Overview: Full Metal Yakuza is simultaneously a campy low-budget Robocop Rip-off done with gangsters and an exercise in a mild form of extreme Japanese cinema. Director Takeshi Mike (best known for Ichi the Killer, but also did Andoromedia) does his trademark extreme blood spatters, and includes lots of head chopping, gun fighting, and a torture-rape-suicide scene thrown in for good measure. You won’t get any big picture thoughts out of this flick, but you might want to tune in for the crazy action and visuals.

The Story: Kensuke Hagane (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) is a slacker junior gangster who doesn’t show a lot of potential. In his mind, he wants to be a Yakuza – a tough guy with a code that’s feared by all. Unfortunately, he just doesn’t have what it takes. He sucks at fighting, enforcement, and worse – he even sucks at love making. He idolizes the older Tousa, a gangster tough guy extraordinaire that has a detailed dragon tattooed on his back. After Tousa gets taken prisoner for 7 years, Hagane perseveres to become an enforcer. Unfortunately, when released, the Yakuza gang betrays Tousa and shoots him down – Kensuke gets killed in the crossfire.

Then the weirdness begins – Hagane wakes up in a strange lab, and finds out that his head has been removed from his body and is now attached to a cyborg body, partially made up with Tousa’s remains. He has Tousa’s heart, hands, feet, tattooed back, and most importantly, his very large “member.” An insane genius scientist ((TETSUO’s Tomorowo Taguchi), for reasons never explained, has brought him back to life, but before Hagane agrees to work with the scientist, he must take revenge on those who killed him and Tousa.

Hagane goes all out, killing his way to the top, but eventually stops due to the pleading of his former friend. Along the way, he also finds Tousa’s mistress (Shoko Nakahara), and falls in love with her. Things go horribly wrong when she is taken prisoner. Hagane now has to finish what he started.

Yes, He’s a Cyborg, But…: Nothing in this movie should be taken too seriously, especially the cyborg aspects of this. Kensuke eats bullets and other assorted metals for energy, but apparently doesn’t even need to grind his teeth to chew them. His body is fully metal, but apparently he’s had an extra large dick grafted on as well. He does weird chants in order to temporarily turn off his emotions (apparently, this trips a jump switch of some kind). I could go on, but nothing in this depiction of cyborgs is intended to be anything other than the creation of a setting.

The Visuals: Full Metal Yakuza gives us a number of trademark Takeshi Mike shots, including massive screaming, gratuitous blood spurts shooting in all directions, torture and rape, and a variety of surreal action scenes. From a cyberpunk standpoint, the interesting visuals take place when Hagane is first transformed into a cyborg. In many ways, they resemble a lighter version of Android from Notre Dame’s visuals.

The Bottom Line: Full Metal Yakuza is interesting in that it was apparently made for a very low budget. There is enough here in terms of strange, extreme cyberpunk visuals that many might really enjoy this flick. Just don’t be expecting too much from the story. There are whole sets of scenes that go absolutely no where (the female cyborg chick, for instance), and many more that strain the bounds of coherence. But if you’re interested in watching a campy, extreme Japanese, non-sensical cyberpunk flick, you might want to give Full Metal Yakuza a try.

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: Overview: Codehunter (a.k.a. Storm Watch) is a fun, but absurd low budget AI and VR flick. This is not a movie who’s technical plot holds together, but it does work as a bubble-gum current-setting hacker-cyberpunk romp. Code Hunter is another War Games-Hacker-Colossus, the Forbin Project rip-off, but in a simplistic and enjoyable way. I’m a sucker for movies with either Bai Ling and Adrian Paul in it. Along with those two, the supporting cast which includes Babylon Five’s Jerry Doyle, Vanessa Marcil and Nora Dunn is pretty fun too.

The Story: Nick “Jester” Chase (played by Nick Cornish) is a reformed hacker who likes to hang out in a VR first person shooter game called Shock. Simultaneously, a small computer firm is attempting to sell the US Navy on a new satellite system called “Thunderhead,” which is designed to control the weather. Nick is contacted in the game by Skylar (Bai Ling), a computer genius extraordinaire, to steal a file from an unknown computer system. After refusing, Skylar blackmails Nick by modifying his record to make him a wanted fugitive. Skylar agrees to steal the file, but then hides it and tries to go to the news station to seek protection. He enlists the aid of up and coming reporter, Tess Woodward (Vanessa Marcil), who agrees to help him.

