun in this, as is the rest of the cast. As long as you turn off your brain, you should enjoy some decent cyberpunk visuals here.

EDIT: ETM reminds me in the comments below that Freejack also does bring up an interesting question that needs consideration: if technology gives life to a person, does the one who owns the technology own that life? This alone bumps it up to the “medium” catagory in the cyberpunk themes.

Overview: Armitage III, one of the many Chiaka Konaka written masterpieces (along with Serial Experiments Lain, Texhnolyze, Malice@Doll) is simply an awesome story. If you like Blade Runner and haven’t seen Armitage, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Most of the same issues are raised there, but are done in an original enough way that makes you absolutely love this little anime chick. Humanity as an exclusionary concept which also implies “worth” is fully explored here. Are androids still supposed to just be our servants even if they do have a sense of self-worth?

Set in a Blade Runner-like future, mostly centering on Mars, Naomi Armitage is a type III series android who works as a cop on Mars, along with her new partner, Ross Sylibus. While most of the public knows about, and barely tolerates the type II series, they are not aware that there are a few lifelike, human-acting type III series androids living among them. Unfortunately for the robots though, someone knows of their existence and is systematically killing them one by one.

As the plot progresses, Ross, who doesn’t like robots (his former partner was killed by a cyborg) learns that Armitage is an android. Even worse, they learn that the murderer is a series IV robot. Armitage, who starts off as a wise-cracking, disrespectful cop who dresses in sleazy clothes starts to question her “humanity” such as it is. In addition to realizing she’s one of the very few left, Armitage wonders why she was ever created. As she struggles to maintain “sanity,” Ross begin to develop a closer relationship - one that is not too mushy, and works well with the pacing.

Armitage eventually broadens into a large-scale conflict that involves greedy corporations, inter-galactic disputes, android’s rights, population issues, and all the rest. We get LOTS of gun fights in this, and even a full scale battle, mecha style. In addition to being cute and vulnerable as an android wondering if she has a purpose in life, Armitage also kicks major ass in her burgundy leather ensemble. Guts, martial arts and all sorts of other gadgets come flying out of this chick. She is definitely, tough, strong willed, and lots of fun to watch.

The story is one of the most compelling in cyberpunk anime and really makes you feel for Armitage. Yes, the whole questioning of humanity by an android has been done before (and since) and since, but Armitage is definitely one of the better ones at this. Within the confines of a murder investigation, Armitage’s “soul” is exposed in her search for larger meaning and purpose, all while her fledgling relationship with a cyborg-hating policeman begins to emerge. Interesting questions are posed such as, what happens if an android has a fatal flaw? Should we throw them away is if they are they truly nothing more than a toaster? This is in essence a mirror to questioning how we deal with handicapped people in human society. We still consider handicapped people valuable and contributing members to society, but would we do the same with disabled Androids? At what point do they become real as opposed to simply remaining property - a tool for humanity?

The Bottom Line: The visuals and sounds in Armitage III, while good, are somewhat dated and inconsistent. Some shots are absolutely superb, while others have a relatively plain background and almost 80s looking characters. Overall, there’s enough there to keep your interest, but its the story that delivers. Truly, I absolutely LOVE it!

What is Armitage III Polymatrix? Polymatrix is a movie extracted from the 4 OAVs in Armitage III. While it is missing a few interesting scenes, its still watchable. It also has Kieffer Sutherland and Elizabeth Berkley as voice actors here, so if you can’t stand subtitles (You really fix this problem in the long run though), Polymatrix is a reasonable substitute. Some truly hate it primarily due to the English dubbing, the missing scenes and the changed ending. For me, I was OK with the dubbing, was generally OK with the scenes missing, but I liked the ending in the OAV (this movie) better.