Weirdhouse Cinema: Mutant Hunt

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lam. And this is Joe McCormick. And today we have a pretty fascinating slice of low budget 1980s New York City grimy genre cinema. It is 1987's Mutant Hunt, a movie just so so grimy, so covered in a patina of sleaze, but without really featuring much in the way of grimy or sleazy content. It is a near future dystopian cyberpunk adventure, full of many of the familiar bells and whistles, you know, cyborgs, bounty hunters, sunglasses at night, pleasure droids, advanced mobile personal computer devices. It's absolutely as derivative as many other entries in this subgenre, but at the same time, I just really admire the hustle of this film. You know, it clearly made with, you know, guerrilla style, I'm guessing with a lot of, you know, just finding locations, shooting it, trying for like really getting ambitious with some of the things that it attempts to do with a limited budget, but with, you know, clearly some scrappy special effects artists. And it trots out a few genuinely cool early and even thought provoking ideas and just really goes for it with wild plot twists and effects, even as you can just feel the budget strain underneath the vision. If only we lived in this movie's version of the future when it comes to mapping software. Where, yeah, they've got these mapping programs that tell you how to get somewhere and it just shows basically an outline of lower Manhattan from space with no streets or words or like text or any topography at all, just an outline of the land mass and then an X in the middle of it. Yeah, oh, there. Yeah, Manhattan Island. And this is where I roughly am on it. Yeah, it's great because on one hand, the way that the, this, this, this technology is used in the film, like it is actually spot on. This is exactly how we get around today, you know, and get, you know, I think any of us that have gone to New York City, you find yourself moving around in New York this way, checking your device, seeing where you are, but with a lot more detail. So, yeah, they should have put the streets on there. Yeah, that's a good idea. The streets would have been a good addition, but yeah, instead of just where's land and where's water? But yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in this movie. Actually, it is quite funny and how most of it is realized, but every now and then I was thinking like, well, that could be an idea from a much more complex, more interesting film. Specifically, I know you flagged and I had the same thought that the ESP of the cyborgs was kind of interesting. Yeah, yeah, this idea that the killer cyborgs have some sort of limited ESP. So if you begin to hunt them, they will detect this and they will begin to hunt you back. Yes. Kind of reminds me a little bit of some of these thought experiments concerning future AI, you know, Rokos Basilisk, that sort of thing. It's like the danger occurs to you once you are aware of the robot. Yeah. As soon as you know about it, it knows that you know about it and now it's coming to get you. Yeah. And you want it, like at what point do they hunt you? Like how serious do you have to be? Is it just like if you, would it just a journalist suddenly be hunted by the cyborgs? Oh, that's true. Because they're investigating the cyborg killings. I don't know. What if it just crossed your mind that you might be hunting the cyborgs, but you're not very committed to it? Do they still come and get you? I don't know. It's one of these ideas that I think is probably here in large part to just sort of grease the plot and move things along, but it really does raise some interesting questions. Also, in general, I like this grisly concept of cyborgs whose organic components have been mutated beyond recognition by altered, like futuristic altered rave drugs. It's, I don't know, it's just such a bombastic concept. And I don't know, it kind of thought provoking in its own ways if you're dealing with a cyborg where it's not just Terminator style where the flesh is on there just as decoration, but if you have an integrated system of organic and mechanical parts, then it makes sense that it could be messed with. It could be hacked on a technological level, but also on an organic level. I just had to go searching in my notes because I remembered something and maybe it's good to bring this up now at the beginning. Did you notice how it almost seems to be the case in this movie that there's a correlation between how gooey a cyborg is and how strong or formidable it is supposed to be? Like the more that a cyborg is dripping slime, the wetter it looks, the more powerful it is. Absolutely. Yeah, by the end of the film, we will see one that is supposed to be mutated quote beyond recognition, but is just a slimy, sneering mess of a cyborg at this point, just a real, real slimy creature. Yeah. It's got a flap that's got half of its mouth stuck together. It's just dripping orange juice concentrate, and yeah, this is the strongest one. It's been incubating actually. The character Domina has it in a mummy chrysalis in her room. She's cooking it for a while, I guess. That's right. Yeah. And the other thing I love about the film is, of course, the futuristic rave drug Euforon being a major plot point. I'm kind of a sucker for any sci-fi property that has a sci-fi drug and this one has it in space. Does it do anything all that unusual for the humans who use it, or does it just turn cyborgs into mutant cyborgs, but in humans just makes you feel good? Yeah, I think in humans, it's just like some really good rave drug. It's like some sort of, I don't know, it's like an MDMA or it's like an opiate or something or some sort of combination of the two, but it makes you feel really good. And the people who are Euforon enjoyers are really into it and they are offended if you actually try and disrupt the supply. Yeah. It's administered in the ear. I thought that was funny. Are there real drugs you put in your ear with a little dropper? I mean, yeah, if you have like ear problems, I guess. I don't know about recreational drugs that go in the ear, but maybe I'm just naive. All right. Yeah, mutant hunt. I first saw this years ago. I think I found it amid the various B movies that used to populate Amazon Prime back when they just seemed to have like a dump truck of schlock was unloaded into their servers. And while they don't have the sludge selection they used to, you can still stream mutant hunt there as of this recording, at least in the US. I don't know about other regions. Still absolutely holds up in its sort of decade format. This is like kind of grimy film quality, cigarette stains, you know, cigarette burns rather on the footage. But this is the sort of film where I absolutely believe it's rewarding in general to watch any film in the best quality possible. And I still stand by that. But with a film like this, it can also be rewarding to watch it in sort of grimy footage as well. Yeah, it feels right to watch the stream that's available, which is, it looks like a rip from a VHS. But if you go look up the stills that have been put out by the vinegar syndrome release that has this movie in high quality, it takes on a new level of comedy to see all these costumes and sets really crisp. They were never meant to look this way. Yeah. And at the same time, I have to say in the higher quality stills, you'll find some of that you get a better sense of what they were going for. And you can admire some of the lighting choices and the costumes and the effects. Definitely. Yeah. So, you know, it goes both ways. So yeah, this one's widely available for streaming or digital viewing right now, if you want to see it for yourself. But yeah, vinegar syndrome put out a really nice looking Blu-ray with fun extras. And the film itself is scanned and restored in 4K from its 35mm original camera. Negative. Looks great. Again, I watched the Scuzzy video version of it, but now I really want to pick up this Blu-ray as well. Next time I'm doing a vinegar syndrome order. Okay. Should we talk about the connections? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Starting here at the top with the writer and director, it's Tim Kincaid, born 1944. A very interesting figure in genre film history. Kincaid's most notable contributions to cinema were actually outside of mainstream or even low budget genre features like this. And it was actually, they were actually in the world of adult cinema. Under the moniker Joe Gage, he was one of the most influential and successful directors of gay adult cinema of the 1970s and early 1980s. This is a period often referred to as a kind of golden age of adult content before the full advent of video, a time when adult films, films tended to feature characters, plot, and sometimes proved quite ambitious in their vision. There were attempts to do things that were artful, subversive, and so forth. Worth noting as well that gay hardcore material had only become legal in the U.S. in the very early 70s on the heels of Stonewall. So Kincaid was really kind of a pioneer of sorts as well. And from what I've read, Kincaid's biggest contribution as Joe Gage was in his presentation of same sex encounters involving blue collar, working class American characters that defied stereotypes were at the same time validating and also depicted same sex encounters as not merely a gay thing, but a broader human thing often involving characters that are not presented as expressly gay in their identity. As Conrad Brewster put it in a 2011 post of the gay and lesbian review, Joe Gage films weren't trying to represent the entire spectrum of gay and bisexual life in the 70s and 80s. His focus was specific and but at the same time, highly successful and influential. And his work could also apparently be subversive and artful in its own way. So Kincaid, before all of this though, Kincaid's first film was a 1973 straight sex exploitation film titled The Female Response. And this was right before his first groundbreaking foray into gay adult cinema with 1976's Kansas City Trucking Company starring Jack Wrangler and Richard Locke. This was the first of his so called Kansas City Trilogy. I'm not going to go through all of his adult titles, but these are historically of significance. This era of his films, he directed his Gage occasionally directed as under another pseudonym. And this continued till around 1985. And this is when Kincaid made a shift to writing and directing low budget genre films outside of the adult industry. And I've read that at this point he was also married and had young kids and wanted to focus on work outside of that industry. And his wife at the time, Cynthia DePaola acted as producer. So the first of these films getting into this B Cinema era, and this is definitely the era that we find mutant hunt in, the first of these films was 1986's Bad Girls Dormitory. This is a woman's prison exploitation film shot gorilla style in New York City that he apparently offered to Charles Banned. And Banned reportedly passed, said, thank you but no thanks. But he was interested and he said, look, tell me what you have planned. And they started talking and this led to Banned serving as EP on several of his pictures from this period, including mutant hunt. Yeah, it's interesting to think how exactly mutant hunt fits in with the standard Charles Banned world DNA imprint. It is not like movies like Metal Storm, The Destruction of Jared Sin or Dungeon Master where I don't know, you can watch a minute of it and you're like, this is Charles Banned. This is like the Charles Banned zone. You just know. It's not like that. So I wouldn't have immediately