Last month, we took a look at the curiously crucifixion-focused, cyborg-lacking endeavor Cyborg, featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme and the leftover costumes from Cannon Films’ abortive attempts to make Spiderman and a Masters of the Universe sequel. As I noted at the time:
Cyborg is fascinating for a number of reasons, but the connection between its eroticism and death fetish is its most notable. For reasons left unexplained, Fender and his men simply love nailing people to crosses. It’s their favorite thing to do. Their other favorite thing is to remove the flesh of their victims — an interesting corrollary to the film’s fixation on pre-removed flesh. It’s a fleshy affair.
After stumbling through high-profile disasters like Superman IV: Quest For Peace and Over The Top, Cyborg marked a return to Cannon’s bread and butter: shitty exploitation filmed on the cheap, with little or no concern for coherence and a whole lot of attention to profit margins. It worked, though not quite well enough to save them in the end.
Today, Cyborg is a cult classic, one of the true “has to be seen to be believed” exercises in popcorn-gobbling incompetence. It remains a bewildering fact that the same guys who made Cyborg financed Love Streams, but the 80s were a weird time no matter how you slice it.
Indeed. The world is a desolate hellscape and everyone is named after an electric guitar or drum-set component. Jean-Claude Van Damme is not a cyborg, but this other lady is. Another lady tags along on a trip to Atlanta for some reason, but that lady is the worst and keeps getting Jean-Claude Van Damme in trouble with a guy who has really blue eyes.
Yeah, I don’t know.
I joined the good folks at Crushed Celluloid to discuss this strange film in more detail, and you can listen to the podcast here.