Cybernator (1991)

I had a post to fill before tomorrow's review of Righteous Kill, and I had Cybernator in the can after I watched it as part of a two-pack with Richard Norton's Hyper Space, which you may remember I covered last week for as his induction post. I can't think of a better time than now to (take this passion and) make it happen.

Cybernator takes place in a future that's pretty anachronistic based on the cars and scenery, but anyway, in this future there's cyborgs everywhere, and a group of killer ones are taking out senators and stuff. A couple cops are on the case, and things smell foul when they find the military is involved. They smell even worse when that military guy is William Smith.



Okay, so remember last week when I said American Ninja 3 was like MST3K quality. This was MST3K quality. It even had the opening credits with the font and grainy film like and Cave Dwellers and Pod People. And the quality was right there. Laser beams that look like cartoons shot out of unfuturistic modern firearms. The cyborgs were a collection of cyberpunk rejects with plastic parts raided from Toys-R-Us spray painted and stuck onto them. But this is all pedestrian. It's little things that make a film like this great. In one scene, the hero and his partner cross the street in real time to a building, and when one of them tries to open it, it's locked. In the next scene, they're inside, indicating that had the previous scene played out like it should, the door would've been open. To quote Billy Ocean, it was "simply... awesome."

The hero was amazing. I'd never seen him in anything before, and when I looked him up on imdb, I recognized a few things, but didn't really remember him. Anyway, more on that later. Between this guy's facial expressions, and the bear skin rug he had on his chest, I couldn't stop laughing. In one scene, he's lying in bed with his shirt off, and he looks like the frickin' Wolf Man. Are you kidding? No one decided to put a T on him? As far as the imdb stuff goes, he won an award for some film he made in 2008 called Beneath the Mississippi. So I looked it up, and didn't see much, till I got to the bottom where the message boards are. On the first one, his friend posed as someone else and completely trashed him, and some guy they didn't know came to his defense. When it was revealed who the trasher was, the defender said "I just saw him in Cybernator and thought he was pretty good." Ya did, did ya?



If the 80s loved the ninja, and the oughts love the vampire, the 90s loved the Cyborg. Sometimes it's done well... I'm sure I'll think of some.... Anyway, sometimes it's done badly but in a way that's awesome, like Cyborg. And sometimes we just don't know what we're getting, like this one. One guy has a white face with tubes running out of him. Our hero does what anyone else fighting him would do, and rips the tubes out. Okay, only he thinks to do that at the very end of the movie, but I'll give him points for thinking of it. The reality is, everything from Star Wars to Cyber Tracker loves the idea of fixing humans with cybernetic parts and then asking "Are they still human?", which makes no sense, because I'm sure you ask any person who lost a limb and now has a prosthetic whether or not they feel more or less human, they'd say more. You're just less human when you have shit from Toys-R-Us stuck to you.

And this had William Smith. I know it's bad form to start a sentence with a conjunction, but I think I needed to here, because William Smith was just kind of tacked on. I was going over his more recent films on imdb, and one of them was a Skin-aMax flick entitled The Erotic Rites of Dracula where he plays Dracula. Gonna skip that one. I want to see William Smith in a Skin-a-Max flick as much as I wanted to see Dreamboat in this movie with his shirt off showing off the mole skin sweater he called a chest.



The weirdest thing about this was the song at the strip club our hero's woman worked at. Not the song they played while she danced, but the one before. It went something like "come here little school girl, don't be afraid..." What? Are you serious? Someone call Chris Hanson. I'd give odds that someone associated with this film was busted in some kind of a sting like that. The movie had that kind of a feel to it.

This is straight up hilarious. If you and your friends want to sink your teeth into a real winner, Cybernator is the one for you. It's not a matter of whether you can make fun of it, it's a matter of how well you can make fun of it, because the material is all there to work with. Do it, England.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137452/