Olivier Gruner plays an emotionless mining cop who somehow gets almost emotionally involved in investigating his brother’s death. More importantly, he sports a pretty bad haircut (but not nearly as bad as the one in Savage) and throws his badge down on the ground after he finishes getting all sorts of vegeneace on pretty much the entire population of Mars.

The mining company is up on Mars to mine Silex which is some kind of something that’s a really great source of fuel for all us greedy Earthlings. Like all miracle discoveries in science fiction though, Silex turns out to be decidedly un-miraclous.

It turns out that Silex has a little bit of a side effect on those exposed to it. It gives them a good dose of the Martian Plague! Not the Martian Plague that gives everyone unsightly sores! Yes, that very Martian Plague!

But as cool as Martian Plague is, the Silex proves its mettle as miracle gunk whose breathrough uses are surpassed only by its breatkthrough medical problems by also causing heinous birth defects!

You can see where this one is going, right? Olivier Gruner battling to the death on the red-tinted sandy landscape of Mars against an army of mutant babies! It’s like director Jon Hess (The Lawless Land and Excessive Force) tapped into my brain and downloaded the wet dream I’ve been having since I could squirt standing up!

Despite this promising set up, Mars proves that in space, everyone with a hankering for lesser Olivier Gruner movies can see and hear you fail! How can you have a movie predicated on the awfulness of a mining corporation killing mutant babies in an effort to keep everyone in the dark about Silex’s horrible side effects, but never show me a freaking mutant baby? Just having something wrapped in a bundle and people looking at it like someone just crapped on their wedding cake isn’t going to cut it!

To be fair, the movie trotted out a full grown mutant that was the son of Pete the Hermit, but a Martian Elephant Man who shuffles around and hides upstairs in his bedroom is certainly no substitute for a squalling little brat with giant eyes, fangs and claws!

Lack of nasty deformed kids aside, Mars still has plenty to keep your own deformed kids borderlined entranced for a good 15 minutes or so. Olivier knows the conventions of this type of movie and thus his investigation takes him to the local strip club! The movie demonstrates a nice balance of action between shots of strippers swinging around poles and Olivier stabbing and punching miners!

Olivier also manages to get mugged as soon as he arrives in Alpha City, but it all worked out because he beat up a gang of roughnecks dispatched by the company to keep Olivier from digging too deep into his brother’s death. He also picks up the annoying chatterbox sidekick that helps him out the rest of the film. As obnoxious as he was, it was certainly preferrable to having Olivier hang around Shari Belafonte’s doctor character who was sporting a Susan Powter haircut.

Somehow, Olivier decides that a trip outside the domed city to visit old Pete the Hermit is just what the case needs and it turns out he’s right because once they get old Pete the Hermit talking, he tells us everything! I always like a movie where a single character is sitting out there waiting to be interviewed so that he can spill every bit of story we need to solve the mystery and finish up the movie.

It’s so much faster than having our hero visit the library, the local hall of records, and breaking into the bad guy’s office to take a peek at the incriminating file that was just left laying around on his desk. I also like a movie where news of this important meeting just happens to be overheard by someone who can report it to the bad guys. It makes the final confrontation so much easier to schedule.

Olivier gets embroiled in series of fights at the end of the film as he battles his way back to the head of the mining company who knew all along all the bad stuff that was happening and who wants Olivier dead.

Mars is the expected menu of low budget action violence where guys get punched, kicked, stabbed, shot, blown up, and set on fire. None of it was executed with any particular panache and nothing of much consequence was destroyed. (I’m probably spoiled by PM Entertainment’s movies where buses and cars are routinely flying through the air and blowing up.)

Olivier’s part doesn’t call for him to demonstrate much of anything beyond a vague irritated squint and the occasionally kickboxing eruption and thus he executes his role to perfection.

There is one thing that absolutely sinks the movie and it isn’t the bad computer graphics of spaceships landing on Mars which I thought was stolen from a early generation video game. It also isn’t the fact that most of the action on Mars seems to take place in steam tunnels and other grungy industrial locales that could’ve been any number of factories in my own town!

No, the single detail that you will remember from this movie when your friends are asking you to rate the Gruner movies you’ve seen is that they had someone else dub Gruner’s voice!

