I am not sure I remember the opening words of Cyborg exactly, but I believe they were, “After the plague, things really got bad.” I do remember laughing heartily at that point, about thirty seconds into the movie. Few genres amuse me more than postapocalyptic fantasies about supermen fighting for survival. Cyborg is one of the funniest examples of this category, which crosses Escape from New York with The Road Warrior but cheats on the budget.
The movie takes place in a future world in which all civilization has been reduced to a few phony movie sets. Leather-clad neo-Nazis stalk through the ruins, beating each other senseless and talking in Pulpspeak, which is like English, but without the grace and modulation. It’s cold in the future, and it’s wet, but never so cold or wet that the costumes do not bare the arm muscles of the men and the heaving bosoms of the women.
The plot of Cyborg is simplicity itself. The movie’s heroine (Dayle Haddon) is half-woman, half-robot, and wears a computer under her wig. Her knowledge may include the solution to the plague that threatens to destroy mankind, but first she must somehow return to headquarters in Atlanta. Her enemy, Fender Tremolo (Vincent Klyn) wants to destroy her because he believes that if anarchy is unleashed upon the world, he can rule it. The hero, Gibson Rickenbacker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is on a mission to escort her safely to Atlanta.
(If you look at the names “Fender Tremolo” and “Gibson Rickenbacker” and wonder why they set off strange stirrings in your subconscious, it is because both characters, according to the movie’s press book, “are named after equipment and techniques associated with electric guitars.” This rule presumably also applies to the characters Furman Vox, Nady Simmons, and Roland Pick.)
Once we know the central players, the movie turns into a sadomasochistic passion play, in which the village tries out varieties of unspeakable tortures on the hero, including crucifixion, before the formula is (of course) delivered safely after all. The movie reduces itself to a series of smoking, smoldering cityscapes (which look a lot like urban neighborhoods slated for renewal), and the Pulpspeak is the usual combination of vaguely biblical formalisms, spiced with four-letter words and high-tech gibberish.
Movies like this work if they’re able to maintain a high level of energy and invention, as the Mad Max movies do. They do not work when they lower their guard and let us see the reality, which is that several strangely garbed actors feel vaguely embarrassed while wearing bizarre costumes and reciting unspeakable lines.
Dancers
(Directed by Herbert Ross; starring Mikhail Baryshnikov; 1987)
The idea is not exactly new: The story of a ballet is echoed by the real lives of the people who are dancing in it. But Herbert Ross’s Dancers easily is the most dim-witted recent example of the genre, using Giselle to so little effect that perhaps the only way to save this movie would have been to substitute Peter and the Wolf.
See if any of this sounds familiar. Mikhail Baryshnikov plays Tony, the greatest male dancer of his age. While rehearsing for a film version of Giselle in Italy, he finds himself overtaken by a vague discontent. Things are just not right. Then, one day across a crowded restaurant, he spies the newest member of his company, a seventeen-year-old American teenager with big eyes and long hair. In a grand gesture, he sends her an entire ice-cream cake, and their romance is under way.
So far, the story’s not implausible. I know a lot of people who would go to bed for an ice-cream cake. What is unacceptable about the movie is its refusal to supply the teenager (Julie Kent) with any human qualities other than hero worship and to assume that she would fall in love with Baryshnikov just because he is a famous man and he wants her to. Doesn’t decency require them to at least pretend to have something in common?
The movie is so ineptly structured that maybe it doesn’t even matter. The Baryshnikov character lays his usual line on her, something about a tall white tree he saw in his childhood, and meanwhile rehearsals for Giselle continue. But this is not even an interesting movie about show business.
Everything I have ever heard about the filming of ballet movies leads me to believe that the set usually resembles Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, in which venomous and embittered malcontents hang around the hotel bar telling lies about each other, but not here. On the set of Giselle, much depends on Long Looks. Baryshnikov’s current and former lovers lurk in the wings, looking significantly at him and each other. We read volumes into their gazes, because we have to, and because the movie gives us little else to think about.
One of the best gazers in the movie is Kent, who learns after the magical white-tree story that Baryshnikov has told it to other women—that, indeed, she may not be the only woman in his life. This causes her such distress that she stands in the wings during a dance sequence and provides not one but two Long Looks. We see in her eyes that she is shaken and in despair. If we look closely enough, we see something else. It appears that the editor, William Reynolds, has had to use the same close-up twice.
The girl runs out of the theater. The dance continues. Then there is a search for her. “Call the police!” Baryshnikov cries, and then her jacket is found in the sea, soaking wet. This turns out to be a real mystery after she turns up on land, dry. The movie eventually ends after more dancing.
Dancers does not provide (a) interesting ballet sequences, (b) a coherent plot, (c) a romance of any description beyond the unsatisfactory requirements of Unrequited Love, or (d) pretty pictures. It has one distinction, though. It is one of the worst movies of the year.
The Dark
(Directed by John “Bud” Cardos; starring William Devane, Cathy Lee Crosby; 1979)
Movie critics aren’t supposed to give away the plots of thrillers. That’s part of the unwritten agreement with their makers. The other part of the unwritten agreement, though, is that thrillers should have plots. Since The Dark breaks its side of the bargain, I feel blameless in forging ahead.
This is without a doubt the dumbest, most inept, most maddeningly unsatisfactory thriller of the last five years. It’s really bad: so bad, indeed, that it provides some sort of measuring tool against which to measure other bad thrillers. Years from now, I’ll be thinking to myself: Well, at least it’s not as bad as The Dark.
The movie involves a Jack the Ripper from outer space, who has superhuman strength, can tear down brick walls with his bare hands, and has eyes that emit lightning flashes. He kills someone every night. The police are trying to catch him.
That’s about it. The killings are not only unmotivated, but uninvolving, since only strangers get killed. They appear in the movie, walk into dark parking garages, and are murdered. The creature’s favorite means of attack is to pull off his victim’s heads. Wonderful. The press nicknames him “The Mangler,” a title that could more accurately be bestowed on the director.
The Dark alternates the nighttime attacks with endless scenes of cops lecturing each other on how important it is to catch the Mangler. But the case is finally broken open when the father of one of the victims (William Devane) and a local TV newscaster (Cathy Lee Crosby) team up to solve it. A psychic has predicted that a young actor will be the next to go, so they pub-crawl through actors’ haunts to find him. They do, he speeds drunkenly away in his car, they follow, the police tail them, and everyone ends up in a deserted monastery where the Mangler is cornered.