identified it as a Banned associated film, but also it fits right in there. When you have the knowledge that this is Charles Banned world, that feels right. Yeah, I mean, it also makes sense that it's kind of adjacent to the trauma world without actually being a trauma picture or having that sort of the goofiness and self-awareness that you often find in some of the trauma or maybe the most popular of the trauma films. So he followed up Bad Girls with Breeders in 86, a grimy, sounds kind of nasty film about alien impregnations in the New York City subway system. And after this came 1987's Robot Holocaust, which MST3K fans know all too well. It's been a long time since I've seen the riff of that, but now I kind of want to revisit it on its own. I know that I've re-familiarized myself with Mutant Hunt. I think that's like season one, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty early, early days. Yeah. And then came today's film Mutant Hunt. After Mutant Hunt, he did the 87 film Riot on 42nd Street. This was a crime movie starring Jeff Fahey. And then 1988's The Occultist, in which, quote, a cyborg private eye is hired to protect a Caribbean president visiting New York City from sadistic sorcerers. I've not seen it, but that sounds amazing. I like all that. And then finally, he did 1991's She's Back, a supernatural dark comedy that seems to be his most truly mainstream work about an electrician haunted by his dead wife's ghost and urged to take revenge on a gang of criminals. And it starred Carrie Fisher and Robert Joy. Hard to believe that the director of Mutant Hunt made a Carrie Fisher movie. Yeah, it's crazy, right? After this, Kincaid returned to adult cinema from, I believe, 2001 to 2017, possibly 18, as far as the main movie database listings go. Eventually, one of his now grown-up sons did some music scoring for some of these films. But at this point, I believe Kincaid is retired. He also wrote a couple of novels and directed an off-Broadway play called Naked Highway in 1983. I was even able to find the playbill for this on eBay. I want to say about Mutant Hunt that you never really know for sure. And maybe I could read stuff behind the scenes stuff and find out I'm totally wrong. But this feels like a movie made on a set that was a lot of fun. You know what I mean? That energy comes through. It seems like in between takes, the actors were probably joking around a lot. It just feels like a fun, lively environment. And maybe they're not taking it too seriously, and everybody's cutting up and having a good time. Yeah, and I think probably also important to stress, I feel like this is a film where everybody was probably excited about filmmaking. There were a lot of people that I think were maybe dipping their toes into cinema and maybe decided to get back out afterwards. But that's an exciting time when you're trying something new. Or you're trying something different. And certainly, presumably the guerrilla style filmmaking that was being employed here, that's also going to keep you pretty... That's going to keep you on your toes for sure. All right, well, let's get into the cast here. I'm going to basically go in building order, but also kind of divide things up among the factions, because this is a cyberpunk film. You got to have your factions. First of all, let's talk about the bounty hunters, Matt Riker and associates, starting with Matt Riker, the world's greatest mercenary and bounty hunter. What a guy. What a guy. This guy is a gentleman of beef, as we might say, but he just looks great in a pair of tidy whiteies, and they'll treat you to that over and over. Yeah. Matt Riker played by Rick Giannassi. Like a lot of the actors in this film, I have no idea how old this guy is. No dates available, though he's one of the actors that did appear in many different things. A frequent face in Kincaid's mainstream work. He appears in Bad Girl's Dormitory, Robot Holocaust, Riot on 42nd Street, and The Occultist. And after this, he went on to play his most famous role, that of Harry Griswold in the 1990 trauma film, Sergeant Kabuki Man, NYPD. The character, Harry Griswold, is also the title character in that film. His other credits include 89's Pose for Murder, 96's Fatal Frames, and 2000's Time Quest. He also did episodes of Another World, Star Trek Voyager, Caroline in the City, Felicity, and Days of Our Lives. So yeah, I would say pitch perfect beef performance here. He's earnest, he's reserved, he's not annoying. Really, for this movie, perfect performance. You've probably never seen a movie before when a guy in just blinding white briefs and nothing else pulls a crossbow off the wall and shoots a robot with it. That's right. I mean, again, he's the best. But even the best needs some help from time to time. And that's where his right hand man comes in, or at least the right hand man for this film, Johnny Felix. I love Johnny Felix. Every time Johnny Felix is on screen, I just feel like everything's going to be okay. Yeah, Johnny Felix seems to, he's a cool cucumber, he's got it under control, you know, ready to jump in with some kicks or some tech, whatever the situation requires. He has a good, a lively, joyful reaction almost to seeing things that are about to kill him. Like when the cyborg is coming their way and starts smashing his hand, through the concrete, Johnny Felix just goes, whoa, okay. Also in a world of seemingly ubiquitous cyborg activity, he doesn't know what the word cyborg means. Like he's like, what do you call these things? I was confused by that because I thought one of his main jobs was hunting down cyborgs. It seems like that's what they do, but he can't remember the word cyborg. He calls them jellyheads. Maybe it's like really deeply, something he doesn't like about the term, and he refuses to use it. Like they're not technically cyborgs. I don't use that term, something like that. But Darla takes offense to this, this other character, she's like, they're called cyborgs, Johnny Felix. Get it right. So Johnny Felix is played by Ron Rinaldi here. He followed this up with Riot on 42nd Street, and he's also in the 87 David A. Pryor film Man Killers. And he also has a small uncredited role in 2020, 2002, rather, analyze that. He also did a little bit of stunt work, which is not surprising because he's throwing some, some mean kicks in this film. Yeah. All right. And then we have Elaine Elliott. This character is a dancer by night, also bounty hunter by night and a private op by night. I don't know what she does in the day. It's not important. Is it a private op? I thought she's a public op. She's a public op. She's a fully accredited government, whatever. You remember that line? Yes. Yeah. She's like, I, I, I, I had to pass tests for my government accreditation of being an op. Okay. She's, she's above bar and also below bar. She's great. Whatever kind of job you need her for. Elaine Elliott is played by, um, Tani Vrennan. Yeah. This was her first role and she went on to work in, in riot in 88s, the big blue, 88s war boar warbirds and 91 switch. She also popped up on the TV shows night court and Beverly Hills 90210. She also seems like she's having a good time on set. Just Yeah. Yeah. Almost laughing while she says a lot of her lines. Yeah. And again, I thought her performance is, you know, perfect for this film. Oh yeah. No notes. Yeah. All right. Now let's move on to the villainous, uh, faction of Intel tracks. Intel tracks? Intel tracks or in, yeah, they say it different ways. I think they do. Yeah. At one point it is Intel tracks. Uh, so I'm not sure how we're really supposed to stress this. I think we also get Intel tracks. Yeah. Intel tracks. Yeah. The, uh, CEO, I guess, or tyrannical ruler of Intel tracks is Z. Just, just single letter Z. Is he doctor Z as in bloodwaters of bloodwaters of or just Z? I think he's just Z. I would, I thought about bloodwaters of Dr. Z a lot, which as if you remember from our episode doesn't actually feature a character named Dr. Z. But, um, uh, what Dr. Leopold is his actual name in that. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. But one of the alternate titles was bloodwaters of Dr. Z. So it's okay to call him Dr. Z. It's, it's fine. Uh, but this Z is played by Bill Peterson. Uh, Peterson was also in bad girl's dormitory. Um, and that's really about it. Uh, IMDB contains an incorrect reference to him in a Rosemary documentary, which I spent way too much time. I think I like scanned through most of the documentary looking for this guy, uh, because we found it on 2B, uh, only to realize, oh no, no, they had him confused with, uh, legendary Trumpeteer Bill Peterson, different guy entirely. So this Bill Peterson, uh, is another one of these actors where it's like, who knows who this guy was and what he did and how he ended up doing this couple of films. But I love him here. He has a real villainous, amazing Chris Well vibe. And he's also like some of our other notable characters. Seems to be wearing like Rick Owens designs the whole time. You're like very gothy and black and sleek and shiny. He looks like he's dressed like a stag beetle. Yeah. It's got the, yeah, the black ribbed armor with the big shoulders. I love Z's energy. He has a smug, unctuous, unctuousness about him, often with his chin held up real high. He's a bit haughty and he's often just standing in a room with his arms folded behind his back before the action begins. And then he gets a phone call. It's like, so he, I guess he just stands like that in his downtime. Yeah. Often just commenting on his master plans to inject cyborgs with club drugs and, uh, and then enjoy the chaos and profits. That's right. Uh, let's see other people in his operation. At least at first we have Dr. Paul Haines, uh, is, uh, one of his cyborg designers and the architect of the Delta seven line of cyborgs that will be important, uh, played here by Mark, uh, Umile. Umile was also in bad girls as well as the 1999 vampire film cold hearts. Uh, then Dr. Paul Haines has a sister, Darla Haines. This film has a lot of characters for it's a limited scope really. But, um, yeah, we have Darla Haines played by Mary Fahey. Um, this is Jeff Fahey's sister and her only other accredited is riot on 42nd street. Really? This is Jeff Fahey sister? Yeah. That's what, uh, that's, that's, that's what the internet says. Yeah. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. Again, another one of these cases where I guess, you know, I don't know her full history and what she went on to do, but for a brief period of time, she's like, let me try this cinema thing out. Let's see if it fits. So Matt Ryker, Johnny Felix, Elaine Elliott and Darla Haines, they're going to end up composing our core group of four heroes. And I can't help but think of them as selectable, uh, characters in an arcade beat them up like the old teenage mutant Ninja Turtles or the X-Men game. And indeed, this whole film has very much has a side scrolling beat them up energy. Absolutely. Yes. It is in that Ninja Turtles fighting game zone. It feels like that. Yeah. Yeah. And has lots of slime. Even some of the costumes look like they would fit into that world. Yes. Yeah. There's, there's one carrot we'll come back to. And one of the cyborgs really does look like probably multiple characters from teenage mutant Ninja Turtles. One of the cyborgs looks like Crang's Android body. Yeah. Or which one was it? Which is it Bebop or Rocksteady? Which one was it? Oh, you're right. Yeah. Bebop. