Cyborg (1989)
In the future, New York, after the dreaded nuclear holocaust, is a wasteland of lawlessness and gangland thuggery. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a skilled martial arts warrior named Gibson Rickenbacker, a “slinger”(aka, a mercenary for hire helping refugees), who fights for and rescues a woman named Pearl Prophet (Haddon) from a horde of marauders. It turns out that the woman is a woman no longer, but rather, a cyborg transformed in order to gather information and transport it to Atlanta in the hope of turning the tide on the widespread plague that has threatened humanity with extinction. However, the leader of the marauders is the fearsome psychopath, Fender Tremolo (Klyn), a man who has history with Gibson and has ruined his life in the past. Fender steals her back because he wants the cure for himself, and it’s up to Gibson, along with his newly found tag-along Nady Simmons (Richter), to become Earth’s last hope.
Gibson? Fender? Rickenbacker? Tremolo? Pearl? One would gather that writer-director Albert Pyun (who wrote under his pseudonym of screenwriter Kitty Chalmers) is a big fan of music, given that nearly everyone’s name can be traced to music and major instrument manufacturers. You can add Nady, Simmons, Marshall and Strat to that mix and wonder if the screenplay was typed up in a music shop drawing name inspirations by what was viewed around the word processor. Reportedly, director Albert Pyun had envisioned the film to be a nearly dialogue-free heavy-metal dominated western opera, which would explain the emphasis on guitar names and lingo. That tie-in to musical electronics is also not far from being the most sci-fi forward thing about the film, as there are few effects shots, and the cyborg herself means little more to the film than being the MacGuffin.
The origin of Cyborg (sometimes referred to by its original title of Slinger) comes as an aborted sequel to Masters of the Universe that was rewritten and retooled about a dozen times into the post-apocalyptic Western-tinged martial-arts actioner that exists today. Filmed on a shoestring budget by Cannon Films’ Golan and Globus, Cyborg’s only selling point is that it is a starring vehicle for Jean-Claude Van Damme, not quite at his peak of popularity, but popular enough for them to gamble on replacing the original intent of making this a Chuck Norris vehicle to give the burgeoning action star a chance. This would be a much darker film than most of Van Damme’s output, with hardly any humor to be found within the film itself, though lovers of cheap-looking sci-fi may get a humorous kick out of the hair, wardrobe, and b-movie kitsch. Fans may be forgiving, but this is far from his best work, both as an actor and as a martial artist, and it doesn’t help that the editing is choppy and gives little real sense of what’s actually going on during the film’s many action sequences. Van Damme has gone on to say that he doesn’t much care for the film.
As his nemesis, Vincent Klyn’s Fender is little more than Kurgan from Highlander in personality, whose only original move is taking off his sunglasses sporadically so his victims can be intimidated by his piercingly fierce eyes. Klyn was not a professional actor, but he was a professional surfer from New Zealand, whose looks they thought would work well for the role. His voice has also been dubbed over by a voice actor wrung through a voice digitizer to sound throatier and deeper, quite similar to the vicious, but eternally amused Kurgan as well.
Albert Pyun, who would go on to direct many other similarly premised post-apocalyptic martial arts b-movies, focuses solely on the action, eschewing much in the way of dialogue (he even wanted much less dialogue than there was, in addition to intending to film in black and white, but Golan and Globus hated the direction and made him re-shoot in color and with more emphasis on Van Damme’s fighting skills) and story-line in order to pit good guy vs. bad guy in a fight for survival. Pyun was commissioned to put the film together on a shoestring using props and sets that were reserved from other Cannon Group films he was supposed to direct simultaneously, namely, those meant for the Masters of the Universe follow-up and a never-produced Spider-Man film the near-bankrupt Cannon couldn’t afford the licenses to these properties any longer), and make another film out of it that would make some sort of sense.
The entire production, from concept to wrap, was completed in less than three-and-a-half weeks, with a couple more months where Van Damme himself spiced up and edited the fight scenes together to give a better feel for the action due to initially poor test screenings. Believe it or not, despite looking like the shoddy film is slapped together by a gaggle of amateurs, there is a Director’s Cut released on DVD, reportedly found from a VHS telecine found years later by the original person who was scoring the film together but never completed it. This is reportedly the only version close to Pyun’s original vision still intact. Pyun re-edited from this unfinished and unpolished material, which has no reference to the plague and its eradication as the main goal and restored more of a religious undercurrent, to emblazon it as the “Director’s Cut”, which he sold himself to the curious public (a German release that splices the poor quality telecine with the theatrical cut would come out on Blu-ray and DVD later as Slinger), even though the viewing experience suffered from its videotape sourcing.
Set pieces are prolonged, as you’d expect from a JCVD action flick, and somewhat absurd. One takes place in what appears to be the world’s largest sewer system, and another in a seemingly abandoned factory space that they rented out to accommodate a large extended melee. It is easily apparent from the way the scenes are chopped together that they were using the same actors multiple times in different shots with different garb to make it look like the marauder gang is far larger than what it actually was. The rest includes mostly beach or plains areas where lots of rented junk is deposited in order to look like a post-apocalyptic scenario.
Van Damme would end up getting sued for nearly a half-million dollars after he injured a fellow actor in the eye, partially blinding him, with a prop rubber knife during a fight scene. The court case revealed that Van Damme had a penchant for not being able to “pull his punches” while fighting, mostly because he wants his hits to look real, resulting in many injuries to fellow actors over the years. Van Damme vowed to never make any more movies in the United States after losing the case, but, of course, that did not happen to be the case. The violence, real or fake, within the film originally got Cyborg an X rating by the MPAA, prompting additional last-minute edits that make the film even choppier.
Cyborg may be trash, but Van Damme’s clout as an action star would be enough to catapult it to great success nonetheless. Off of a reported budget of about $500,000, it would score over $10 million at the U.S. box office, and would double that in international markets.
With silly costumes (flashback scenes from Gibson’s youth sees Van Damme sporting the a truly ridiculous looking blonde mullet wig), questionable weaponry (Gibson’s switchblade-tipped boots seems out of place), cartoonish characters, awful music and sound, and unconvincing special effects, this is the kind of film that should only be attempted by unabashed Van Damme fans and sci-fi heads who love their post-apocalyptic tales to be as cheesy and violent as can be. Though forgotten by most but Van Damme aficionados, it would be one of the films features in ROber Ebert’s, “I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie” compilation of the films he gave the worst reviews to. The entire production just looks cheap and plays like amateur hour at the movies. The Road Warrior it is not.
— Followed by the Van Damme-less mostly-in-name-only straight-to-video sequels, Cyborg 2 (1993) (which marks the debut of Angelina Jolie to films) and Cyborg 3: The Recycler (1994)
Qwipster’s rating: D-
MPAA rated R for strong violence, brief nudity and language
Running time: 86 min.
Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Deborah Richter, Vincent Klyn, Alex Daniels, Dayle Haddon, Blaise Loong, Ralf Moeller, Haley Peterson, Terrie Batson
Director: Albert Pyun
Screenplay: Kitty Chalmers