5/10/07: Cyborg 3: The Recycler (1994)Back in the ’90s, we had a cushy gig doing video reviews for
Entertainment Weekly—until we blew it by writing about some bitchy internal conflicts at
EW
in another publication. That’s typical of us. It wasn’t some bold act,
though. We were ready to walk because of a crappy new editor who
inserted a line in a review that we’d written. Specifically, he had us
referring to a Hispanic actress as a “spicy chimichanga.”
We’re dwelling on our painful past because we recently discovered that our old reviews are now available on the
Entertainment Weekly
website. (We linked because that’s what you do; we don’t expect anyone
to rush there and run a search for our byline.) Only a few reviews
appear to be missing. One of them—
suspiciously enough—is
Cyborg 3: The Recycler.
You’d expect a title like that to be a politically correct tale that Time-Warner would love to promote. Instead,
Cyborg 3: The Recycler
is a good example of a bizarre conservative offshoot of trashy
direct-to-video fare. This entry’s for the good Catholics out there,
because
Cyborg 3: The Recycler is another epic about the battle to save the unborn.
We could do an entire theme week about such films. The problem is that
it would be a boring week, since the plot is always the same: There’s a
pregnant heroine wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape, and an evil
mercenary wants to either kill the kid or simply abduct it to serve a
totalitarian government.
Cyborg 3: The Recycler adds a nice twist by having the pregnant
heroine be a cyborg. Also, it’s reassuring to see a movie where someone
called The Recycler is a bad guy. A hooker android learns there’s more
to life than being a pleasure unit, and that’s just part of a big
plotline dedicated to the worth of the individual.
This is actually a pretty good film, with an even better cast. The
gorgeous Khrystyne Haje stars in a role originally played by Angelina
Jolie in
Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (which was itself a follow-up to Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 1989
Cyborg). William Katt gets yet
another chance
to show that he’s the most underrated comedic actor in the
direct-to-video market. Richard Lynch does a perfectly villainous turn
as The Recycler, and there are appearances by Evan Lurie and Kato
Kaelin.
But the real star is Malcolm McDowell—or his agent. Check out that
artwork above, where the actor gets top billing and his image plastered
over the artwork. McDowell only has one scene in the entire movie. He’s
sitting in a chair in the desert, and it looks like he’s picking up a
few extra bucks while shooting
Tank Girl.
Cyborg 3: The Recycler is much better than
Tank Girl. More moral, too.
Make it your own: There’s a
Region 2 DVD release, but plenty more
cheap copies on VHS. That’s a little surprising. You’d think there’d be more Khrystyne Haje fanatics out there.
