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Seems the war between the different cyborg producing corporations seen in the previous movie somehow caused the downfall of civilisation (no idea why) and cyborgs are now hunted for spare parts. One poor synthetic soul is on the run as the movie starts, being chased by a nasty character called Anton Lewellyn (eccentrically portrayed by Richard Lynch), Anton removes the poor fellow’s eyes for his collection (he wears them around his neck, cute) and along with his burly cyborg assistant Jocko, take the cyborg to sell for parts. Lewellyn is known as a Recycler, one of the group most feared by cyborg kind for their habit of ruthlessly hutning down cyborgs, dismembering them, and selling their parts, they’re a real drag at parties. Lewellyn is tired of picking up the occasional cyborg chump to earn mere pocket money, he wants to find the Free Zone and with it Cytown, the legendary refuge for cyborgs that no human has seen and returned to tell the tale. Lewellyn takes his latest prize to Lord Talon (Malcolm McDowell!!!), a creepy character with a nasty cybernetic hand. Don’t get too excited though, Lewellyn zaps him with his trusty electro gun and takes his money, and we never see the Lord again. Instead we get to see Anton go to a run down cyberbrothel and hire a, er, model, only to attack and mutilate her to get his jollies. In case you hadn’t worked it out yet, Anton Lewellyn is a bit of a bastard. Meanwhile our only connection to the previous movie arrives, the cyborg Cash. Its been 80 years since the last movie and her human companion Colt has died, and the years haven’t been kind to her either, Angelina is gone, replaced by the less aesthetically pleasing Khrystyne Haje. Cash has been feeling quite odd since she buried Colt, and its diagnosed by her cyborg doctor chum as...... pregnancy. Seems she’s the first cyborg of her kind to be capable of this.
Now a quick recap to Cyborg 2 needed here: Cash was intended to be used by the corporation that made her to infiltrate a rival company and blow it up using a special and highly potent explosive known as ‘Glass Shadow’, an unwitting suicide bomber if you will. Christ almighty I almost made it sound interesting. Anyway, why on Earth would they want to blow up a cyborg with such advanced technology? One that can become fertilised and grow and give birth to a human child? Just think of the benefits, the money, the novelty t-shirts! How far would Skylab have got if it created the T-1000 and then just sent it on errands every now and then and had it live in a box in the basement? Couldn’t they have spared 30 seconds to explain this? Did it really never occur to the writers? Rant over, Cash is alarmed because the baby is draining her power and she wants to get rid of it. Don’t think she quite gets this whole mothering thing does she? The doc tells her the only person that can help is some dude called Evans who lives somewhere up in the north west quadrant (why is it in the future everybody always uses the word ‘quadrant’?) he was some sort of genius programmer back when the world was still ripping off Bladerunner. As she leaves, Cash encounters Lewellyn and Jocko, who then interrogate the cyborg doc about her, killing her but discovering Cash’s secret in the process. The foetus inside Cash makes her much more valuable to Lewellyn now, though I guess the writers forgot to explain that too. Cash is attacked that night by Lewellyn and Jocko (she’s ludicrously easy to track, that wouldn’t have been a good trait to have when infiltrating a rival corporation to blow it up either) but with the help of some sort of strobe grenade, she escapes into the night to look for Evans, the man with the skills to find out what’s happening to her, the man who can find Cytown, the man who has a beard to try and cover up the fact that he still looks just like the snotty kid he played in Gremlins.