I’ll be the first to admit that in most of his other movies, I can’t understand half of what he is saying due to his soft-spoken French accent, but when you’ve grown up with him yammering like that, it kind of becomes part of the charm of any given Gruner film! Dubbing Gruner is like colorizing Frank Sinatra’s eyes or painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa! I kept trying to convince myself that Olivier just had a cold or that it was the Martian atmosphere affecting his sinuses, but in space everyone can hear your hideously dubbed voice!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

A few hundred years in the future, man has spread to the stars and as in the case of most futures that involve something other than desert wastelands with mutant bikers harassing fertile women, there’s nothing much happening other than mining operations on various worlds.

Gruner plays a cop named Stokes who works on one of these worlds and who’s been set up to take the fall for murdering a fellow cop. There’s some type of backstory about Stokes and his old lady having a kid who died and somehow his old lady is now under contract to the evil manager of the mines. That’s really too bad for Stokes and all, but I was mentally urging them on so we could get to the part where Stokes gets assigned to the crappiest job in the known universe: security detail on a ship going into the Velocity Trap!

I was concerned that with this murder charge hanging over his head that Stokes would spend his time on some boring prison planet where he’d be forced to fight in some illegal kickboxing tournement set up by the sadistic warden those types of facilities inevitbly have. Improbably though, the manager of the mines explains that if Stokes was put on trial, it would embarass the department and if he just killed Stokes his old lady would cause trouble, so he’s just going to assign Stokes to this six month job babysitting a spaceship full of cash.

Huh? So who set him up and what was the point? If the evil mine manager was behind the frame up and had the authority to get him out of the murder charge, why not just assign him to this detail from the beginning? Without the pointless conspiracy?

If it was someone other than the mine manager, it makes even less sense from a story standpoint to include all that since nothing more is said about the incident. Sure, you have to get Stokes on board the ship to have the movie, but there’s less tortuous ways to do it. I mean, people have been forced into duty on ships for centuries without all this rigmarole. Heck, Britian was such a professional at this that it actually had an official organziation (the Impress Service) to do it!

In addition to Stokes, the crew of the ship with all the cash totals three. There’s the tough female navigator, the captain (Bruce Weitz who showed up in the Jeff Speakman killer satellite movie Memorial Day the next year) and another crew member named Cruz. I would complain about the fact that the only security a ship full of cash had was one cop who was only there because he was being punished, but this is a future where giant starships are run with as many employees as some modern day conveneince stores.

The first three months of the trip are uneventful with Stokes engaging in a montage of time killing escapes like doing exercises, ballet, and spitball target practice. Then the alarms signalling a collision go off! The collision turns out to be the space pirates docking with the ship and Stokes is just able to wake up the navigator to assist him in fighting off the theives.

The remainder of the film is a collection of scenes where Stokes is running through parts of the ship and fighting the thieves with space blasters. For no reason at all, Stokes even ends up falling down a tube right into the part of his ship that houses a killer robot! That would have been handy against the criminals if it wasn’t just stored in the basement!

Despite the fact that it’s just Stokes and the navigator against the looters, there are only about four of them, so it isn’t like he’s up against insurmountable odds. In fact, there’s so few criminals that near the end of things Stokes has to work with them to avoid being smashed up by an oncoming asteroid! I guess they knew what they were doing when they only assigned one guy to guard the ship.

These crooks are also the sort of dumb crooks who even though they manage to lock down the controls of Stokes’ ship so he and the navigator can’t change course, they somehow still allow Stokes access to an escape shuttle. Thus we are treated to the big dogfight in space before the bad guys let them land on their own ship. The navigator quickly plugs this potential plot hole by guessing that the criminals don’t have enough guys left on their own ship to prevent this. How many guys does it take to punch the “undock” button?

Gruner is a relatively inoffensvie presence though he always looks like he’s about ready to burst into tears and the sets and special effects aren’t as hideous as you would expect from a movie starring the Jean-Claude Van Damme of France. The ending is conveyed to us via a news report (which saves the time and money of actually shooting the scenes of what happened) and is as unconvincing as the rest of the story.

