The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A cyborg is a human (or in some cases alien) whose body has been replaced by mechanical parts. In its generalised usage a cyborg has come to mean someone who has used mechanical replacements for damaged parts or to enhance their abilities. The Transhumanist movement has embraced the possibility of cyborg replacement and refers to it as Augmentation.
On screens, we have had a range of cyborg heroes and superheroes ranging from The Six Million Dollar Man to RoboCop. The 1980s gave us a whole slate of evil cyborgs or action films with cyborgs battling in post-apocalyptic futures. The Cyberpunk Films genre depicts futures where such enhancements has become commonplace.
The eighteenth Godzilla film and one of the best of the modern era. This has the most conceptually audacious plot of any Godzilla film and overflows with wild ideas involving time travel and changing the timeline
Another anime film in the Ghost in the Shell franchise. This was the fifth episode of the Ghost in the Shell: Arise reboot series that received a theatrical release
Reboot of the Ghost in the Shell series in a quartet of prequel stories. This funnels the essence of Cyberpunk superbly, creating a dazzling world with cyborgised security services fighting terrorists hacking people’s brains
Classic anime from Mamoru Oshii, a Cyberpunk work with a heroine who is a cyborg special forces officer, a work that delves deeply into the philosophical questions of what is human and what is machine
Mamoru Oshii’s follow-up to Ghost in the Shell where he makes a work that pushes both an artistic envelope at the same time as taking his philosophical fascination with the Cyberpunk world to a stunning level
This US-made live-action adaptation of the cult anime is a disaster on every level. The original’s haunting meditation on the dividing line between machine and human is diluted to being no more than a Cyberpunk action film
Classic anime space opera adventure made not long after Star Wars and filled with moments of glorious visual poetry including the conceptually absurd image of a spacegoing train
Low-budget attempt to make a Cyberpunk film. Essentially The Warriors with New Wave fashions as a group of frat boys are pursued by a relentless, psychopathic cyborg
An early work from Takashi Miike, an ultra-violent comic-book variant on RoboCop about a Yazkuza enforcer who is incarnated in a cyborg body and goes seeking revenge
One has difficulty with the notion of a Found Footage Frankenstein film, although the film does credibly justify this. That said, the film offers up a series of genuinely phantasmagoric and out of this world creations
A series of short film interpretations of the Frankenstein story, with interpretations ranging from BDSM to kung fu and modern police procedural
Possibly THE worst film ever made. Tony Watt throws an mash-up of exploitation elements together in an incomprehensible plot. A film that made me want to hammer a nail through my eyeball rather than keep watching
Stuart Gordon, a cult director on the basis of Re-Animator, ventures into making an SF action film set in a futuristic prison. The film has a bone-headed script that feels like it is only rehashing cliches from every SF film
An Italian exploitation film that blatantly copies the plot of Mad Max 2. It offers the benefit of some vigorous action scenes and English-language dubbing that is out of this world
One of the more enjoyable films from Charles Band’s Empire Productions, a comic-book of a film that assembles an action team of various abilities on an adventure up against a mad scientist
TV mini-series that came out hoping to ride the coattails of Star Trek: The Next Generation but looks dated barely ten years later. Somehow the idea of teenagers on a space mission didn’t get many audiences enthused
Modest and conceptually packed B-budget action film in which a motley team are sent to break into a bunker that has been hijacked by a scientist who is threatening to fire nuclear missiles
Not to be confused with Neil Marshall’s Doomsday. This is a surprisingly good, low-budget British SF film that serves up the essential plot of The Terminator but with a number of clever touches of its own
This was the first of two Doctor Who movies produced during the height of Dalekmania during the 1960s. Alas a comedy element in the form of the asinine buffoonery of Roy Castle is allowed to dominate and kills the show off
Nicole Eggert stars in this cheap and rather laughable copy of RoboCop, where she is a police officer killed in the line of duty who is resurrected as an avenging cyborg vigilante
Amateur low-budget production about mysterious happenings in the aftermath of an alien invasion. This has many ideas but none of them much coalesce into a plot
The Death of Superman is still is the top-selling comic-book title of all-time after 25 years. This was the first half of a two-part animated adaptation of the storyline, which brings it to life with a fair and reasonable telling
Deadpool was an hilarious breath of fresh air amid the Marvel Comics adaptations. This sequel is even better, with the self-deflating, fourth-wall breaking humour even funnier and more slickly polished action
The second of the theatrically released Doctor Who films intended to highlight the popularity of The Daleks, this is an improvement in that it dispenses with the first film’s buffoonish comedy elements
From Arrowstorm Entertainment, a low-budget company that make highly professional films. Here they have even roped Danny Trejo into playing a role in a passable attempt to replicate a 1990s Albert Pyun post-holocaust cyborg film
A Japanese romantic comedy about a lonely nerd who falls in love with a cyborg girl that has time travelled back from the future
From the height of the 90s RoboCop copycat video release, a sequel that this time pits DEA agent David Bradley up against an army of rogue cyborgs
A low-budget action copy of RoboCop starring David Bradley as a DEA agent up against drug lord John Rhys-Davies who has transformed his brother into a cyborg
The film that inspired The Terminator! Michael Rennie plays a cyborg who travels back in time to prevent a machine-dominated future coming about, while being hunted by two killer androids sent back to stop him
The second of Michael Schroeder’s sequels to Albert Pyun’s Cyborg both of which are better than the original. This does interesting things with the hokey idea of a pregnant android.
