Dr. Squid's B-Movie Reviews: Review: Cyberzone

(these reviews are reprinted from the Dr. Squid zine, originally published in the late 1990s through the early 2000s)

Also known as Droid Gunner, according to various sources, but the video box I rented called it Cyberzone. Marc The Beastmaster Singer stars as a scruffy 'droid hunter, who works the mean streets of a future where the poor live "on the surface" while the wealthy live either in high rises or in an underwater city build where Los Angeles used to be (the west coast fell into the ocean, y'know). Matthias Hues - whom I last saw as the brain-draining alien in I Come in Peace - plays a smuggler who carries four pleasure droids (overly-buxom babes in lingerie and sometimes, not in lingerie) to earth. Marc is hired by the droids' owner to retrieve them and he's teamed up with a mousey-looking female assistant - who of course looks like a babe who is made up to look mousey by pulling her har back and wearing dorky glasses. In the course of looking for the missing pleasure droids, Marc visits a brothel, where the mousey-babe has to pose as a sexy hooker (I was just waiting for something like that to happen) and hangs out at a strip club where scream queen Brinke Stevens stars as a mutant stripper (her mutations consisted mainly of Spock ears and fangs). Anyhow, Marc meets up with the smuggler, who's been ripped-off by the president of new LA who wanted the droids in the first place. Needless to say, the two buff guys and the no-longer-mousey babe all team up to rescue the pleasure droids in a big shoot-out at new LA.

Fred Olen Ray directed this puppy and he knows "the elements:" babes, buff guys, blood, spaceships, strippers, gunplay and...babes. Well, as with other Ray features I've seen, the elements are there, but there's a little too much other stuff inbetween. This film gets added to my list of movies that re-use the spaceship footage from Battle Beyond the Stars (which includes Space Raiders and Dead Space already). In addition, some sort of waterworks plant is used as several locations, basically filling the role of the "warehouse/foundry/space to be used for the action-packed finale." Robocop ended up in some abandoned factory for his finale. In Cobra, Sylvester Stallone's Marion Cobretti fought his big finale in a working foundry, as did the characters in Terminator 2. You know the drill: at the end of the movie, get the main characters to a big space they can run around in, ricochet bullets off of, run along catwalks in, etc. Then either impale the bad guy or just blow the whole place up. In any case, getting back to Cyberzone, I enjoyed the sense of humor in it and it was fun with nice eye candy. Think of it as an R-rated Trancers. If you're into that kind of stuff, check it out.

HEY! Director Fred Olen Ray himself contacted Dr. Squid about the above review...and here's what he had to say:

"Enjoyed you review of Cyberzone, which was made as Droid Gunner until the Lucas people tried to convince Roger Corman that THEY owned the word Droid.... I personally don't like anything with Cyber in the title. While some of your points are well made it must be considered that a) the film had a 10 day shooting schedule - the same as Creepozoids; b) It's budget was a little over $225,000 - the same as an low-budget AIP film from the early 1970's; c) When Roger tells you to use the spaceship footage, you use the spaceship footage. Other than that I did the best I could with a script that was developed without my participation. Unfortunately, Corman chose to excise what I considered to be the film's best scene (with the orphan child) for home vid, but I think it may be in the Cable Tv version...Corman's spaceships also appear in Forbidden World (which Dead Space is a remake of), and Caged Heat 3000, but I'm sure there are others - like my film Hybrid and of course, the disasterous Star Hunter."

Director of photography Howard Wexler told Dr. Squid that Cyberzone was "a quickie Fred Olen Ray pic with a 10-day shooting schedule. Basically, Andrew Stevens, doing work for Roger Corman, had some stock footage in need of a story. Marc Singer was great, as well as Matthias, and we all had a good time."