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of looks like a pre-mutation Bebop. All right. You can't have just two factions in a cyberpunk story. We also have what I'm calling Team Domina, led of course by Domina. This is Zee's rival and I think something of a cyborg originator. She takes credit for everything for all of Zee's success in the cyborg world. Yeah. He stole everything from her. Yeah. Domina is a Euphoron and Joyer. And what seemingly, what New Jersey native, is that, is that the accent? I'm not great with my analysis of New York area accents, but it's strong and character defining. She kind of feels like she could be a Sarah Squirm character on SNL or something. She's just, I love her. I love Domina so much. Her accent is great. Here's my take on her accent. It sounds like a bad, fake New York area accent, but I think it's just a real non-movie actor, thick New York area accent or New Jersey accent. That's what I think. I think this is her real voice. And almost all of her lines in the movie begin with the word Zee. She's just always saying Zee's name because she's either talking to him or talking about him. So almost every line starts off with her saying Zee. Yeah. You feel bad for the other individual in her life, Hydro, her loyal cyborg, because why not more talk about Hydro? Hydro's been for you the whole time. He's been here for you the whole time. But you're always talking about Zee, who's your enemy that's elsewhere. Well, she does tell Hydro that he is very loyal and well-programmed often. And he said, thank you, Domina. But then the next thing she says is she's like, but that's Zee. Domina is played by Stormy Spill. This is Stormy Spill's only credit. I could find no other evidence of Stormy Spill popping up anywhere in any kind of media. I can only imagine what sort of adventure Stormy Spill got up to in mid-80s New York City. But she's great here. I'm an instant Stormy Spill fan, and she is also dressed like a Rick Owens model for most of the film. She feels like a local celebrity. You know, like when they put what's R.C. Bates as Sam the Keeper and Werewolf or in the Black Hole Sun music video, R.C. Bates, it was known as a round town LA local celebrity more than as an actual movie star. But people knew of him and liked him and so put him in things. She feels like that. She feels like somebody around town in New York that everybody knows about and likes. And somebody was like, we got to put Stormy in a movie. Yeah, you can easily imagine Stormy Spill being a notable owner of some local bar or an MC at a club or a burlesque show or something. But for the rest of us, years later, just a mystery. But her on-screen energy is a little bit like share. Yeah, compared to share in some user comments before. But by way, again, of a stag beetle with the costuming. Yeah. Now, we mentioned Hydro, her loyal cyborg, a slightly dopey earlier Delta model, also the last of its kind. Hydro is played by Doug DeVos, but sometimes spelled like Devo's. And I think Devo's feels more appropriate because the cyborgs often look like they belong in a Devo video or perhaps some other like 80s sunglasses at night sort of music video. Or like Kraftwerk. No, Kraftwerk for sure. They look like Kraftwerk the robots. Yes. And they move like that. Yes. So Doug DeVos here, not to be confused with the businessman of the same name. All right, getting a little bit into the world of cyborgs and droids. There are some great beefy cyborgs in this, but I'm not going to list all of them. But I am going to mention we have a pleasure droid that shows up last year's model. And she is played by Leanne Baker. Baker was also in Bad Girls, Breeders and Riot. But a lot of viewers will recognize her as the lead Eva from the 1986 New York indie film Necropolis, in which she plays a New York City punk witch. This one has some notable VHS covers included one here for you, Joe. It's made on graph paper. Yeah. Yeah. It's on a motorcycle. Short spiky blonde hair. You know, almost a little bit of a gozer vibe. But yeah, she instantly stands out. Her other films include 87's Psycho's and Love and Galactic Jigolo. She retired from acting, but has written at least one young adult book. So she went on to become an author. So yeah, look her up. She's fun. She really punches her lines in this movie. She only has a few lines, but every one of them is just fully enunciated. Straight into the camera. Which you can't criticize because we find out she is a cyborg. So that's right. Yeah. Robotic acting, you know, excuses a lot. All right. And then briefly getting into some of the folks behind the special effects in this film. Again, the special effects in this film are scrappy, low budget, but also awe-inspiring in their own way. Yeah. The stretching arm effect is everything. I was watching this on my phone at first on an airplane. I mean, that started happening. I just, I was at a loss because I needed to turn and talk to somebody. There was just this random guy next to me and I can't like show it to him. I want to be, do you see the arm? Oh my God. Well, I'm sure everyone around you who was thinking about this movie, while you're watching there, probably like, what is this? What is he doing? Why is he watching the films on the back of his seat? Yeah. Good question. Well, I had something much better than any of that there. And it was this. And to a large extent, better because of the special effects, that crazy arm stretching. Also, the later puppet of the guy that I'm going to end up calling Bud the cyborg, the family cyborg, man, that puppet is incredible. Yeah. Way more elaborate than I would have expected for a movie otherwise of this budget. If this makes any sense, the special effects are definitely a production value rung above, say, the sets and the costumes. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. And again, it's just a place where you see the passion here. You see the passion in these guys, guys's work. So who are these guys? Well, we have Ed French. He's credited with special makeup effects. And he was born in 1951. French worked on several Kincaid films and acts and breeders. And this was around the same time he did 86s, bedtime stories and four episodes of tales from the dark side. He also had already worked in special effects makeup on such films as 83 sleepaway camp, 84s chud and 85s the stuff. Since then, he's had a hand in a ton of special effects laden films, including Terminator 2, Hellraiser Bloodline, The Midnight Meat Train, Sinister 2 and the 2023 Dungeons and Dragons movie. Wow. Also credited with cyborg mechanical designs, we have Tom Lawton. Lawton had previously worked on 86s class of Newcombe High and Robot Holocaust and went on to work on a nightmare on Elm Street for the Dream Master, 2005's King Kong and 2005's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. These last two as part of Weta. I remember Nightmare 4, I think, has some very notable special effects. Yeah. This was a period in the Nightmare, I guess, after a point. I mean, they all have some great special effects in them, but this was a point where they're really going for crazy stuff. Yeah. Also, Matt Vogel has special effects credit. Vogel's previous films included 81's Miss 45, The Nesting and Mad Man, as well as 84s chud, Robot Holocaust, Breeders, Necropolis and 87's Streak Trash. He went on to work on such films as Franken Hooker, another film that I've watched on an airplane. I keep almost coming back to Franken Hooker. It's pretty great in its own way. But oh, he also did Kings of New York, Cloverfield and much more. Bravo. Nice work. Yeah. Once again, as with Star Crash, I love the violent laser blasts in this film, how they just send the sparks flying. And I also love how the cyborgs all seem to have like green slime vomit for blood, again, or at least the mutated ones. Once they get really mutated, there's all sorts of weird goo coming out of them. I am used to seeing movies where the laser guns are almost useless against the, you know, this is a comment you've got like, oh, I'm an invulnerable cyborg. I can't stop. And so you see characters shooting it with laser guns and the lasers just bounce off. Or even when they kill somebody, they don't leave a mark. It's just kind of like, you got me. In this movie, the lasers are absolutely deadly. So there will be characters locked in a life or death struggle with the cyborg. But if they can pop one laser blast off on the cyborg, cyborg's done. That's it. Those are deadly rays, for sure. Exactly. These deadly rays will be their death. Yeah. All right. And finally, the score is by Don Great, born 1951. Synth guitars, lots of cheesy riffs that only sometimes match the onscreen action. I also get a great retro video game vibe from all of this, you know, just the music that's playing as you side scroll your way through a level. Absolutely. Sounds like the music that loops in the background in the old NES Batman game. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Great. Also composed scores for Breeders and Necropolis. But he also had a lot, he also has a lot of additional music and stock music slash production music credits on all sorts of films. Okay, are we doing the plot now? Let's do it. Let the hunt begin. So the title and credits are a very nice glowing green on black, like the computer screens in the matrix, you know, the digital rain look, not that design, just the green on the black, it does, I don't know, just makes you feel nostalgic for another era of computers. Also, the opening music makes me feel nostalgic. We were just talking about it being kind of like video game music. But the song that plays at the beginning isn't quite video game music yet. That comes a little bit later in like the fight scenes. The opening theme is that 1980s synth pulse that just makes me think about a cop in a cream blazer with the sleeves pushed up. You know what I'm saying? So it's a little bit Miami Vice. It's also Grand Theft Auto Vice City. So that whole thing also kind of a thin, plinky little snare beat. I don't know. It's a good sound. And then the opening shot is New York City. We see the skyline of lower Manhattan at dusk with a dark blue sky, orange sunset in the background and all of the buildings glowing. Yeah, this reminded me just a little bit of the Atroma team release skyline. Yeah, Atroma fans will know what I'm talking about. Also, in a way, it reminded me of the opening of the John Travolta movie about John Gotti, which I don't recommend, but it starts with Travolta just looking at basically this skyline of New York City. And then he's like, New York's the greatest city in the effin world. So after this, we cut to an establishing shot outside of a grungy looking building. And the sign tells us this is the headquarters of the company called Intel Tracks. Intel Tracks. We cut inside and there are random doll body parts hanging from the ceiling. That's promising. Yeah. The first thing we see is a severed mannequin arm on a wire just hanging in this dark room that looks like it's a parking garage. There's a table that very much wants you to believe it is a lab. So we have test tubes lined up on racks, a white sculpture of a hand mounted on a brick, and then a few loops of IV tube dangling in the frame. Yeah, a lot of these sets slash locations, they're going to get you halfway there. You bring a little imagination into your viewing. There's just enough for you to figure out what this is supposed to be. Yeah. So we pan over to some cyborgs standing in a row. And you can tell they're cyborgs because they are wearing the mutant hunt cyborg uniform, which is long dark pants, a dark fitted button up shirt buttoned all the way up, including the collar, high and tight haircut sunglasses, even at night and indoors. And we will get an explanation for those sunglasses later. I think that's pretty ambitious. Most