I won’t spoil it, but how was Stokes going to explain what happened if someone who recognized him ever saw him again? And the fact that no one seemed to connect his apparent disappearence with two other events described in the newscast would strain my suspsension of disbelief if I wasn’t so enamored with slow motion scenes of Stokes flying through the air due to various explosions and depressurizations. Ridiculous plot, decent action, and solid production values. Just the sort of thing you’re looking for amidst the rest of the space trash out there.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

There is of course no one or no robot named Nemesis in this movie. There is a robot named Olivier Gruner, but he’s actually playing a human that the cyborgs are trying to kill!

And really, they aren’t trying to kill him at first since they planted a remote control bomb on his heart that they plan to detonate once he gets close to some human rebels, but they get tired of waiting around and decide that even with the bomb, they still need to chase poor old Olivier through the jungles of Java!

Java? The last war between meatbags and cyborgs will take place in some faraway land named after coffee? Shouldn’t all this be going down in the rubble-strewn wastelands of a place like New Los Angeles?

How are the robots going to kill all the innocent bystanders that usually get gorily crushed in these man vs. machine beatdowns? And more importantly, will the cyborgs be able to find replacement parts in a backwater like Java?

It’s understandable if you’re already confused. These cyborgs have computers and stuff for brains! They’re thinking and planning for stuff hundreds of years in the future, while you’re still trying to remember where you parked your car at the mall!

There’s no way you could possibly hope to grasp just what the devil they’re up to! When you think their plan for taking over the world is both idiotic and complicated for no discernible reason, it’s because you only are equipped with your God-given common sense! These killbots have microchips! And circuits! And unlimited supplies of guns, ammo and explosives!

Gruner (Automatic, Angel Town) is an L.A. cop named Alex. He spends his days killing cyborgs and getting into astonishingly mammoth gun battles with them as they all run around half wrecked buildings.

He’s been hurt so many times that he’s got a bunch of artificial parts in him which leads to a couple of scenes where cyborgs make snotty comments about him being more machine than man!

But during a firefight with some metallic trash, Alex takes time out from running and diving out of the way of incoming flak to rescue a puppy! Take that you soulless death machines! I am human after all!

But later in New Baja, some cyborgs kill his dog! Take that you wimpy crybaby skinbag! You don’t have a dog anymore!

Killing his dog was apparently not part of their master plan, but was just some bonus evil. The real evil gets in high gear once we head down to Java where Gruner is supposed to be recovering some stolen security plans from a cyborg that also happens to be his ex-girlfriend.

This potentially awkward reunion is made even more so when Gruner discovers that his old lady has been downloaded onto a little chip and he needs to get that to the rebels because she has all the information on the really evil cyborgs and their plans for taking over!

The cyborgs reveal themselves in need of a serious upgrade when we find out what they are up to. They have replaced Alex’s boss (the L.A. police commissioner) with an exact duplicate that can’t be identified as a cyborg by any known method!

And now he’s down in the jungle trying to stop Alex! If they could do that, why couldn’t they just replace Alex with a duplicate and use him to infiltrate the rebel hideout?

And what can the rebels do hiding in Java? If these cyborgs are such super awesome machines couldn’t they just use their superior technology to isolate the humans from the rest of the world? Just cut off their Internet access and cell phone service and it would be like they never freaking existed!

But what about the bomb implanted in Alex’s heart? The rebels had a gizmo that neutralizes it for several hours which gives Alex a chance to run around and fight cyborgs before the movie ends.

The rebels also managed to disrupt the camera implanted in Alex that allowed the bad guys to know what was happening. A few people hiding in the jungle who have no problem screwing up your plans is not really a great start on your campaign for world domination.

There’s zero explanation for any of this cyborg nonsense. No reason is given as to who made them or why. There’s nothing to indicate what happened to turn them against humans.

Director Albert Pyun (Cyborg, Captain America) tries to give us a decent amount of action, but with the villains being inept and not too bright (do the cyborgs really only have the handful of people, including the police commissioner, that they sent to Java for the most important mission ever?) it was just a bunch of loud noise.

Terrible special effects featuring a stop motion cyborg skeleton fighting with Gruner only serve to put an exclamation point on how poorly put together it all is. Confusing for the most part, especially the scene where Gruner is wearing a Rambo wig.

