MonsterHunter

Engineered to the be the perfect killing machine. Part man. Part robot. All ass kick! Cyber Warrior One will be the soldier of the future for the American military. Unaffected by extreme heat and cold, impervious to biological weapons and various and sundry toxins, and completely obedient in following all orders, no matter who wrong they may be, this ultimate force of devastation and freedom-spreading vengeance will continue to ensure our great country’s superiority for generations! But what if this cyborg was accidentally let loose on an unsuspecting world? What if it escaped before its orders could be downloaded into its electronic brain? What if the bunch of losers who were guarding it on a ship bumped into the closet holding Cyber Warrior One during a brawl over a poker game and let it out?

Can you imagine the carnage that would result? An unstoppable force whose only mission is to murder, rape, and pillage all who would stand against it? Entire cities would burn! Governments would collapse as fearful citizens revolt in the face of the cyborg invasion force! The mightiest weapons in the world’s arsenal would have to be used, prompting the sacrifice of entire regions to nuclear missiles, all in an effort to dent Cy Warrior One’s metal butt! Human civilization would be on the brink of annihilation, to be replaced by robotic hegemony that would rule for a thousand years! In short, it would be pretty dang unimaginable!

Which is good, since nothing like that happened in Cy Warrior. What did happen was far more terrifying. Once Cy Warrior One escaped his American masters, he ended up in some South or Central American country and moved in with a hot sugar cane heir and her eight year old brother and proceeded to play house and learn about what it means to be human! First he acquires a much more hip sounding name than Cy Warrior One, being dubbed Cy W by the semi-retarded brother. Then he learns about human customs such as how to eat a hamburger and use a napkin. It’s good that for a guy who knows zero about how to interact with people that table manners are at the forefront of his education. So often that sort of thing is overlooked by these terminator-types in favor of stuff like gun-shopping and stealing cars to drive around looking for people to shoot with their newly purchased weapons.

Thankfully Cy W’s education doesn’t end with sorting out the salad fork from the other forks. He also needs a wardrobe so that he can get into all the hot clubs! You don’t have to have the mega-brain of Cy W to know that there’s no way in hell you’re going to get past the velvet rope dressed in your government issued camos. His host, Susan, takes him shopping and pimps him out to look like a extra from an episode of Miami Vice. Yes, Cy W has come a long in fitting with human society, but there’s still one last thing he must learn. One final test to pass. Cy W must learn to boogie down!

As far as cyborg dance scenes go, this one was pretty good. At first he danced like a girl, but it wasn’t long before he caught on and was shaking things down just as pitifully as you would expect an uptight white guy to. I’m pretty sure we would have been treated to a Saturday Night Fever-style solo with his lady friend, if the strike force the military sent to recover Cy W didn’t choose this precise moment to fire all their bazookas and machine guns into the nightclub!

If Cy W hasn’t exactly been kicking all the hind end you were hoping for while he was playing house with Susan and her brother Brandon, there’s at least one guy in this movie bound and determined to show us someone’s still intent on delivering the violence we signed up for. And that man is named Hammer! Hammer is heading up the team assigned to recover Cy W and he’s played by the very angry-looking Henry Silva. Hammer is much cooler than Cy W. Hammer sets a record for “most cussing by a single character in a runaway cyborg movie” as he manages to bust out just about every swear word there is several times. He cusses out Cy W, he cusses out his team, he cusses out all the locals he has to massacre in an effort to get Cy W at a local market where Cy W is buying bananas for Susan. (Thank crud that Hammer arrived to shoot up the joint before Cy W had to go score some Kotex for Susan!)

Initially, Hammer tracks Cy W down with a homing device that’s inserted into Cy W’s spine. This results in a showdown on a bridge that sees Cy W somehow clumsily dodging thousands of rounds of ammo before jumping off the bridge. When we next see Cy W, he’s laid out in the woods where Brandon finds him. Brandon is clearly a lower functioning youth as he is on a field trip with his class and announces that he saw a guy in the woods, then leaves his class to find the guy because he wants to bring the guy back to prove to classmates he really did see a guy. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, then you must have forgotten that Cy W escaped when angry card players bumped into his broom closet.

It also probably means that you didn’t know that Cy Warrior was scripted by director Giannetto De Rossi and Dardano Sacchetti. De Rossi also made Killer Crocodile II and was involved with make up on Italian standards such as Zombie and Cannibal Apocalypse as well as normal Hollywood fare like Dune and Rambo III. Sacchetti only scripted every movie made in Italy in the 1980s. In 1989 alone he worked on six other movies besides Cy Warrior including The Church, Killer Crocodile, and War Bus Commando. Both Henry Silva and the woman who played Susan were no stranger to Italian cinema either. The year after Cy Warrior, Henry would appear as the evil warden in the football team vs. banana republic epic, The Last Match. Susan would later appear in Killer Crocodile and Sergio Martino’s American Rickshaw.

Naturally, a movie with this level of talent demands a big finish and in this case you actually get two! First, you have the expected Hammer vs. Cy W fight where Cy W has to rescue that little dope Brandon while single-handed killing most of Hammer’s strike force. Then you have Cy W’s even more impressive efforts to save Brandon after Brandon took a bomb for Cy W and got himself mostly blown up. There’s a big power outage at the hospital where Brandon is having surgery and Cy W does what any cyborg with a metal heart of gold would do in this situation - he climbs up on the blown transformer, grabs the two busted power lines and somehow gets the juice flowing, but at the cost of his own life! In death, Cy W finally learned what it is to be truly human: to make big sacrifices for people who don’t deserve it and don’t appreciate it. As Hammer might have said, “Cy Warrior, you stupid numbnuts!”

© 2008 MonsterHunter