3/31/08: Cyborg 2087 (1966)We feel kind of bad for goofing on
The Day The Earth Stood Still. The film’s still hateful, but we should’ve said something nice about Michael Rennie. The man who was Klaatu had an amazing presence. Rennie would get stuck playing a dull
Batman villain, but he was in memorable episodes of
Lost In Space and
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. We’ve never seen him as Harry Lime in the TV series of
The Third Man, but we like the casting.
We really need to credit Rennie for the right-wing fantasy of
Cyborg 2087. It’s not considered a classic like
The Day The Earth Stood Still, and that’s no injustice.
Cyborg 2087 is a painfully low-budget affair. It’s also pretty much forgotten, unless you were once lucky enough to be a kid watching a television station that ran the movie all the time as part of a cheap film package.
In our case, we were in Atlanta. We recall
Cyborg 2087 as a regular presence on TBS. It might have been Channel 36. Anyway, Atlanta was also one of the cities where film geeks walked out of screenings of
The Terminator and didn’t talk about the movie ripping off old episodes of
The Outer Limits. They talked about the film ripping off
Cyborg 2087. They would’ve talked about it even more after
Terminator 2: Judgment Day, but
Cyborg 2087 was truly forgotten by then.
We had to call up an older Atlanta resident—and
fine conservative film critic—to confirm what we remember about
Cyborg 2087. As noted, you’ve pretty much got the main plot from the
Terminator films. Freedom of thought is no longer allowed on the Earth of 2087. The planet is ruled by domineering Cyborgs. (This was made back in the politically incorrect days when half-men, half-machines were cyborgs with a capital “C.”)
Rennie plays Garth, who jumps in a time machine and goes back to 1966 so he can stop the creation of the Cyborgs. There are two things we remember about this movie. The first is that the scientist who’s responsible for the oppressed society is named Marx. There’s nothing subtle about screenwriter Arthur C. Pierce—which reminds us that he made a few other films we should get around to reviewing.
We were also surprised to see that the film was released in 1966. We remembered clean-cut teens in the film who were straight out of the late ’50s. That’s important, because if Garth had landed in San Francisco in 1966, he would’ve looked around and headed right back to the future. The credit for those teens probably goes to director Franklin Adreon, which reminds us that we should get around to writing up the other film that he made with Arthur C. Pierce. That one was also shown frequently on Atlanta television.
You know another movie they used to show all the time in Atlanta?
Frankenstein 1970. That one’s definitely aged worse than
Cyborg 2087.
Make it your own: There’s no commercial release of
Cyborg 2087, but it took us about ten minutes to find a bootleg. Here’s
the trailer, in case you need any further motivation. And you can
buy a print of that keen movie poster, too. It was on sale the last time we checked.
