Mechanical Terror Week: Cyborg Soldier

Boy, is this just generic.  This 2008 action film is an amazingly-generic rip-off of a famous Jean-Claude Van Damme.  Which one?  Just take a guess.  Shockingly enough, it's not actually Cyborg.  I know- I'm surprised too.  The film it's ripping off is actually Universal Soldier.  In place of the wooden, oddly-accented kickboxer, we have a wooden, non-accented UFC fighter.  The guy looks like Lance Storm mixed with Pinocchio.  Who looked at the guy and said 'Yeah, you should be the lead in a film!'  Maybe it's the same guy who gave a contract to Don "The Dragon" Wilson based on his 'charisma and exotic, good looks.'  That really happened, you know.  This movie also stars Tiffani 'Not Amber' Thiessen and Bruce Greenwood, a man who should be able to do better.  He's the best part of the film, so enjoy him whenever you can.  Prepare to fire a lot of bullets for when we meet up with the...

A random guy breaks out of a facility in some awkwardly-shot fight scenes.  Why can't they show us our hero?  It's not like this is building up to a super-secret reveal later or anything.  We meet our other lead character: Thiessen playing a small-town Sheriff.  She has a relationship of sorts with the guy manning the desk, which proves to be as about as important as the human appendix.  The unseen man escapes from the facility and meets up with the Sheriff.  The boss at the facility (Greenwood) sends out some guys to retrieve the man in the black outfit.  They stop by the Police Station first and kill the guy there because...um, why not? See what I meant about their relationship now?  They confront our protagonists and shoot the guy full of lead. He gets up, however, and makes his escape with the Sheriff in her car.  At the facility, Greenwood and his assistant are joined by a woman sent in by the parent corporation to see what went wrong.  Her role- be a bitch, but otherwise do nothing.  Time to get in a series of redundant scenes!

Basically, the middle portion of the film boils down to these key things:
* Our hero does something robotic and/or doesn't understand emotions.
* Our heroine is constantly saved by him and then tries to escape.
* She also constantly leaves evidence behind, allowing the chase to continue.
* They drive/run away.
* Very little character progression actually occurs.

Eventually, the movie gets around to explaining a bit about our hero.  If you want to avoid any SPOILERS, just skip to the end.  For those still with us, here's the long and silly explanation for the events.  Our hero worked on the experiment to augment humans with nanites, but didn't want to test on unwilling people.  So, to get him to do it, Greenwood killed his family and used him as a subject instead.  So your plan was to piss off the guy and then make him nigh invincible?  When our hero finds out all of this, he takes out a bunch of guys in his path.  The lead hitman for Greenwood is the guy who killed his family, so he gets a face full of knife.  Greenwood captures Thiessen and takes out the woman from the corporation, but cannot stop our hero.  In the End, our hero blows up the plant with him and Greenwood inside.  Thiessen mourns his death, but celebrates his life.  That's so...sappy and cliche.  The End.

You're supposed to be a cyborg, not a bad actor!  The plot of this movie is, well, trite and cliche.  That's really the best way to put it.  The characters don't have a lot of motivation, the events are pretty uninspired and it just feels cheaply put together.  Nothing is outright terrible or anything though.  The fight scenes that they actually want you to see are pretty good.  The lead guy doesn't ever do anything that really stands out though.  Judo flips and punches- I've seen that 100 times before.  I was expecting some real takedowns or submission moves, but we just get that.  While the middle part of the movie is nothing special, it's at least paced pretty evenly.  Ultimately, this whole thing is a cheap, Direct-to-DVD affair designed to sell us on Rich Franklin as a movie star.  How has that turned out?  Well, he's had a minor part in a Christian film (also Direct-to-DVD) and an even smaller part in another film.  The real winner here is Greenwood, who actually puts in a good performance (on an underwritten character).  It's like he read a different script when he did his part.  Bruce is the new voice of Batman in DC's animate films like Batman: Under the Red Hood.  That's a step up!  Take us away, amazingly-exact shot to the head!