films of this sort, they're just like, of course, everyone's wearing sunglasses at night. It looks really cool. This film actually bothers to give us some lore to explain it all. I think the explanation though has to be a post-talk rationalization because in the scene where it's happened, I don't think that scene was originally in the story. I think that's a later insert. Do you think the actors requested it? They're like, Tim, why are these cyborgs wearing sunglasses? I don't know that my character would hunt them if they were wearing sunglasses at night for no reason. We've got to establish it. No, I don't think that's the reason. I think the reason is otherwise it wouldn't make any sense at all for there to be a sex scene in the scene right after the scene where the heroes are like, we've got to stop these cyborgs right now. They need to explain why they have 12 hours until the cyborgs can be hunted again. There you go. So we first see these guys, the cyborgs are moving around and it's very old school robot mime work. Again, craft works, we are the robots. Slow pivoting, that kind of thing. So after this, we cut to some different guys. Three guys standing in a row, one of them is Zee, the character we already talked about, the villain Zee who is dressed like a stag beetle. He's wearing some kind of vest or upper body armor that is shiny and black, ribbed in the front with these flared out shoulders so that he's kind of V shaped. He checks his watch and he says serum activation should begin now. Right after this, a couple of cyborgs in this line over here, they turn and they start attacking the other cyborgs and we see them really damaging each other. Arms get yanked out of sockets, their wires popping and shooting sparks. One of them rips a head off and Zee says, that's it. They're even more violent than I imagined. He says, our customers will be pleased. Don't you think? And then it cuts to reaction shots of the two cyborgs beside him in which they do not react. That's the joke. Meanwhile, somewhere else in a tall building, there's an alarm going off inside an empty white room that looks kind of like an art studio with nothing on display. Did you get that feeling? Yeah, I sure did. In walks a woman wearing that same kind of stag beetle outfit as Zee. So big shiny black leather shoulders and a ribbed front. And this is Damina. As we were saying earlier, Damina is a phenomenon. She just owns the screen. The alarm is sounding and Damina says, sort of talking to the ceiling. She says, Hydro, what was that? And then we cut to somewhere else and there's a cyborg who looks even dorkier than the other cyborgs. He's talking into a microphone. This is Hydro. He tells Damina that the Intel tracks cyborgs have been activated. She asks the altered units. Hydro says this is correct. And then Damina begins to pace. So in this scene, there's some cinematography. She's wandering behind a bell jar that gives her a slight funhouse mirror appearance when she crosses parts of it. And she's thinking about the activation of these altered units. She says that Zee must be out of his mind. Quote, the way he has them programmed, they'll turn against him. He'll be lucky if he isn't ripped apart. But Damina is plotting. She tells Hydro that they're going to keep an eye on what Zee is up to. Quote, until I'm ready to unveil my creation to the world, Zee can play with his pathetic toys. And then she starts monologuing. So we learn that everything Zee and his people have ever produced, including Hydro, started in her laboratory. She says Zee, that thieving swine. Then she wanders over to a figure that we can't quite see. It's held off screen. We just sort of see an arm wrapped in something white. And then she just starts rubbing the arm and we hear it growling. There's going to be a lot of build up concerning this figure. Yeah, I wonder if it's going to be a cyborg. So we cut back to Zee and his two dudes. And he says that he is creating five different models of these things with a thousand copies of each. Quote, total carnage, uncontrolled fury. What more could anyone ask? Why is he doing this? Well, I think he does generally enjoy chaos, but we also will learn later for profit. He has a client list that includes tyrants and dictators and criminals around the world. And they want a way to biologically hack their worker cyborgs and turn them into mindless killing machines. They cannot be controlled. They specify many times what these things are is that they cannot be controlled. I mean, can you imagine a tech CEO wanting to make money off of a technological innovation that cannot be fully controlled and may become a problem later on? I don't know. Well, at least there there's the illusion that it can be controlled. He's just saying, he literally says these are uncontrollable. So he calls in the maintenance droids to clean up the Borg massacre and incinerate the evidence. And we get a hilariously dramatic scene of cyborgs killing other cyborgs and smashing laboratory equipment, body parts are smashed up all over the floor. There's a funny shot of the dead cyborgs lying on the ground smoking and they all have their mouths wide open in dentist mode. Yeah. And also their limbs up like dead bugs. I love it. Yeah. So next we meet a handsome guy in a white lab coat. And he walks into the room with all of the fuming cyborg meat on the ground. And Z is just standing there over the bodies. This is one of the times when the scene starts and Z is just standing there with his arms clasped, hands clasped behind his back, not doing anything. And this guy walks up the guy in the lab coat is Paul Haynes, Dr. Paul Haynes. He and his sister Darla Haynes are Intel Tracks employees who worked on the design of the Delta seven cyborgs, which is I think what these are. So Haynes goes up and sees all the smoking meat and he's like, what is this? Hey, as he says, he thought the lab was empty. Haynes says that the Delta sevens were not ready for activation. These have not been safety tested yet. It's not time. Haynes says, I've spent the last year on these cyborgs, you've reduced them to a pile of scrap. Z says my scrap doctor, your work is for the benefit of my corporation. If you wish to keep your position, you'll forget everything you've seen here. And Z looks so annoyed. But the fact that he seems so annoyed is especially funny because he's not doing anything. He's just standing there like some kind of palace guard when Haynes comes in. And then after this conversation, he wanders off pretending, obviously pretending to be looking at something that's not there on the other side of the room. So Haynes kneels down and then he, I love this, he dips a finger in the cyborg juice and then is he going to taste it? Yeah, he just tastes it. Like what's he assessing? Freshness? Yeah. I mean, he's not an angel from the prophecy. So he presumably just has human love. We talked about this. We have a geologist out there in the world who can actually taste a rock and tell you something about it. So maybe Haynes is just such an expert in the cyborg world that he can taste just random cyborg juice and tell you a little something about what's going on there. He can debug cyborgs programming by tasting their juices. Yeah. But the weird thing is we find out later that anytime these altered cyborgs go anywhere, the place just reeks of euphoron. Yet he's like sampling the goo here and he's not getting high, presumably. Maybe this is cyborg goo from a non-euphoron altered cyborg. So I guess it works. I think you're right. Yeah, because these are the cyborgs that Zee had the other cyborgs kill these cyborgs. I think Zee was having the euphoron cyborgs kill the non-euphoron cyborgs. There you go. That explains it. So he, no, wait a minute. No, no, no, no. Now that I'm thinking about it, that can't be right because Paul is about to yank the core out of the back of this cyborg and go figure out what happened. So this has to be one of the altered ones. Oh man, missed opportunity to explore here with him getting hooked on euphoron by sampling cyborg goo. So he takes it back to his lab, this little core that he gets out of the back of the neck. And I just want to flag here that everybody in this movie has a funny costuming issue. Both Paul and Darla are dressed really funny for lab work. Paul is wearing a lab coat, but underneath it, he's wearing this blue shirt that is open like four buttons down in his lab. And Darla is wearing like a black party dress. I'm going out after the shoot today. So can I just wear this? Yeah, it looks like you're dressed for going out for cocktails. That's what it's lab now. But again, basically all of the costumes in this movie are funny. We'll note them as we go along. So they run some tests and established that there is an alien molecule in the fluid system of the affected cyborgs. Guess what it is? It's euphoron. Again, this is the fictional drug in the movie. Characters spend a lot of time talking about it. They spend a lot of time doing it. You put it in your ear. And Paul explains the computer readout on this stuff. He says, anti-organic reactions triggered by pre-programmed sexual response. Like, what? Are these going to be sexual cyborgs now? No, that does not happen. There's nothing sexual about them, but they keep, characters keep describing what's going on with these killer cyborgs in sexual terms, but the cyborgs do nothing remotely sexual. Yeah. Yeah. This initial setup makes you wonder if you're in for a much grime in your film. But I think the idea here is the drug messes up the cyborgs in a way that makes them, on some level, experience hedonistic pleasure via violence and death. But all they need to do to feel that pleasure is just rip somebody's head off. That sort of thing. I think this is actually, it's a drawing on some kind of like serial killer associated ideas that like, oh, serial killers are getting some kind of sexual pleasure when they go out and randomly murder people. And that's what's happening to these cyborgs, I think is the idea. Yeah. Anyway, Paul determines that three of the mutated cyborgs escaped and at once he picks up the phone to call somebody. He explains to Darla that he's contacting the only man he can trust, Matt Riker. Darla is skeptical. She knows that Riker is a mercenary, but Paul says those cyborgs can't be stopped by ordinary means. But while Paul is making the phone call, they're interrupted, some cyborgs come in. Cyborgs come in and explain that the two of them are being, that Paul and Darla are being placed under arrest for making mutated cyborgs. I think Z is trying to pin this on them. Yeah. Whose cyborgs are these, though? Are these are not Z's cyborgs, but like law enforcement cyborgs? Maybe. Darla gets away by just kind of shoving a table at one of the cyborgs and then she jogs off. And they kind of lumbers at her Tor Johnson style that she makes it. The cyborgs are like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. They're slow moving. They're all messed up. Yeah. It is explained that I think most of them are designed for like assembly line type work and dangerous environmental work, that sort of thing. So maybe they don't have to move quickly. We see Darla running away through these desolate, futuristic city streets. At one point, she goes through a tunnel and we see cars parked everywhere. It's very future New York City from the 80s. There's lots of trash and graffiti. At one point, she passes a bit of graffiti that says, death may be your Santa Claus. Interesting. With claws, felt like claws. With a W. So the cyborgs are in pursuit the whole time. They're blasting at her with lasers, but always missing. Eventually, she