Unfortunately, Thunderhead appears to be out of control, and has created two massive hurricanes on each side of the US that will devastate the both coasts, causing potentially millions of deaths and billions in damages. The government tracks down Nick and bring him in for questioning. As the plot unfolds, it appears that a strange connection between the VR game “Shock” and Thunderhead emerges. Unless they can unravel it, the consequences will be catastrophic.

The Bottom Line: Although the cast is fun, and the pacing is good, the actual plot points and coherency are well past the point of believability. They are too numerous to count, but suffice to say the good guys had a number of obvious solutions that could have stopped the catastrophe. To add insult to injury, the movie overstretches its AI angle – had it stopped earlier, it would have worked within the narrative, but instead, they go for the sappy “teach me all of humanity” angle. Again, the movie is fun to watch, but lacks any real intelligence.

Overview: Cyborg 2, we are led to believe is a sequel to Pyun’s Cyborg. I say this because right at the beginning, a cut scene of the cyborg in the first movie is shown. But quickly we learn that this is only shown because Cyborg 2 didn’t have the budget to make low quality cyborg FX. In fact, Cyborg 2 has NOTHING to do with the first more. In the first movie, cyborgs were human brains encased in a cybernetic body. In Cyborg 2, cyborgs are robots. Furthermore, in Cyborg, we found a lawless dystopia, yet in Cyborg 2, we find a battle of two mega-corporations.

The Story: OK, the story is just hoaky, but unlike Pyun’s Cyborg, at least it holds together once you give up on the absurdity of it. In Cyborg 2, the Pinhole corporation has decided to kill off the management of the rival cyborg corporation by embedding one of their androids (called cyborgs) with a special chemical, that, upon orgasm (yes, I guess androids in the future not only have sex, they orgasm!), blows up the chick and everything around it! It turns out they can also use a detonator switch to do explode the androids. So the idea is they will send a hot android chick (played by Angelina Jolie in her debut starring role) to visit a party at the rival corporation and explode! Why don’t they just set off a regular bomb there, you ask? Good question! If there’s an answer, we aren’t given it.

Cash, the hot, sentient android chick (Angelina Jolie), gets word of her new implant by a disembodied mouth (Jack Palance) who tells her Pinwheel’s plan for her demise. She and her human lover, Colt (played by Elias Koteas) escape Pinwheel and attempt to escape to a place far off where free cyborgs live in peace with humans. Pinwheel corporation hires a crazed bounty hunter (Billy Drago) to go and retrieve Cash. The rest of the movie is comprised of bizarre chase and confrontation scenes, similar to the first movie, only this time the good guys are on the run.

The Bottom Line: Schroeder’s Cyborg 2 is not a good movie, but in comparing it with Pyun’s Cyborg, it does come out better storywise (it’s not as good on the fights though). Once you get past the absurdity of the story, things do start to hold together better. On top of this, we get an absolutely gorgeous, young Angelina Jolie kicking ass and even throwing in a nude scene for good measure. Billy Drago provides a memorable performance as a lunatic bad guy, and Palance, if you can get over the close-ups on his disembodied face, is pretty good to see for the brief time he’s on. I’d give this 4.5 stars if I had that available, but instead I’m bumping it up to 5 stars both for Angelina Jolie’s performance, and the thought they give to how cyborgs and humans could have a life-long love affair.

Overview: Even of Destruction, one of the myriad of “B” terminator imitator movies, is about a military project gone bad (Gee, that’s original!). In this case, they’ve developed an incredibly realistic android who can mimic humans. In addition to some very sophisticated fake cyborg exoskeleton stuff (similar to Terminator), they’ve embedded the android called “Eve” with memories from its creator, Dr. Eve Simmons (Renée Soutendijk). Eve can blend in, but also has incredible strength, terrific armor, great fighting skills, and also has a thermonuclear warhead embedded inside her body. Unfortunately, during “trial runs” while walking around the bay area, she accidentally gets shot during a bank heist.

The shooting ends up messing up her memory and programming, and after killing the bank robber, she takes his guns and leaves. To stop her, the military brings in its top man, Gregory Hines, a special forces cop type. Hines has to work with Eve’s creator, Dr. Simmons to stop this android before it blows up a bunch of city blocks.