Next up, we begin Rare Flix Week.  First to be reviewed is an obscure horror film from the '80s about a killer brain...and the dude from Re-Animator.  Stay tuned...

Mechanical Terror Week: Hologram Man

Out of all the films, you chose to rip off this one?  Today's film is a rare bit of '90s action/sci-fi known as Hologram Man.  Basically, a guy escapes from a form of  futuristic prison and takes on a new, super-powerful body.  Only a cop from his past- the guy who put him away originally- can stop him.  Does that sound familiar?  It's freaking Demolition Man!  Hell, there are practicallly the same amount of letters in the title to boot.  To be fair, they changed a little bit (the cop was not in Cryo-Prison as well), but it's still a rip-off.  Demolition Man was a 1993 vehicle for Sylvester Stallone, whereas this one stars...nobody famous.  It has some characters like John Amos in it, but they barely play a part.  The film does have "Tiny" Lister in it, so I can't be too mad at it.  Put out your mirrors before the arrival of... 

The film begins with two cops being assigned to protect the Mayor.  One of them (Amos) does not play by the rules and regulations, while his partner (the film's actual lead) is 'by-the-book.'  Unfortunately, the Mayor is being targeted by a crazed, terrorist organization lead by the film's villain.  He sets up a very elaborate trap that involves his men dressed up like bums, targeted shooting of other cars in the line (hello, A Clear and Present Danger!) and himself driving a hijacked bus.  In the shoot-out, Amos reveals his secret weapon- a .45 that fires explosive rounds!  You use that to take out burglars and drug dealers?!?  Unfortunately, things turns bad & both Amos and The Mayor get shot.  Our hero beats up the villain, however, and he's locked up in prison.  He's sentenced to Rehabilitation (sadly, not the one from Idiocracy) and has his spirit placed in a computer.  No, they don't really explain the science of this.  In a key plot point, our hero is dating the daughter of the guy running the holo-prison and she also works there.  The other worker there is a sarcastic man played by William Sanderson, who is most famous for his role as 'Larry' on Newhart.  For those of you who have sadly-missed the show, Larry is a guy who works in the Woods with his two mute brothers Daryll and Daryll.  In other words, how the hell did he become a computer hacker?!?  He's working for the bad guy and has a devious plan in mind...

Thanks to some computer trickery by 'Larry,' the gang leader has his spirit kept in the hologram body and it's filled with so much energy that it can exist on its own.  This apparently makes him invulnerable, as bullets and projecticles go through him like, well, a hologram.  He can shoot energy from his body, however, and escapes via the internet of sorts.  I should also mention that there's a five-minute shoot-up scene placed before here.  It does three things: shows that our hero is not playing by the rules anymore (which some dialog already told us), it pads out the run-time and it ups the film's body count to about 50 or 60 people!  Our hero is called before the head of the California Corporation, a massive conglomerate corporation that controls, well, California.  Were you expecting real creativity from a film called Hologram Man?  The Corporation is all about catching the guy, as he represents an Anarchistic group and doesn't care about who dies in the process.  To save on the film's budget, the villain gets a molding of plastic 'skin' that allows him to blend in.  It also allows him to disguise himself as other people, which is a trick he uses all of once.  Reunited with his gang (which includes 'Tiny' Lister as '8-Ball'), the guy starts attacking the system and just generally killing lots of people.  That will show the people to...um, exist.  There's also a sub-plot involving him capturing a guy who works for the Board of the California Corporation, but it also goes nowhere.  Hurray!

