Bad Movie Club: Cybernator

1991 sci-fi action thriller

Rating: 3/20 (Fred: 9/20; Libby: 5/20; Josh: 4/20; Jeremy: no rating)

Plot: A tough cop with even tougher eyebrows--the titular killer of cyborgs--tries to discover the truth about some sort of cyborg plot to do something.

The Bad Movie Club collective of jockasses are in the middle of a disagreement about whether or not Darth Vader was a cyborg. What do you think?

Here's another Wiseau candidate since Robert Rundle wrote and directed this low-budget embarrassment and wasn't too ashamed to play a character called Ratchet Jaw. I don't know which character that was because other than the character who was supposed to be the most menacing bad guy--an albino with dreadlocks named Captain Hair--the cyborg characters all kind of looked like normal-looking guys with tinfoil on their faces. Captain Hair, by the way, was played by Michael J. Foley. Bad Movie Clubbers have tackled 3 of this guy's 11 movies--Prison Planet (aka Badlanders), Karate Cop (the only Bad Movie Club I missed), and this. And just how menacing is Foley's character? Well, he dies after essentially having his hair pulled if that tells you anything. And sorry for the spoiler, but let's face it--you're not reading this anyway. Foley, despite his appearance (see poster), doesn't really stand out because his performance isn't nearly as bad as everything else that's going on here. And there's a lot of bad going on in this, most notably from Lonnie Schuyler as the Cybernator. The character and "story" give Schuyler a chance to show a wide range of emotions, all which are completely identical, like he's either bewilderingly in pain or painfully bewildered. Comedian Tim Heidecker, the host of my favorite movie review show On Cinema at the Cinema, created a show called Decker in which he plays a Bauer-esque character, poorly. He's brilliantly terrible, and it's the exact kind of terrible that Schuyler is except I'm fairly positive that Schuyler is genuinely trying to give a good performance. I have my doubts that Rundle actually thought he was making a good movie at any point in the movie-making process, but there's no way anybody involved in the production could see what Schuyler's doing at any point and not think, "Oh, shit! There's no chance anybody's going to take this thing seriously!" He's also got the sort of chest hair that makes you wonder how anybody thought it was a good idea to film the guy without a shirt on. Love interest Christina Lucia Peralta-Ramos almost matches him--strained emotional delivery for strained emotional delivery--but she just can't keep up. She plays Blue, a character who seems to have been made a stripper just so the movie can show a woman awkwardly dancing in a thong and pasties. The two get a steamy sex scene as well. I think it was literally steamy although that could have just been some of the excess dry ice used for a ridiculous action sequence that takes place in a parking garage. Peralta-Ramos and her weirdly intriguing face were only in four movies, but one of them (Princess Warrior) looks like future Bad Movie Club material. She plays a character named Bulemia. There's all kinds of hammy acting in this, but a lot of the dialogue is unintelligible or nearly inaudible which is really too bad because the stuff we could hear sounded almost Shakespearean. Ridiculous acting, a story that's barely even there, action sequences that are almost as good as ones that random drunk guys could pull off in their backyard in between WWF matches, costumes and cyborg make-up that looks like the work of a child, and laser special effects that look like they're straight out of the 70's. It's a bad movie goldmine. Oh, and there's a scene featuring a 300-pound stripper if that's your thing.