© 2010 MonsterHunter

In an Olivier Gruner film though, it’s not so much the dead end story elements that we worry about, it’s the kicking! And there are kicks a plenty in this, Gruner’s debut! While I detailed all the stuff no one in the movie even seemed to care about, there’s only two things we do need to care about!

One is that Gruner (Automatic) is the baddest ass ever to come to Los Angeles from France! And the other is that the baddest ass ever to come to Los Angeles from France has just moved into a neighborhood that’s infested with the most evil gang ever! But not only has he moved into the wrong neighborhood, he also uses his unerring fighting instincts to move into the very house that the gang has targeted for constant harassment!

It’s the house of the family whose husband was killed by the gang leader, Angel, a decade ago! The husband was a folk hero for his battle against the gangs! Even Gruner’s good friend and karate school owner, Henry, knew and worked along side him to defeat the gangs! But once this guy was killed, everyone gave up fighting the gangs, That’s probably what the dead guy would’ve wanted, right?

But the dead guy left a widow, a son, and a grandma! Now, Angel is determined to force the son (Martin) to join his gang, even if it means scaring his grandma into dying of a heart attack and raping his mom!

Yeah, that’s too bad for those gals, but guess who doesn’t have a weak heart and who isn’t about to go hanging around work after hours just waiting to be violated? That’s right! The very same guy who can roll into his graduate level engineering class late and still tell the professor where the error is in the complicated math formula!

What’s great about Gruner in this movie (besides his academic abilities) is that not only was he constantly kicking people and slamming their heads into stuff even after they were obviously unconscious, but was a surly bastard about it all!

Sure, he acted all polite here and there, but he wasn’t above criticizing and complaining to Martin and Henry about what pansies they were. He could also be pretty intense like when he put Henry in a chokehold and explained to Martin that the only reason he didn’t kill Henry right then was because he knew that Henry’s family would stop at nothing to kill him! Gruner did this to illustrate that you have to make sure that the other guy knows that if he messes with you, there’s a price to pay, but Henry was probably praying that nothing ever happened to his family!

Gruner doesn’t really have a lot of time though to threaten his friend’s life because every five minutes or so, he and Angel’s gang have some kind of confrontation.

I don’t know if Gruner was pulling his punches or if the gang members were especially tough, but he had to beat up the same gang members for an hour and a half before he made any progress! When he finally got around to visibly snapping necks and arms, I was thinking, “it’s about time you took the kid gloves off! All these gangbangers understand is getting killed!”

The movie is about 20 minutes too long since there isn’t much of a story beyond the whole “Angel’s gang keeps attacking the house Gruner lives in” plot. Every so often, Gruner will get chased around by some of the gang members, or they’ll cruise over to his school to shoot it up or put a stick of dynamite in his car, but without anything else happening, watching Hispanic dudes in bandanas and flannel yell “vato” again and again can get a little tedious.

And what is the deal with Angel? I guess he’s super bad because he carries around an Uzi. So why didn’t he ever just empty it into Gruner? Instead Angel managed to have one of the most humiliating fates I’ve ever seen happen to a villain.

At the end of the movie Gruner beats him senseless. Then Gruner says that Martin and Angel should go one on one with no interference from anyone. Everyone agrees and Angel ends up getting kicked to death by this teenaged kid! The best part is when Gruner stops the kid saying “you did what you had to do!” I guess so, if what you had to do was kick a guy to death after Gruner softened him up for you!

The movie did have some of those nice brutal touches that we love to see in our kickfighting entertainment. In a great display of one-upmanship, Gruner sneaks into Angel’s bedroom and puts a knife to his throat and threatens him while Angel’s girlfriend inexplicably laughs! Not to be outdone, Angel returns the favor by killing his girlfriend and putting her nasty, bloody body in Gruner’s bedroom!

Gruner though isn’t a champion fighter for nothing because he takes the body and puts it in Angel’s car! Remember, Gruner was just renting that room, but Angel owned the car! You almost start to feel a little bad for Angel when Gruner blows his car up with some dynamite that was meant for Gruner’s boarding house!