Repeated attempts to step the evil villain fail and more people die, including our hero's female partner.  Ah yes, the character so important that I didn't feel like mentioning her until now!  You will be missed- honest.  In a big scene, our hero is beaten up by the villain again as the latter tries to retrieve his human body.  Our hero fills it full of holes, so the guy kills his girlfriend's dad.  The man is wounded, so his girlfriend recreates the effect from before and makes him a Hologram Man too.  They celebrate this by having off-camera sex.  No, really.  Our hero tells off the head of the California Corporation and vows to take down the villain for his own reasons.  He takes out a bunch of them, but gets his fake skin burned off.  This leads to the ultimate showdown of...two hologram men in all-white bodysuits.  We've been building up for 90 minutes to this, huh?  The fight is just silly and our hero ends up turning the villain into a tiny hologram and locking him away.  In the closing moments, he kills the head of the California Corporation in his limo, letting fate decide the city's future.  The End.

I wish that this was only a hologram!  The plot of this movie is both silly and cliche.  It's not quite a 'Mad Libs plot,' but it is chock full of the things we saw all the time in the '80s and '90s.  Romance story- check.  Cop who changes his ways for the worse and eventually learns to change them back- check.  The coolest actor in the film- John Amos- is a tiny cameo- big check!  Nothing in this film really stands out in a major way.  There is a lot of death- this movie is about as deadly as a Robocop film- but none of it has any substance to it.  It's just death for the sake of death.  It's called an 'emotional investment'- look it up!  To the film's credit, most of the effects hold up pretty well.  I was expecting the hologram effects to look worse, quite honestly.  They're still not good, but they work well enough for the film.  The film is loud and full of explosions, so I was never really bored.  I just kind of wish that the whole thing was not so generic.  It is a bit better than any film called Hologram Man has the right to be though.  Take that statement for what you will.

 &

Next up, we end Mechanical Terror Week with a look at a 2008 rip-off of another '90s action film.  Instead of Van Damme, we get a UFC fighter who looks like Pinnocchio.  Stay tuned...

Mechanical Terror Week: Monster Man

Sometimes, you have to make a lot of shit to get to make what you want.  Such is the case with Michael Davis, a Director and Writer who did a lot of studio work before they let him live out his dream.  His dream- Shoot 'Em Up.  For the record, Shoot 'Em Up is awesome and deserves to be seen by all.  Unfortunately, it wasn't.  Before we got to that 2007 film, however, we have to look at one of the things that Davis did to make the studios happy: Monster Man.  Like Cloverfield, the movie was sold without much actually being written or conceived.  The film was literally conceived on the title and then a film was made to match it.  I think that's the case with Gone with the Wind too.  What is the plot?  A pair of idiots are chased by a serial killer in a monster truck.  I would not have called that one.  Get ready to do the 'Monster Mash' as we meet the...

In a pre-Credits scene, a man is crushed head-first in a vice.  Context?  The film truly begins with a nerdy guy driving a car.  All of a sudden, a masked killer pops up in his backseat.  This, it turns out, is his former buddy who stashed himself in there.  There about ten questions raised by this, but this stupid set-up is not worthy of the time.  The pair have been estranged due to the nerdy guy's long-standing crush on a girl from their past & the latter's insulting of her.  The lady is getting married, so the nerdy guy is driving there to see her.  By the way, the nerdy guy is played by Eric Jungmann, who played the 'Ducky' character in Not Another Teen Movie.  He's literally the same character here, which just raises more questions!  He's a copy of a character that he played in a parody film and was based on a real character- argh!  The pair run across a hearse driving down the road, which does not lead to a cameo by Angus Scrimm.  I'm sure that a lot of you are mixed about that news- me too.  The pair stop in a bar and the friend bad-mouths the rednecks there.  Stop giving me Joy Ride 2 flashbacks!  Later, they are chased by a monster truck.  The scene would be more intimidating if not for the fact that I know that those things could not go the speeds implied here or have the turning capacity of a normal car.  Duel is still better.