comes to an apartment building and runs up the stairs to the home of Matt Riker. When she starts banging on the door, Riker is asleep in his bed with a woman next to him with all the lights on. And Riker's apartment is hilariously empty. It is painted white brick walls and instead of furniture, he just has hooks on the walls with weapons mounted on them. Yeah, most of these shots, there are no visible windows in this place. And I've stayed in some New York City basement apartments before, granted with more art and fewer weapons on the walls. So this feels like a very real location, but it also does just feel like an absolute kill room of a New York City apartment. Yes. So Riker gets up, does not get dressed. So imagine a very beefy man. He looks kind of like a soap opera star in tidy whiteies, brand new ones by the looks of it. They're blindingly white. He goes to the door, but before he can open it, Darla Haynes busts in somehow. And she says, Matt Riker, I'm in trouble. And then the lady in bed who had been in bed with Riker pops up and says, you bet you are, sweetheart. The lady in bed is the short blonde here. This is the one that we're going to find out later. He has a pleasure bot. Yeah. Now, quick note on the tidy whiteies. I haven't actually watched any of the Joe Gage films, but I'm to understand that the standard white cotton briefs are a hallmark of the blue collar working man aesthetic in those films. So this might be one of the things we can point to as a connection between the Tim Kincade films and the Joe Gage films. Interesting. Okay. Anyway, before Darla and the others can discuss things, cyborgs arrived. They just start coming in the door. And then here begins one of the funniest action scenes I can recall from any movie. Basically, what happens is that mercenary Matt Riker fights this gauntlet of buttoned up cyborgs. He's still in his white briefs, but the staging is just magnificent. Throughout the fight, they keep cutting away to new walls with different weapons on them for Riker to use. There's the way that people have to step over the bed to get over it, producing a cute little mattress squeak every time. Yeah. The cyborgs, big beefy cyborgs having to step over the bed. Yes. Riker hiding behind the punching bag while he's maneuvering. The way only one character moves at a time. And when one character is moving, everybody else just stands there still and watches them. Yeah. And the music, this is where some of that video game style music comes in. It's also very Wawa 80s guitar going. It's so good. Absolutely. Yeah. There's one amazing sequence where Riker, he manages to, he's got handcuffs for some reason. He manages to handcuff one of the cyborgs to the radiator using these handcuffs that we're just sitting on a table. And then while the cyborg is cuffed there, it turns, it sees a machete on the wall, but oh no, the machete is like 15 feet away. No problem. It starts reaching with its arm and then just keeps reaching and keeps reaching and keeps reaching and the arm stretches. So the cyborgs have stretch arm strong powers. Yeah. It engages extender arm. We do get a cutaway where you see the full length arm all the way stretched out. And then it retrieves the machete so that it can chop off its own hand. It squirts orange juice concentrate, wires are poking out everywhere. And then I think when it gets up, it jams the hand back onto the wrist. Yes, it does. And then it's ready to fight again. This scene takes forever, but every moment of it is awesome. I would love this sequence in any mid to high budget production, but I also just love it in a low budget production like this. Yeah, it's so good. And it got all of the weapons. So there's a crossbow on the wall, Riker ends up using that. There's a shotgun on the wall. I don't think he ever uses the shotgun. He picks it up and he tries to shoot it, but it jams and then he can't use it. So he just has to punch a cyborg. Or maybe he realizes last minute, oh yeah, I don't keep a loaded shotgun hanging. But yeah, that one is no use. There's a harpoon that he never uses. Yeah, I would shock the harpoon gun doesn't get used. What are Raphael's weapons in the Ninja shirt? Oh, the Psy. Yeah, okay. He uses some of those, or he tries to use them, but the cyborg deflects him. It grabs them, whips them around, and then he goes to use them and they're deflected. But then in the next shot, they're hanging on the wall again. Oh, very good. I didn't notice that. Eventually he gets one of the cyborgs with a nightstand lamp attack, like he yanks the bulb out and then zaps the cyborg with it. So he kills a couple of the cyborgs and then the music stops. And then Darla says, they aren't human. And the woman in the bed says, no kidding. Darla asks Riker for a cigarette, which I thought was funny. And he finally put some pants on. And then Darla explains what happened. She asks Riker for help. Turns out Riker and her brother Paul had worked together in the past. Paul once saved Riker's life and he owes him one. So he's in for whatever this is. Then Darla gives the scoop. She says, Paul's head of research at Intel Tracks. He designed a new line of cyborgs, the Delta 7s for hazardous occupations. A few hours ago, three of the Delta's malfunctioned, someone had introduced Euphoron into their system. And then the lady in Riker's bed, who's still here and very much part of the conversation, says Euphoron, who'd want to get robots high? Great delivery. And Darla says, the drug decays and mutates psychosexual response programs, corrupting the reasoning cortex. The other lady says, what's that in English? And then Riker, comprehending perfectly, says, they kill for pleasure. I don't know how you get that from the other thing. So Paul is being imprisoned by Intel Tracks, which we learn is legal, actually. The corporations in this movie can imprison anybody for up to 72 hours, quote, ever since the space shuttle sex murders. Yes, the space shuttle sex murders, which is just a nugget thrown out there for us to ponder. But I love it. Kind of like a gentle world building. It's like, what? Imagine a world in which there was something called the space shuttle sex murders. And it's just sort of a common reference. Like, yeah, you remember when that happened. It's just a common reference point. And it can explain anything, apparently. Why can corporations imprison people because of the space shuttle sex murders? We can't allow it to happen again. So yeah, we've got to give corporations extra power over people. So Darla says, if you can't stop the mutants, Riker, who knows how many innocent people they'll murder? Riker says, I'll give it a try. But it's not going to be easy. Darla explains that the Delta sevens have five times as much strength as the cyborgs that Riker just killed. And he says, she says they have this is where we get that they have a limited telepathic power, allowing them to sense potential harm, meaning that as long as you're hunting them, they'll be hunting you. That's good. That's pretty fascinating. And again, it makes you, if we exist in a world where that exists, that's part of the cyborg build. Like, what other details are out there? So I do kind of love this. So Riker first jokes that he's going to not take the job. He's like, I don't know. This is too much for me. And then he's just like, no, I'm just kidding. I'll do it. And then more cyborgs just start pouring into the apartment. Whoops. They were talking too long, I guess. And another fight begins. I don't know why, but this time they go straight for the lady in the bed. The cyborg just scoops her up and throws her out the window. Oh no. But when she hits the ground, our fears are somewhat put to rest because we see there is no blood. Instead, she splats in a puddle of yellow green goop. Yeah. Yeah. She's a cyborg. Fantastic sequence here. And a good moment to just bring up the general cyborg fighting techniques that we see from these guys. They have two main grappling styles. They have the monster movie maiden lift, you know, like any poster you've seen of a monster carrying an unconscious woman. Yeah. Just lifting you up. Yeah. And the other is a two-handed frontal ballet lift. I'm not sure exactly what this is called, but you know, like lifting someone up in the air like a parent might lift a toddler above their head. That ballet move. So not something you see like in wrestling, per se, but it's one of the things that the cyborgs do here in addition to their chops, their punches and their head rips. Yeah. They do some brutal karate chops and their ribbed body parts off. But the fight continues. There's machete versus chair. One of the cyborgs gets a machete, Matt Riker, as the chair, and they're squaring off. Eventually, Riker gets the upper hand and blasts the cyborg with a laser gun. And that's it. You know, laser gun does the trick. And then Riker and Darla go to the window and Darla looks down at the body and she expresses shock and Riker says, easy come, easy go. And she goes, how can you say that? And Riker is like, ah, she wasn't human. Just a pleasure robot. Oh, okay. No big deal. She seemed to have a personality. Yeah. Well, the question like, do the cyborgs in this movie want to live? Do they feel pain? In which case, I would feel kind of bad anyway that she got thrown down there. I don't know. Don't know. Yeah. We're left to just try and figure it out. We at least learned that some of them later do feel pain. Yeah, that's right. But so apparently no big deal from the movie's point of view, just a robot. Oh, and then also Riker says, I smell you for on. Must have been pumped full of it. Which one is he talking about? Her or the other? The other. Yeah. The others. Yeah. It was confusing the first time I watched it as well. And then he says, seems an old friend of mine has been on the Euforon trail for the Feds. So we cut to a nightclub called Club Inferno. And there is a dance act going on. We see a lady with red hair with a mask on. It was kind of a bandit mask of some sort. And she's dancing on the stage. She's wearing like a black body suit with a bunch of holes in it. She almost looks like she could be in the cast of Cats. Did you get that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And this is going to be the character Elaine Elliott. So in the middle of her dance, there are a couple of creeps in the club that come up on stage and start messing with her. And then she beats them up and tosses them out on their butts. But I thought it was weird while they're fighting, some people in the club are audibly like calling out and rooting for the attackers in the fight. This is my city. Get her. Yeah, get her. This is not a very good club, it seems like. And so in this club, we see people also doing Euforon. They're dabbing it into their ears. There's one guy just drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels. Do they let you drink straight out of the bottle at a bar? They do that in movies. If you're the protagonist and you've had a rough day, it's like just lean to the bottle, Sam, that sort of thing. But wouldn't they at least make you put it in the glass? I don't know. I went to a bar in Thailand, I believe. Oh, no, I can't remember if I went to a bar or just read about this while I was visiting Thailand. But there are bars in Thailand where you can bring in your own bottle that they will keep for you. And I don't know if you're allowed to drink out of the bottle, though. That's the thing. Anyway, Elaine comes down after her act and she talks to Riker in Darla. Riker introduces Elaine as Private Op Bounty Hunter. Oh, you were right. Private Op, he says Private. Okay. Private Op Bounty