Throw in a crippled vet who helps out with his automatic weapon during the final showdown and you’ve got a movie that while overlong, is full of enough Gruner intensity and solid violence to satisfy even the most desensitized of vatos!

© 2008 MonsterHunter

The premise is so simple, you’re sure that you’ve seen it before, probably with Olivier Gruner! But do not be fooled! In all those other movies, Gruner’s stiff appearance and minimalistic acting style are because he’s playing something like a taciturn space cop in something like Velocity Trap!

And just like Velocity Trap, we are in the future! A future of poorly lit hallways, rooms full of exploding glass, video phones and silly-looking guns loaded with about a million rounds of ammo! In short, just the sort of future that H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clark, and Stephen Hawking predicted!

It’s the 22nd Century and the Robogen company has revolutionized something or other (the manservant industry, I think) by producing a robot (Automatic) that helps out around the house and also happens to be the perfect killing machine in case your house in invaded by thugs armed with Uzis.

This concept is introduced to us via a fairly amusing commercial that depicts a family being slaughtered before Robogen’s CEO Goddard Marx appears and shows us how things would have been different if the family had one of his Automatics. After I saw Olivier standing next to Marx while dressed in a sweater vest, I wasn’t really surprised that one of his kind would rebel later on in the film.

On the eve of a big announcement for its new product, Robogen hits a speedbump when one of its executives tries to rape a female employee. An Automatic, J269, comes to her rescue since he’s been programmed to protect humanity.

Now, like all robot movies, he’s also been programmed not kill a human, but we know that’s one of those rules that’s made not only to be broken, but to be ripped up, shredded, burned, shattered, kicked, stomped, punched, stabbed, shot, strangled, and blown up. And as is usually the case with these sorts of things, once you get your first kill under your belt, the rest of humanity isn’t nearly as hard to wipe out.

The funny thing, and by funny, I mean it doesn’t make a lick of sense, is that J269 doesn’t intentionally kill the rapist. He kicks him a couple of times in an effort to disarm the scuzzball, but this clumsy pervert falls and bangs his head on a desk and dies!

Well, hell, if I did that to a guy, I think I’d probably shrug my shoulders, slap the investigating cops on the back, telling them that I saved them a bunch of paperwork and go buy everyone a beer. So even though I wouldn’t not only not lose any sleep over it, but would actually probably sleep rather peacefully (job well done and all that), this robot suddenly becomes Mr. Morality and is all about killing everyone who looks at his new girlfriend wrong!

Once Marx is notified of the executive’s death, he orders in a strike team to kill the girl and robot. And if you’re wondering just how Marx has a team of assassins ready to be deployed into his headquarters in 15 minutes, he explains that it’s the same team he used to rescue some company hostages from a previous situation. And remember, this is the 22nd century! If the movie turns out to be wrong about this, you can call me in 100 years and let me know!

Once all this set up is finished, Automatic is, well, automatic! It’s pretty much just pure running, crouching behind stuff, shooting folks, commandos cussing over the headsets, and J269 and his lady friend getting closer to the startling truth that Marx is hiding and that is the subject of his big announcement.

The movie was plenty noisy and violent with more than enough Gruner-centered kicking and punching stunts to keep you numb enough not to turn it off before it’s over. I won’t pretend to understand how an android without feelings would scream when someone was trying to pull out his power cell or how he would develop emotions in the course of a couple of hours on the run, but I don’t have a clue how my TV works either. It still shows me Wheel of Fortune though, doesn’t it?

The depiction of the 22nd Century involved some interesting choices. For instance, I was surprised that no one seemed to have heard of a cell phone. Why, if J269′s girlfriend had a cell phone, the movie could have been over in about 20 minutes!

Then again, the 22nd Century did feature a revolutionary technology called “e-mail uplink.” You won’t believe this, but this email uplink business allows a person to use a computer terminal to send a message to another person with a computer terminal! What’s next? Telephones you can carry in your pocket? Without any wires needed to hook them up?

Best of all though is that the 22nd Century featured torch-wielding villagers that stormed Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, I mean Mr. Marx’s factory, and burnt it to the ground! Angry mobs never go out of style!

© 2011 MonsterHunter