Our heroes stumble across an RV in the middle of nowhere- see above- and discover a human sacrifice.  They get over this and keep driving down the road, making sure to oggle a woman who is hitch-hiking.  That night, the pair wake up in their hotel to find some roadkill.  They freak out and drive away, only to discover the young lady in their car.  This sets up a whole sub-plot of the two arguing about who she likes more.  By the way, there sure is a lot of horror in this horror film, huh?  The pair drive into another town and we learn that the woman can stand up for herself in a bar.  This leads to a scene of her and the nerdy guy in bed.  Again- the horror is where exactly?  They end up in a town full of maimed people and discover human remains in the Chili.  Damn you, Wendy's on the bad sign of town!  The monster truck shows up again to remind us that we're watching a film about death and terror.  Chase time...again.

The killer gets out of the car after a bit, choosing to chase the group on foot.  The friend is captured and the killer pursues the other two.  Using the magical 'Jason teleport,' he gets ahead of them and catches them.  Here's the scene over an hour in where the film is explained to us.  I hate it when plots can be deciphered on their own!  Basically, the killer ran over his brother many years back and died in the subsequent crash.  Fortunately, their sister- the hitchhiker- practices voodoo and brought them back.  The guy was attacking the locals and stealing parts in order to restore the impacted brother, which is why our hero is here.  That's a lot of explanation for a movie about a maimed killer driving a giant truck, huh?  Our hero fights back, however, and takes out the family.  The main killer proves harder, but fortunately he was blinded and can just run into a spike for you.  Outside, the guy shows up for one last hurrah.  Thankfully, his friend is not dead and the duo crush the killer into paste.  They drive off happily, forgetting all about the whole wedding sub-plot.  The End.

Run me over or get to the point!  The plot of this movie is so scattershot that it feels a bit like Mad Libs.  Two guys go on a _____, but get chased by a ______ who wants to ________ them and ______ them.  I love Shoot 'Em Up, but you can tell that Davis' heart was not in this one.  He was required to make another generic film for a studio and he did it.  On the plus side, it isn't the same exact film done three times like 8 Days A Week, 100 Girls and 100 Women.  The real problem here is the execution.  Mind you, Davis had only made comedies at this point and he was signed to do a horror film.  I guess I'm saying that everyone should have expected this, basically.  Unfortunately, the film is not funny and it's not really scary either.  This is what you get when people do work for you under duress.  Take a hint, studios.

Next up, we take a break from killer machines to celebrate a holiday for the Irish.  That means another Leprechaun film...which is more reason to drink.  Stay tuned...

Mechanical Terror Week: Hakaider (Live-Action)

Anime is strange.  I state that obvious, obvious statement for a reason.  If this shit is so strange, why does Japan keep making them into live-action films?  So many of these films are just built around bizarre concepts and don't make sense as live-action films.  Case in point: Battlefield Baseball.  Why I love- and own- the film, it is too weird for a 90-minute, linear film.  If you want a second case, I'll just give you two words: Cutie Honey.  I don't think that I need to say any more.  Obviously, this is all building up to Hakaider, the 1995, live-action version of the anime.  Fun fact: Netflix labels this as Mechanical Violator Hakaider, which sounds like a film that would only be released in Germany.  This brings up another issue with adapting anime to live-action: a lot of these cartoons are rip-offs of other works of fiction, at least in some way.  What does this rip off, you ask?  Well, let's just say that it has something in common with Fist of the North Star.  Prepare to shoot your local angels in preparation for the arrival of...

The film begins with a bunch of people breaking into a deserted building.  This never ends well, does it?  They wake up a guy in chains and get killed by him in silhouette.  This is apparently our lead character, although the narrative of the film makes it hard to figure out.  On the plus side, it's not one of those films that takes an hour to explain who the hero is.  This one only takes about 50 minutes.  The guy escapes and rides off on a motorcycle.  For those keeping track, he's riding around in a desert-style wasteland, has a shotgun and is wearing a leather jacket.  He drives through a checkpoint run by a fat, British guy who's dressed like he should be unearthing a mummy.  How did he get in this movie?  He continues to drive about as a bunch of robot guys attack him.  Thankfully, the guy is bullet-proof, except until later when shrapnel can pierce him.  He also can turn his skin into a metal suit...even though he's a robot.  What?  Huh?  He kills the guys and...the movie just kind of forgets about him for a while.  He's still driving, I guess.  We meet the villains of the movie: a flamboyant guy dressed in white and a robot who looks like a slightly-cool Stormtrooper.  Oh yeah, the bad guy has angel wings too.  I'm confused.