The Bottom Line: While Gregory Hines puts in his usual decent performance, and Renée Soutendijk as the scientist. babe (and crazed android) puts in a pretty good performance as well, there are enough story issues to take away full enjoyment of this flick. This is even more problematic considering there is very little original here - you think they’d be able to get this right! Extra star added for acting well above the quality of the script, but not enough to make this good.

Overview: Liquid Sky is another movie that makes a number of cyberpunk lists. Personally, I don’t think so. It has absolutely NO cyber aspects (it does have scifi aspects though). However, it’s so strong on the punk side that from a visual standpoint I suppose a case can be made for inclusion. This is a very low-budget art film that is emphasizes “weird” from the get go. If I were to rename it, I would call this “The movie where the Punks say Fuck!” as they do so every other word. The real effort here is NOT in the acting (most is horrible, but Carlisle is decent), or the story, or the pacing. The goal is to create a weird punk immersion that gives the film an other-worldly quality. This is emphasized by the completely non-sensical alien pie-plate spaceship.

Liquid Sky takes place in modern times (early 1980s) where a very small alien space ship is looking for a heroin fix and settles on top of a punk-apartment building where drug addicts are the order of the moment. The space ship “steals” the emotional state of the heroin addicts to give itself energy. We soon find out that the aliens can also get their fix from people having orgasms. In line with this, the aliens follow around Margaret (played by Liquid Sky writer, Anne Carlisle, who also plays the role of the androgynous Jimmy in the picture above), who is continually getting raped and forced into having sex with people she doesn’t like. She never orgasms, but her partners always do. At first, the aliens appear to steal this energy by impaling the victims with a crystal scepter, but later, the victims just disappear. Anne starts to think her vagina has the power to kill, and either tries to stop having sex with people she likes (which fails) or seeks out those she hates in order to kill them. All the while, a European scientist, who’s big on the narration (this is the only way we learn what’s going on) is tracking down the alien ship and is attempting to warn the punks.

Overview: This movie is a massive cheesefest in every sense of the word. It is quirky enough to be interesting though (hence the 5 stars instead of 4), and is certainly original to the point that I could certainly imagine some enjoying this multiple times. Again, for the moment I’ve decided to include it as a cyberpunk flick, but I’m sorely tempted to move it to the “not cyberpunk” category. Even though the visuals qualify in a strange way, there is no cyberpunk themes to speak of here.

Overview: Slipstream is a movie directed by Tron’s Steven Lisberger, who, thankfully, time has mostly forgotten. This movie is supposed to take place in some future time where the continents have all reshuffled themselves due to Earthquakes (yes, you might think this would take hundreds of millions of years, but Lisberger apparently knows better). For the most part, Slipstream is a pretty lousy movie. Especially lousy are the costumes and set designs. The costumes consists of regular 1980s attire, while the set designs, what little there are seem hastily manufactured with little attention to detail.

The plot concerns an escaped android named Byron, who’s apparently killed someone, and has escaped to the fringes of society. The police bounty hunters, played by Mark Hamill and Kitty Aldridge, have just caught him after a 3 month trek, and are on their way back to bringing him in. On a stopover to get some food, they run into Matt, played by Bill Paxton, who sees Byron as his ticket to money and happiness. Without knowing he’s an android, Matt steals Byron from the police, and escapes down the “slipstream,” A river running down a huge gorge that seems to generate its own wind power. The rest of the movie is about Byron’s emergence and his friendship with Matt, while still evading the bounty hunters.

Android Freewill: The only interesting part of this movie concerns a scene where Byron has just been told he’s free, and, experiencing true freewill for the first time, is completely overloaded. He doesn’t know how to handle it and immediately asks for Matt to tell him what to do. This scene is a little too “in your face” but it is the highlight of the movie, and really, pretty much the ONLY aspect of this movie that feels cyberpunk.

The Bottom Line: There really isn’t much here. If you haven’t seen it, you probably won’t feel too bad. I will say that for the most part, the four acting leads give decent performances - this more than anything allows me to give it 5 stars. It’s a shame they had so little to work with. The plot is forced, the sets are aweful and the costumes are basically what the actors wore to the shoot.

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.