Sequel that abandons that mindless chop suey of Albert Pyun’s Cyborg and reconstructs it into a halfway reasonable Cyberpunk film. A then unknown Angelina Jolie plays the cyborg
The first of Albert Pyun’s kickboxing killer cyborg films featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme who was largely unknown at the time. Pyun creates wall-to-wall action but there is almost nothing else to the film
Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson stars as a law enforcement officer pursued by killer androids in a blatant made-for-video action movie copy of the basics of The Terminator and RoboCop
The feature film spinoff of a cult anime tv series
Qurkily appealing Cyberpunk film in which a female bodyguard and a male pleasure android must make a journey across a post-apocalyptic wasteland
The Car concerning a possessed car is one of the forgotten films of the 1970s. Why it has produced a sequel 42 years later is a scratch of the head. Not that the two films even resemble one another
Captain America’s second solo outing feels more like a Mission: Impossible film or an episode of 24 than a superhero film. Lots of Marvel continuity and fanservice and you are taken aback at how political it is prepared to be
Less Captain America 3 than The Avengers 3 – the entire film has been conceived as a massive superheroic punch-up. The results move with an exhilarating pace, but the Russo Brothers haven’t yet mastered Joss Whedon’s hand with character humour
Another of the gonzo Japanese splatter films about a schoolgirl who tries to go about her schoolday while fighting off mutant cyborgs with the chainsaw she carries
That starts out seeming a standard mindless action film in which Vin Diesel is resurrected as an augmented super-soldier only for everything we assume to get turned on its head in interesting ways
Near future set science-fiction noir as a cyborg-enhanced hero is drawn in to conduct an investigation on behalf of a morally ambiguous femme fatale. Despite a reasonable effort made, this is a little too low key
The most successful Marvel Comics adaptation of all-time up to that point. Enjoyable if I fall short of calling it the best Marvel film ever and its receiving a nomination for a Best Picture Academy Award
Skyline was a modest alien invasion film; this is a long-planned sequel. The new director has simply turned it into an action film and tediously deals with every alien encounter with gunfire, stunts and explosions
A highly ambitious film about a mysterious alien portal that appears in Earth orbit and the attempts to explore what is on the other side
Japanese film clearly inspired by Battle Royale that has a wonderfully appealing premise where a high school baseball game that has been turned into a deathsport
Marvel conclude the cliffhanger they left Avengers: Infinity War on and offer up a bigger-than-big line-up, overspilling with just about every MCU character to ever appear on screen up to that point
Shinji Aramaki’s immediate sequel to his reboot of the Appleseed franchise. This lacks the visually stunning qualities of its predecessor and seems more conceptually muddled but Aramaki eventually gets it together
Shinji Aramaki returns to the Appleseed franchise for a third time with this prequel. Though it abandons the Cyberpunk milieu, Aramaki crafts action scenes with a stunning realism
A dazzling reboot of the earlier manga/anime made with stunning photorealistic animation design and breathtaking action scenes that made this a benchmark for modern anime. Sequels followed.
A routine post-apocalyptic action film with Nicole Hansen as the last fertile woman on the run hunted by killer cyborgs while being protected by Joe Lara
What was once a planned James Cameron adaptation of a manga about a cyborg girl is now brought to the screen by Robert Rodriguez but it is hard to say what an underwhelming disappointment the result is
Following on from his reworking of The Wizard of Oz in Tin Man, this is a tv mini-series where Nick Willing rather fascinatingly reinterprets Alice in Wonderland in SF terms
South Korean anime that is set in a future world where people are obsessed with shit. This comes with a demented energy and a filthy-mindedness that is determined to outrage