The crazy guy with the tiny wings is the guy in charge of Jesus Town.  No, really.  The place is called Jesus Town, just driving the metaphors into a brick wall!  The place has an oppressive government that has been keeping all of the criminals in line.  The downside, of course, is that it keeps everyone in line by force too!  This has led to Movie Cliche #564- A rag-tag rebel resistance.  That's so amazingly-uninspired.  They face off with the white, robot guys when our hero finally shows up again.  Wasn't he going towards the bad guy's building earlier?  The fight is reminiscent of Prince of Space, in that the bad guys can't hurt him, but think that the 600th shot will do something different.  He kills all but one of them, who lives long enough to report what happened.  To really confuse things, the 'angel robot' kills him in cold-blood!  Huh?  Hakaider had some sort of weird flashback/fainting thing at the end of the fight, so he awakens in the rebel base.  He falls for a lady there, but the romance is short-lived.  Quite literally, in fact, as the bad guys attack within three minutes of them meeting!  Another fight ensues and Hakaider gets wounded by a rocket shot, sending his body out a window.  Our hero?

Our hero recovers and gets to the girl, but she's been wounded.  This leads to a bizarre, five-minute dream sequence that's a mix of Camelot, a Michel Gondry film and a 'bodice-ripper' novel.  I guess she dies, since she doesn't appear after this...but the movie is not explicit.  Angry at her death (I assume), he goes back to the task of taking down the villain.  It's about this time we learn the hero's origin.  He was a robot created to stop violence, but he was too violent.  He was locked away- since he couldn't be killed- and thought lost forever.  The replacement, of course, is the white robot...who kills his own men for no good reason.  Good trade!  Hakaider takes out about two dozen more foot soldiers along the way inside the building.  The high point: when a shotgun/rocket blast blows off about four soldiers heads in a row!  He fights the white robot and the thing goes back and forth, with Hakaider wounded and winning.  He's grabbed and pulled into a different room to fight the new Hakaider model- a giant, stop-motion version.  After 80 minutes of suits, we suddenly get stop-motion?  He beats that too and faces off with the villain.  Finally, the whole thing is over as Hakaider leaves the room busted, banged up (the walls full of what looks like red velvet cake) and full of floating feathers.  Yes, feathers.  They drive the Mad Max rip-off to full hilt as Hakaider rides off down the road in a blatantly-stolen visual.  The End.

Jesus Town- that's all I need to say.  The plot of this movie is not bad, but the execution is a bit dubious.  We don't know who Hakaider is for a long time and just sort of have to guess.  Throw in some confusing plot elements like the good/evil villain, his angel robot and a resistance movement that sucks & you have a weird stew!  Stuff like the woman's dream/death visual is dragged out, since I guess they were trying to closely-replicate something from the anime.  Aside from all of that, however, you get some good action and characters who are men in suits, as opposed to CG.  Mind you, CG was still pretty lousy in 1995, so it's not like they had a lot of other choices.  Even so, I'm a sucker for practical effects, most likely a backlash against fully-CG monsters that look like shit!  Of course, the stop-motion final boss was still a weird choice.  Honestly, if the narrative wasn't so bizarre and confusing, this would be something I'd recommend.  Unfortunately, it is, so I can't.  If you like Japanese action films or, more importantly, anime-to-live-action adaptations, you may like this one though.  For the rest of you, probably not.

Next up, I review a film that first showed up in VHS For the Win.  Will the film entertain as much as the video box though?  Stay tuned...