Dr. Squid's B-Movie Reviews: Review: Cyborg Cop

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

I passed by this box many times in the video store - you never know these days with the word Cyborg slapped onto so many pieces of crap. I think it started with vampires - see, directors figured that all they needed for a vampire movie was some fangs and some blood, so a lot of cheap (and bad) vampire movies were made. You should also watch out for zombie movies. I mean, there are some cool ones (Romero's trilogy, Dead Next Door), many directors figure if you have some ratty clothes and some dark eyeshadow, you can make a zombie movie. For a while there, serial killers became the cheap movie fad - I mean, you didn't even need any make up for this - just a guy who can look crazy. So a lot of cheesy movies came out that had "serial killers" in them. So now we come to cyborgs. Well, true, usually these movies have some sort of special effects in them, often some part of the cyborg's flesh is shown torn away and you see mechanics underneath. But nowadays those prosthetics can be bought at the local Halloween shop, so some cheapo cyborg films are being made. Which brings me back to Cyborg Cop.

Not necessarily cheap, but not necessarily good, either. In fact I was enticed to rent this by seeing a trailer for it on another movie. Unfortunately it was a case of the trailer being better than the whole movie it was promoting. Actually until about the last 1/3 I was feeling very ripped off. The movie starts with two DEA agents in a shootout. One agent blasts the nutjob, but he turns out to be part of a famous newspaper family, So the cop is grilled in he press and basically forced to resign. He ends up going on a secret mission with some Navy SEAL types to South America somewhere to attack a drug lord's HQ. It turns out to be a setup and basically the good guys are slaughtered. Back home the cop's buddy finds out he's missing and heads south to find him. Hey - where are the cyborgs?!?!

Anyhow, the buddy gets to the islands and runs into a reporter from one of the papers who slandered his friend. Well, after the little fight they had I knew these two were going to end up in the sack together and...I was right. They end up teaming up to find out what happened to the cop. Hey, where are the cyborgs? Oh, wait, here they are. Seems that the drug lord has a team of scientists making cyborgs to sell to international criminal groups and questionable governments for use as the perfect assassin. They've got one unit done and are at work turning the cop into one of them. Needless to say, a few remnants of the cop's memory remain and so he ends up fighting against the bad guys but dies a tragic death at the end. Sob.

Now, I guess this was a cool concept, but just wasn't done very well - in fact is was pretty slow and there was quite of bit of dialogue I laughed out loud at. Here's something else I laughed at. When we first see the cyborg-making lab, the background sound effects are the sounds from the Enterprise deck on the Star Trek TV show! Hilarious! In any case, unless you want to fast forward through this whole movie for the 2 minute sex scene, you can probably skip it.