Hunter, dancer of the Seven Veils. I just thought she's a public op because she says she does it for the government. So I don't know what's going on there. Maybe she's private and public and bounty hunter. Private public, yeah, by day, by night. She's a busy woman. She has a number of hats. Totally. She's multitasking. Riker tells Elaine that he has a blotter job for her. Blotter in this movie means murder, I think. It means like assassinate. So he's got a blotter job for her. Does she want in? There's some haggling. She finds out that Riker is doing the job as a personal favor, but she's only interested if she can claim her usual fee. As we can see from the number of jobs she has, she must be she's interested in making bank. And Riker says, don't worry about it. I'll cover your fee. He says the targets are not human. They're cyborgs, quote, mutants, psychosexual killers. And we learned that lately Elaine has been working on a government case. Here's her public op stuff. She is tracking a large cache of euphoron smuggled in from the lunar colony. Yeah, this is another detail that it's like, what, what is it? Euphoron comes from the moon? Are they like, they're making it in like euphoron labs on the moon? Or are they growing something there? It gets turned into euphoron or something naturally occurring in the depths of the moon that becomes euphoron? I don't know. That was my thought. Euphoron is made of the moon. It is a drug manufactured from the lunar regolith. That's got to be it. I love it. I love it. But anyway, somebody on earth here, at least in New York, has been buying up all of the euphoron. So the market has dried up. Somebody's buying it and hoarding it and nobody knows where it is. And then while she's talking, it took me until the second time I was watching this scene to notice like, wait a second, isn't that Domina sitting right next to her? That is, that's her. Drinking something out of a coupe glass there. Yeah. Yeah. So they, oh, I'm sorry, a Nick and Nora glass, I think. I think that is right. Yeah, that is what it is. So Domina's just sitting there listening. I guess she's snooping on this conversation. Our heroes decide that they've got to get another one of their associates on board, a guy named Johnny Felix. We'll meet him soon. And Elaine says, Riker, how do I find these mutants? Riker says, you don't, they find you. So it turns out, yes, this was Domina sitting next to Elaine. Domina goes in back and places a phone call to Z. Remember Z? I love this call. These personalities bouncing off of each other so good. Domina says, Z, how good to hear your voice. It's been such a long time, so much blood under the bridge. Z says, what is it, Domina? Domina says, Z, all of the lines, start with Z. She says, as your old colleague as well as your ex-partner, I thought I might have some information that would be of interest to you. But if I'm mistaken, don't let me disturb you. Z says, we've been playing these games for too many years, Domina. Sounds like some games without frontiers. I would say so. Yeah. So he says, now what is it? Do you want something from me? Or are you planning something that's going to hurt me? Domina says, that genetic strain you introduced into your Delta 7s, it's about to cause you a few more problems than you've anticipated. You've got Matt Riker and his Mary Band on your case, baby. So they haggle about some stuff. I also love the way the scene looks because they both have these orange-red backgrounds behind them, though they're in different places, but their backgrounds look the same. Yeah. And this is a scene in which the stills from the restored version that you'll find on the Vinegar Syndrome disc, they really pop and made me, these stills especially made me realize I need to pick this up. So they're going to make a deal. Domina offers to share the location of Matt Riker's recently recruited associate, I think this means Elaine, in exchange for 50 kilos of euforon. Domina says, you've made it very difficult for those of us who like to use euforon as our favorite entertainment. And I for one feel that I must go on record as telling you that I resent it. I really do. That lion has too many words. You can cut that in half and say the same thing. She feels strongly about this though. I really think she does. And Z, I love this line where Z replies by saying, you're so euforon-ed out right now. You don't know what you're talking about. But Domina wants the 50 kilos of euforons. Z is going to give it to her and she's going to provide the location of the op. So it's a deal. And next thing we see, Elaine is walking home from the club alone and she hears footsteps behind her on the sidewalk. She stops and looks back and it's a big ol cyborg coming her way. So she runs to a yellow payphone and places a call to a new character, Johnny Felix. Johnny Felix is a cool guy in a short sleeve green mechanics jumpsuit who kind of looks like he's going for like hairstyling of oats from Holland Oats. Did you get that? Yeah. Like he's kind of small but muscly, good looking guy with a strong dark mustache and a tight curly black mullet. Very cool look. And Johnny Felix, as I said before, he's just a very positive, sunshiney presence. Makes me feel like everything's going to be okay. Yeah. He's got the kicks. He's got the tech. He's going to help you work it out. So Elaine calls Johnny Felix and he's walking on the sidewalk somewhere eating the chopsticks out of a Chinese takeout box and he answers the call by pressing a little button on his ear. So I think he's got a cell phone implanted in his ear. Johnny Felix is not a robot. He's not a cyborg. This is just a strictly business implant. Of course, it made me think of earbuds. You know, there's so much in the visual language of a film like this, depicting the technology of the future that it easily just passes you by as a modern viewer of it because this is already how we live. Yeah, it's true. So Elaine asks for help as a guy is after her. Johnny Felix, he's always making jokes. He's just like, geez, you and your man problems, Elaine. But then she shares her location with him. Yeah, I again, I said this earlier, I love anytime this movie shows a map with location data, it happens a lot in the second half of the movie. So in this case, there's a pixelated screen vaguely shaped like the outline of lower Manhattan as seen from space with no features, no labeling, no streets or landmarks, just a solid island. And then a big X appears on part of the landmass. Johnny Felix looks at that, he says, I got you, babe, I'll be there in exactly 85 seconds. Yeah, and this is where he breaks into a dead run, right? Yeah, well, no, he shovels a few more bites of noodles. Yeah, you need that noodle fuel for the fight to come. Yeah, that's right. These sausages will give me the quick energy I need to escape. So he eats some more noodles and then he throws his takeout box on the sidewalk. Johnny Felix, that you litter bug, he's contributing to the miserable state of this dystopian cyber city. But then he takes off at a run. Meanwhile, the cyborg corners Elaine on a kind of boardwalk or promenade overlooking the East River at night and we see bridges lit up in the background. She taunts the cyborg, she says, come on, you putrid slime bag, take your best shot. And they tangle a bit. Elaine gets some good kicks in. Johnny Felix arrives on scene and then stands there watching while the cyborg and Elaine are wrestling and then the cyborg holds her up in the air like he, you know, like the cyborgs do, like he's going to do a body slam. But Johnny Felix yells, cut her some slack. Yeah. And the cyborg hearing this puts her down, I guess he cuts her some slack and then allows Johnny Felix to kick him in the face. And then our two humans run off and get some distance. And Elaine says, unless you've got some big artillery on you, this thing's too heavy hitter. Something got lost there. And then the cyborg sort of menaces them. It walks up punching some holes in a big concrete block. And then Johnny Felix yells, whoa, so perhaps another time they've run away. And then after this, they have a stroll in a little chat there, again, walking on this, you know, sort of railing area overlooking the river by the city. And Elaine explains, I hate it when men save me. Johnny Felix says, well, excuse me for living. And then Elaine says, come on, Johnny, you know what I mean, it's humiliating. I am a fully accredited federations operative. I pass tests. Johnny Felix says, he has a reasonable answer. He's like, look, Elaine, you know, we all need help once in a while. It's true. Johnny Felix needs help sometimes too. But then Elaine says, even Riker, they gotta admit, Riker never needs help. Riker's different. But wait, why did Riker recruit them if he never needs help? Because Riker needs help. Riker obviously needs help. Yeah. Yeah. So Elaine says, well, as of tonight, I'm just real glad I know an off with a phone implanted in his ear. There you go. Then Johnny Felix says, yeah, it's real convenient. And if I don't pay my bill, what can they do? Cut off my ear? Seems like they probably would. Yeah, that seems like the black mirror direction this would take. Yeah. Trends come and go. Your skin barrier doesn't. E45 lotion is effective science-backed hydration for everyday use. Lightweight, fast absorbing, and trusted to do what your skin needs. No fuss, no compromise. Just soft, smooth, healthy looking skin every day. Grab your E45 lotion now. Speaking of ears, next there's a scene of Demina at her apartment or is this her lab? Anyway, slamming some euphoron into her ear while she looks in a mirror. Hydro appears and gives her an update. Riker's op has escaped. The cyborg is still at large. Demina is very happy with all of this. She says that not all cyborgs are as well programmed as Hydro. Hydro says, thank you, Domina. Domina says, I often thought I should have stayed with the Delta 6's Hydro. You were all so dependable, so trustworthy, so impervious to rust. Hydro says, thank you, Domina. Domina says, now you're the only one left. I wonder how often she talks to him like this. It just seems like it's the running theme in their house. She says, all the others turn to scrap. Z. Z had to be greedy. He always wanted more. Well, he's about to find out that it was more than he could ever handle. So many scenes where she's just predicting that Z will soon get his come-up. It's got to be really good when it finally comes. Next, we go back to Matt Riker's apartment, the one with the weapon hooks instead of furniture. Johnny Felix is getting some reps in at the punching bag. This scene is funny in how it's shot because at first, Johnny Felix is the only character we can see. We're just watching him work in the punching bag. Suddenly, he stops fighting the bag and starts talking to the room. He says, I've tracked and logged four murders in the last 85 minutes, but we don't see who he's talking to. Gradually, we cut away and reveal basically all of the other characters are in the room with him. So we got Matt Riker here, Elaine, and Darla. Johnny Felix explains the murders he is tracking. He says, all in the same quadrant, kill meth is identical and traces of euforon. Looks like one of these creep boys is out on the job. Darla says, cyborgs. Paul would die if he knew. He never intended the Delta 7s to kill, but Matt Riker says, someone did. In this scene, Johnny Felix can never remember that they're called cyborgs, but again, he seems totally familiar with hunting cyborgs. This is like his standard work, it almost seems. So yeah, very confusing. Yeah, it's like if you didn't know it was called an iPhone. Everybody knows