American Cyborg: Steel Warrior (1993)

Here we have one of my biggest guilty pleasures: American Cyborg. It's one of the last of the Golan/Globus-productions and is a very late entry in the post-apocalyptic cyborg-genre. Why they decided to make this movie in 1993 with a soul of a eighties Albert Pyun-movie is beyond my imagination, but I will thank them forever.Boaz Davidson directs with a steady hand and gives us a nice looking movie with lots of darkness, shadows, underground tunnels, factory-locations, people with transparent coats, radioactive cannibals (!) and Joe Lara in hunk-mode no. 3. He's of course is the lone warrior (complete with music cues from spagetti-westerns) who's helping the last pregnant woman, Mary (Nicole Hansen ... and actually she has the baby in a jar in her bag) to get to the sea where a ship will meet her and help mankind to make babies again. Yeah, it's more or less like Children of Men but with more cyborgs.

I don't know what the budget was, but it has a bigger looking visual style than it should have for it's time. Darn, it's actually kinda well made! The locations is awsome, for us who like that style of torn down buildings, dirty streets, burning cars and everything else we can expect from the future. The cinematography is nice and the effects quite good. Some impressive latex-effects and lot's of stabbings and cyborg-gore (ya know that white blood that cyborgs always have). The action is brutal and the bodycount above average. The ass-kicking is uneven, but Joe Lara and the cyborg-actor (John Saint Ryan) kicks each other a lot and it's a nice way of communicating in these kinda movies. The highlight is the radioactive cannibals (they are called so in the movie to!) which are rotting people in mummy-bandages who just would love some fresh baby-meat. 

American Cyborg is a way better and entertaining movie than some of the fools at IMDB would suggest ("terrifyingly bad movie" - bah, haven't they seen Terminator Salvation?). It's far from the hip action-movies from the nineties, and we should be just happy because of that. It's out on dvd in Holland I think, but I have the Hong Kong release. It's fullscreen, but seems to be open matte - so just zoom and you will see it with correct ratio and it will also hide the terrible forced chinese subtitles.