I have to hand it to the makers of Cyborg 3, after veering away from the look and style of the original Pyun opus in the first sequel, this third instalment does capture some of the essence of that most unique of sub-genres - the Albert Pyun post-apocalyptic cyborg movie. This is quite a feat but they managed it, they captured the almost complete lack of coherent plot; the utterly po-faced and humourless execution; a cast almost totally devoid of talent and/or motivation; and a surprising lack of actual goings on replaced by loads of pointless talking. It was admirable of them to try and give what us Albert Pyun fans want, painfully dull cyborg shenanigans based in the desert that barely redeems itself with the action at the end. However, the film does actually succeed in being more entertaining than some of Albert’s lesser efforts (the unspeakable horrors of which I won’t go into here) mostly due to the utterly crap writing. I can’t believe it took two people to write this movie, two actual real human beings. The film is littered with examples of lazy writing, leaving us with no explanation why it took Cash’s pregnancy circuits 80 years before they did anything, what, it was based on “wait until some guy dies” sensor technology? The baby itself is first ‘born’ after she’s had it a couple of weeks, and what do we get? A cylinder, about the size of a can of hairspray, which apparently has the baby inside. So...... what do they do when its too big for that? Will her cybernetic body suddenly produce a giant test tube? Even more ludicrous is when she shows it to her cyborg pals in Cytown, she has the thing wrapped up in a blanket, its hard to believe this was meant to be funny, but it certainly worked out that way.
One of the most entertaining segments comes when Evans and Cash reach Cytown to find it populated by messed up misfit cyborgs (expect Rudolf and the Town of Misfit Cyborgs next Christmas). Its filled with tragedy as one cyborg who has screwed up hands laments that its so hard to be programmed to be a hero, but never being able to take up arms (pun intended) and be one, another cyborg who doesn’t have any legs dreams that one day he’ll have legs again and will be able to run down a beach towards a beautiful woman or something, and another wishes he had his arm back so he could hold a sword once again and hack stuff up with it. Its meant to be a touching, sad moment as you see these poor cyborgs with specific programming that due to the sad state of the planet and a lack of parts, cannot fulfil their programs and so live an utterly futile existance *sniff*. However, its so cliché, its played so straight with absolutely no sense of irony or humour, and the lines are so poorly written and badly delivered, its utterly hilarious. Another moment of inadvertent hilarity is when Cash is alone in the secret cave lab Evans has built. She connects herself to a PC using the serial port on her thigh, and boots up the, yes, Abortion Program. Yup, despite Evans claiming he never knew a cyborg with a womb (a womb-borg, if you will) existed, he has a handy Abortion Program sitting around on his hard drive! Its not even another program that Cash just adapts to try and kill her unborn child, it says “ABORTION PROGRAM” in big letters on the screen! The pro-lifers would be furious! Then there are the little things, like Lewellyn calling Cytown a ‘metropolis’ even though it consists of 7 or 8 shacks; and the cyborg who has machine guns permanently welded onto both arms, which would sure make reloading interesting.
The only other entertainment to be found in this tripe is b-star spotting , of course you’ll recognise Zach Galligan from the Gremlins and (hopefully) Waxwork movies. Then Malcolm McDowell makes an appearance purely so they can put his picture and name on the cover, but he’s his usual entertaining self while he lasts. Richard Lynch is as quirky as you’d expect from a (very) minor b-movie legend, I’m presuming he was cast due to his ever so slight similarity to Billy Drago who played a similar role in Cyborg 2, well they’re both enjoyable hams so I’ll go along with it. Then Jocko was played by former bodybuilder Andrew Bryniarski who went on to put in an outstanding performance as Zangief in the Street Fighter movie, as well as appearances in Any Given Sunday, Black Mask 2 and most recently the remake of Rollerball and the movie version of Scooby Doo, definitely a guy in the Ralf Moeller vein. Khrystyne Haje too, well she was in, er, Scanner Cop 2! Sadly that was probably a step up for Khrystyne, as Cyborg 3 is short on just about anything that would have made it interesting, and much of the pleasure derived from it will be due more to the inept writing and execution. What’s worse is the packaging of this film, including a picture of Malcolm McDowell and giving him top billing on the box, seeing him for five minutes and then having to put up with a cast that has less charisma and talent than McDowell has in his little finger, its actually really annoying. Save for those with high cheese tolerance, this is probably best avoided by anybody with a working brain. Do not recycle.
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