what this is called. But your job is buying iPhone or something. Yeah. And then he starts calling them jelly heads. But also in the scene, we learn that Johnny Felix is Riker's cue branch. So he busts out some toys for everybody. This includes tracking devices. There's one that Darla can tune to pick up the mutants so that they can find them anywhere. Another device is one that can zero in on the molecular structure of euforon and will lead you to any quantity over 10 kilos. They also have these little wind up cars with spikes on them that crawl around and then jump and then explode. Yeah. And when they jump, they make a cartoon sound like Yosemite Sam just shot a tin can off of a fence post. Yeah. So now basically now we've got finally the mutant hunt begins the titular mutant hunt. It is here. Elaine is going to go hunting for the euforon stash. Johnny Felix is going to hunt for cyborg alpha and blotter him. And Matt Riker is going to hunt for cyborg beta. These are the two main cyborgs left. And Darla is going to stay at Matt Riker's apartment until the hunt is concluded. And Darla says, look, I know you're professional. I know you kill for money. But do you really know what you're dealing with? These things aren't euforon dealers or sex maniacs. They're super human machines 10 times stronger than any man. Wait, wasn't it five times stronger in the earlier scene? That was an hour ago. They're just stronger now. They're getting stronger. Yeah. And Johnny Felix is like 10 times stronger than any man. So Darla says, so, so you can't even remember they're called cyborgs. Johnny Felix makes himself pronounce the name. He says cyborgs. And Darla then addresses Matt Riker. She says, you think brute force can solve anything? Well, it can't. But Riker is able to put her at ease. He's like, Hey, you know, your brother sent you here. Your brother trusted me. You should trust me to another funny costuming note. By this point of the movie, Riker is now wearing also a full body jumpsuit like Johnny Felix. But this jumpsuit has zippers that come in at angles on the chest that make it look like a country Western shirt. He's about to do a cowboy song. Anyway, they get to hunting. So I think after this part, I'm going to narrate the movie a little bit less closely. We'll do specific scenes instead of trying to cover everything. But generally, in the middle of the movie, we're going to have Matt Riker and Johnny Felix hunting their mutants. Elaine hunting the Euforon. And then Darla is going to have encounters with a previously assumed destroyed cyborg in Riker's apartment. Yeah, cyborg that they seem to terminate in the initial battle and is just laying there. We see it laying against the wall. And it just looks completely disgusting. Like, why would you not clean this out? Like this thing must just reek of like rotting organic parts and maybe Euforon. Yeah, just chopped meat laying there on the wall. But it'll come up again later. So they set out on the hunt. And then right after this, right after the scene, we're like, we're going to hunt the mutants now. We cut to Riker and Elaine in some other different apartment together. And they decided it's time for some loving. It's like, aren't y'all on the clock? I know work is not everything, but there are mutant cyborgs killing people every few hours. But they start kissing on each other. Part of their foreplay involves tossing deadly explosives at each other. And there's one part I was laughing out loud here at the way that Elaine unzips Riker's jumpsuit and then peels it back to reveal those awesome tidy whiteies yet again. And then while they're lying naked on the floor kissing, Elaine says, we have crazy mutant cyborgs out there. Riker makes an excuse here. He says, you saw the dark glasses. They can't take the light. Something about no compatibility of organic and synthetic parts we have until tomorrow night. Okay, I'm not sure it makes sense. But again, I admire that there's a reason for the classes. That's why they can be doing this. But again, this scene feels to me like an after the fact interpolation. Yeah. Now I want to add here, there's a love scene here, but it is amazingly tame. And oh, yeah, it is. There's nothing really, there's some very brief nudity in this film a couple of times, but like blink and you miss it sort of thing. And it is kind of interesting to think about this film in particular, at least, I can't necessarily speak for other Tim Kincaid pictures, but comparing the Tim Kincaid pictures to the fact that he had this career in adult cinema, you almost get the sense that it's like he has unlike other filmmakers and you know, B movie filmmakers, maybe he just didn't have a desire to explore anything overly sexual in his sci fi pictures, because he already had all these other films where he'd gotten to explore all of that. Yeah, there is this romance scene. It does feel kind of perfunctory, just like something they had to like get in there and get done really quick. Does not feel like Kincaid is eager to explore the sexual side of the story. It just seems like not something that's a high priority. Yeah, I guess it's one of those things sometimes in pictures it's like you portray a physical relationship in order to imply the emotional connection, the character level connection that you either don't have time to depict and establish or you know, or you just, it's not the sort of film where you do that. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know if I've ever thought about it quite that way, but sometimes I think yes, like a kiss can be cinematic shorthand for when you either don't have time to or don't have the skill to properly render a developing relationship, as well as just have them kiss and there you go. But I mean, who among us has not fallen in love during the course of a mutant hunt? So I think we can all resonate with this scene. So here we go to our first mutant murder scene, plus Riker's Intervention. So we're on a street with graffiti and trash everywhere. It's nighttime. There's a lady calling out a window above. She says, Amber Dawn, come inside. It's two in the morning. She is apparently, we don't really find out until later, but she's calling a child. Yeah, this is I guess a little bit of comic relief that's thrown into the picture, but there's some kid named Amber Dawn just out there playing in 2am Slime City, dystopian New York. I'm playing with the toxic waste mom. I'll come in later. There is a euphoron couple kissing in an alleyway, another couple wandering down the sidewalk. The cyborg smells these people and then meets them head on on the sidewalk. The cyborg karate chops the dude and then somewhere else, Matt Riker is walking around next to a chain link fence and his watch starts beeping. He looks at it and we see a screen that says, human life termination process in progress. Quadrants E-135, human life termination process in progress. So he starts running to intercept. You think, man, this would be faster if he had a car because there's no traffic. Motorcycle or something. Come on. Motorcycles are cyberpunk. This New York future has no traffic at all. We never see traffic. Where's the public transportation system? Also, we see now the cyborg is very bloody and bubbly. This seems to fit with the theme that as the cyborgs become gooier, they are becoming more powerful. Also, when the cyborg kills one of these people, I think this is when we just get a bunch of meat slop thrown on the euphoron couple who were kissing in the alleyway. Yeah. They seem to just be like, oh, we should be still until the murderous cyborg leaves so we can commit smooching again. Yeah, they don't run away or anything. I want to add that Riker, yes, we are told that he is running and we see him running, but probably by accident, it ends up feeling like he's not in enough of a hurry to stop this impending human life termination because he gets there right and he strolls in casually. Right after the cyborg rips an innocent person's head off. Yes. Then he's like, hey, cyborg, let's do this. He said, no, this is the line he says when he gets there. He says, you sure look ugly, real ugly. Hey, cyborg. This cyborg just murdered somebody in cold blood. Maybe you should have skipped the one liner here and just jumped in and stopped the murder. I don't know. I'm not going to tell Matt Riker how to do this thing. He's the best. Also, the line seems backwards. He says, hey, cyborg, last instead of first. When they're fighting, there's a part where he says, don't get me steamed, cyborg. He's going to kill this cyborg either way. What does it matter if he's steamed? But the cyborg is also thinking, thank you for calling me by the correct term. I am a cyborg. That's right. I'm not a jelly head. Riker is victorious in this fight. Then when the cyborg is busted down on the sidewalk, I think he gets out pliers and starts just taking it apart. Yeah. He kind of like field strips. The field dresses the cyborg and gets the parts he needs to study later. I want to add that most of these fights also remind me a bit of 1950s lucha movie action sequences, not because of the choreography or anything, but the way that they're staged and shot often wide and long. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Often lower budget situations where you're shooting the action wide and you're letting the action play out and you're missing none of the beats of the combat, which in a way is good because if the choreography is good, then it'll make sense from move to move and tell its own little story. That's not necessarily what we have going on here. So in the middle of the movie, there are more scenes of Demena pacing around her empty art gallery talking to Hydro about how she's going to get revenge on Z, talking about how she needs Euforon, and also monologuing to this other being, which we now get a better look at. It's a mummy. She just has a mummy standing in her apartment. It's huffing and growling, and she talks to it kind of like she's hitting on it. