Post Apocalyptic – Action Hero Movies

Cyborg is a Mad Max style post-apocalyptic action drama starring a young Jean-Claude Van Damme just one year after his breakout movie Bloodsport.

Due to the amount of pain & suffering depicted, including plenty of murder & torture, this movie could qualify as borderline horror. The most gruesome shots are omitted but there’s still enough unpleasantry to warrant a bit of fast-forwarding.

Van Damme plays a ‘slinger’ called Gibson who helps get people out of a ruined New York City. He stumbles across a female cyborg (a robotics-enhanced human, like Robocop without the strength & weaponry) played adequately by Dayle Haddon. She needs help getting to Atlanta to deliver vital information to doctors so they can make a cure for the plague that’s ravaged the world.

He also stumbles across another female, played terribly callously & nonchalently by Deborah Richter, with an outwardly-confident nervous twitch, not dissimilar to the demeanour of an adult industry worker – no surprise therefore that she has multiple scenes of nudity here. She tags along with Van Damme’s character because she’s otherwise quite helpless in this scary wasted world, plus she’s trying to convince him to help the cyborg deliver the cure to Atlanta.

Along the way, Van Damme’s character Gibson faces a ruthless gang of pirates led by a guy called Fender (played very convincingly by Vincent Klyn) who rejoices in misery and wants to own the cure for himself. The same guy also murdered Gibson’s family, so Gibson has a vendetta to fulfil.

Due to its originality and its frequent action, with a fair bit of quality, while being let down by plenty of slow scenes with empty filler content that ought to have been condensed out, and due to the overwhelming amount of horror genre infesting this movie, I rate it So-So / Lower-OK from a smooth action hero movie fan’s perspective. It’s more than Watchable, but only just.

Fun fact: this movie was put together using the sets & costumes of the abandoned Masters Of The Universe 2 plus an abandoned Spider-Man movie. Due to budget issues, those movies were scrapped even though a lot of money had already been spent on them, so they made this movie Cyborg to put those sets & costumes to good use and it turned out to be quite a hit – well played Cannon!

Waterworld is a post-apocalyptic Max Mad style movie, except everyone lives on boats & rigging above water, because the whole world is flooded.

Kevin Costner stars in this epic legendary movie and does a very good job of it.

The script is fluid – the action stays busy – the plot stays interesting – the acting & cinematography are on point.

Being a high budget movie with elaborate props, it cost $172 million to make, when only $100 million was initially budgeted. It cost a lot more and took a lot longer to make than originally expected, due to under-estimating the difficulty of filming on water (it was practically all filmed in Kawaihae Harbor, in Hawaii). Unexpected difficulties included the need to take more safety precautions (accidents happened), and the need to postpone filming on bad weather days. Many people were sacked following this apparent disaster, although with high income from the foreign box office the movie did make a small profit in the end, and more importantly to some people, we ended up with an epic movie to enjoy for decades thereafter.

I rate this movie as Pretty Good alongside Hackers which also came out in the summer of 1995 but cost barely a tenth of what Waterworld cost to produce. Still, as much as it was hailed a disaster for massively over-running its budget, Waterworld still eventually turned a profit while Hackers was commercially a flop. Anyway, I rate them both a tad better than Christopher Lambert’s cool movie The Hunted (1995); also a tad better than Steven Seagal’s best movies like Under Siege (1992) and The Glimmer Man (1996); but a tad inferior to The Quest (1996) for my taste – co starring Roger Moore, that was one of Van Damme’s best movies after Bloodsport – and I may be a bit biased as a martial artist favouring the martial arts movie (if I were a sailor maybe I’d put Waterworld right up there with the best movies ever made).