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes me feel worse for Hydro. Hydro has always been here for you, girl. And you're just touching on this giant mummy cyborg because it's got to be a cyborg while Hydro's just standing there. So yeah, feel bad for Hydro. It almost feels like there should be a scene where Hydro has bought her a present or has flowers for her, but then he's embarrassed and he doesn't give them to her. Yeah. Yeah. She's in there grinding on this mummy, and he's like, oh, and then he just like head down, leaves the room with the present. Yeah. Puts the ring back in his pocket. Yeah. So there are scenes of Elaine hunting for Euforon. She's just walking around strange, deserted locations. At one point, she's on a beach. She goes to empty factory buildings, and she's singing Euforon. Euforon, where are you? One particular empty factory building. I didn't look up where this is or would have been, but it's quite impressive. There's a lot of grill style shooting in this, but they also found some cool locations here and there. So one of, yeah, if it's the same place you're talking about, I assume it probably is. It's clearly a real location. It's way too vast and elaborate to have been built as a set. Yeah. Or a map painting. This is not a map painting. No, no, no. This is a real place. It's like a brutalist concrete building with interior facing windows over this courtyard. But the courtyard is not open sky. It's got a roof over it with skylight windows and then just concrete opera boxes poking out from windows on the six floors that are facing in. It's a very cool looking place. Seems like it would have been used for a RoboCop set. Yeah. And this, correct me if I'm wrong, this is supposed to be the Intel Tracks headquarters? I think so. Yeah. Okay. Let's see. Somewhere around. Oh, there's one part I wanted to mention just because it was unexpected and kind of interesting. There's the scene where the civilian beats a cyborg. Yeah. This is great because there's like this random Asian guy walking down the street or doing something. He's doing something on the street. He's like taking the garbage out. Yeah. And then a cyborg attacks and you think, oh, this poor guy, this is just going to, we're going to establish cyborg dominance here. Yeah. Yeah. You think head's going to get ripped off again, but instead, this guy has moves. He starts kicking the cyborg. He beats it up and then he runs away. Yeah. He does like some sort of cool flying headbutt to the midsection of the cyborg and wins and leaves. And you're like, yeah, that was quite a roller coaster ride and I'm glad this guy won. I just assumed any non-op who faces a cyborg is dead meat, but some civilians in future New York are powerhouses. This guy's one of them. I don't know what the point of this scene was. It almost feels like it kind of goes against the theme of the story, but maybe it's just like, hey, we know this other guy who's a good, you know, martial artist. We could use him for something and we don't really have room for another character in the movie, but how about just we have a scene where he beats up a cyborg? I guess so. That has to be it. It's like, this is the sort of thing in a more finely tuned film. You wouldn't find this or if you did find it, it would have some sort of important payoff later. Here is just there and you just enjoy it for what it is. It's just a gift that the movie gives you. Yeah, great scene. Yeah, no notes. There's also the scene where Demena kidnaps Matt Ryker. She chains him up in her place, tells him the whole plot, explains Zee's plot to create mutant, these mutant cyborgs. She puts a bomb in his head. He gets an implanted bomb in his skull. And then Demena wants to make a deal with Ryker. She's going to help him if he will get rid of, will help her get all of Zee's euphoron. Ryker says, sounds to me like you have a bad pleasure, Joe. Is that a thing? I guess we can go with the future. Demena says, quite the opposite. I've created something extraordinary. Zee thought he could use euphoron to break through to the next level of strength and intelligence. But all he did was create sickness and plague. He had the answer right in front of him all the time. He didn't even see it. Seems like more rubbing it in Hydro's face. It's like she's talking about Hydro. He's the answer. They was there all along. Yeah, but she's already kind of threatening. It's like Zee's sick plot. He can't actually pull it off. I'm the only one who can pull off the sick plot. Yeah, exactly. So Ryker talks Demena into deactivating the bomb implanted in his head in exchange for telling Demena where Darla is and then in the story. Oh yeah, she's like, all right. I'll do that. Yeah. And then he just elbows her and escapes. Yeah. There is a whole plot here where Darla and the already destroyed cyborg in Matt Ryker's apartment start interacting. The cyborg has half of its face blown off. The half that's still there is pretty mangled. As we were saying earlier, the effects in this movie in general can look pretty cheap and some of them are cheap but great. I was suddenly pretty impressed with this one. This is elaborate puppetry. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, Darla sees the cyborg up and moving around and freaks out. She sees it. I think she's just getting out of the shower. And it says, Doctor, don't be frightened. I can't harm you now. Our damaged chromo system demands that we kill every six hours. I will be homicidally inactive until 617am. That's great. Please, Doctor, your brother created us. You know our circuitry. I am in great pain. You can neutralize my killer impulse. You must help me. You must return to the lab. So for a second, I thought, well, wait, how sweet this is. This is about to become Bud, the mutant cyborg who is friend instead of foe. It's sort of that but not exactly. He then picks Darla up while she's screaming and telling him to stop and he ignores her and carries her away to Intel Tracks headquarters. This is another lift. This is another grappling maneuver for the cyborgs. This is the put her, heave her over your shoulder approach here. And then just carries her down the sidewalk while she's screaming and like nobody helps her. New York, yeah, bad place. Slime City. Slime City. So yeah, this cyborg is now not exactly nice, but at least homicidally inactive. He just wants help getting the neutralization of the impulse. So there's another cyborg street fight scene. We have a gang of euphoron heads who tried to jump a cyborg and get his euphoron. That's what they say. The cyborg fights back and then Johnny Felix, who is for some reason watching from some metal bars up above, intervenes and fights the cyborg. That was like bad strategy. Why not let the gang fight it first? I guess he's trying to make friends. I don't know. Now, Johnny Felix gives the cyborg a good beating. He keeps whacking it with poles and then he eventually impales its face with a pipe. And then after he beats the cyborg, the euphoron punks try to jump him. But Matt Riker is there. He's squatting on the roof and then he jumps up like Spider-Man and together our two heroes beat up the punks. I think two of these three guys are the ones who attacked Elaine in the club. I believe so. And I think we saw the other punk in there as well. Drinking the Jack Daniels. Yeah, the punk with the crazy hair, which is another one of these figures you just kind of assume this was a New York punk scene character or something at the time. While walking away from the scene, Johnny Felix and Matt Riker get a signal on their watches. They realize the cyborg in Riker's apartment has kidnapped Darla. So they go off in pursuit. There's a villain monologue scene somewhere in here where Z is talking to Paul, who is tied up on a table, very loosely tied up on a table. He's just laying on a table with his hands, kind of some wires looped around him. Yeah, these are meta material size simp. So that's how it works. There you go. And Z explains this plot. It goes like this, you get the euphoron, you put the euphoron in the cyborgs and then the cyborgs mutate. Now you have uncontrollable homicidal maniacs with the strength of 10 men. You sell them to the highest bidder. And Z says he has clients lined up all over the world. Somehow this makes you capable of global domination. Sure. That's what he's doing. In 10 meters, take a left at the pile of washing. Sorry, what? At the valley of toy dinosaurs, approach the kitchen with no room to cook. Turn right at the floor drope. You've reached chaos, recarculating, suggested immediate course correction to Ikea for fitted wardrobes, children's storage and cupboard organizers. Find your way back to calm. Discover smart storage at Ikea Greenwich now. Ikea, the wonderful everyday. At Intel Tracks headquarters, Matt Riker and Johnny Felix intercept Darla and Bud the cyborg. Bud the cyborg explains that he has been programmed to feel pain. Why? And that he can feel and he wants their help. And in the middle of the conversation, Elaine blows up Z's cache of euphoron elsewhere in the facility. And this causes havoc. But Bud the cyborg tells them, hey, I can show you the way to get through undetected. So follow me. Meanwhile, Domina has another scene with her mummy. She says she's going to unleash the Delta 8 on Z. Yeah, this is the Delta 8. The others have been Delta 7. This is the most advanced cyborg yet. She's got the best. And she says, and then we'll see whose combat units are the most expensive purchases on this planet, this planet at least. There you go. She's going to out ZZ. So she starts ripping off the mummy's bandages, revealing weird green runes carved into its back. And then she gets hot and heavy with the cyborg mummy. She just starts grinding on it. Yeah, suddenly her shirt is off and she's kind of like grinding against it. And yeah, I mean, she is just into this euphoron pumped Delta 8 cyborg. And this is going to be the most hotly anticipated cyborg on the market. Also, the more goop equals more power or more power correlation that's holding. Because when we see the Delta 8 cyborg revealed at the climax, it is the gooiest one of all. They say it is mutated beyond recognition. It's just dripping. Yeah, just ball, hairless, dripping, smiling, like just completely off its rocker. So here the character is kind of just running around in the facility. I think Elaine is blowing up the euphoron. Zee keeps throwing random grenades at nothing. I don't know what he's just throwing things that explode. And then there's a final showdown at the facility. So our heroes and their cyborg friend meet Zee and Paul, who is his hostage. Zee tries to tell Bud the cyborg that he can help it, but it's a lie. Paul tells the cyborg Zee made you like this. He made you kill. So Bud the cyborg then grabs Zee by the collar and hoists him high in the air with an arm stretch to create the image that's on the poster. We didn't talk about the poster. Yeah, there are at least a couple of different posters from back in the day out there. One of them is this amazing image of a cyborg slash mutant arm extending a dude into the air. I think that was the reason I ended up watching it. I was like, that looks awesome. Then quickly realizing this movie might not deliver on that image, but it does. It really does. And then the cyborg just throws Zee on the ground. Then we get another twist. Dominga shows up with her unwrapped mummy, the Delta 8. She's here to get her revenge on Zee, but by the time she arrives, Zee is already on the ground. So I guess it's just going to get revenge on whoever, which is all of the good guys. There's plenty of vengeance to go around. And so the fight starts. Matt Riker says, party time, Felix, party time. And everybody fights. Matt Riker squares off against the Delta 8. It's more fighting, basic kicking and jumping attacks. Elaine fights some other random cyborgs. At first, Johnny Felix just stands there watching with his arms crossed, not helping his friends. He's powering up. At one point during the fight, Johnny Felix yells, God has come out of the ceiling. What? I don't know what that means. But Elaine beats up some cyborgs. And there's a funny part where she kicks a cyborg in the crotch after she knocks it down. And this makes a metallic clanking sound like a ho. No crunching in this crotch, just a metallic clank. A little loony tunes action there. Yeah. And then Johnny Felix beats up a couple of cyborgs and then stomps on them. And we see him lift his foot up from stomping on them. And it's just sticky pizza. Yeah, just puified them. Pizza bubble gum on his shoes. And at one point, Riker in the fight jumps on the Delta 8's back and rides it piggyback. Yes, yes. But then there's the cyborg intervention. So the Delta 8 gets Riker on the ground, and then reaches out with its hand just holding its hand out to him. And then bud the cyborg, the now sort of friendly cyborg says, watch out, its hand, don't let him use his hand. And then Z shoots bud the cyborg with a laser. So he's done for. And then the Delta 8 hand starts to glow. It glows from inside like a salt lamp. And then before the Delta 8 can use his hand, whatever this is going to mean, Darla intervenes Darla, sister of Paul, she intervenes and shoots the Delta 8 with a laser gun. And that does it. Delta 8 collapses. And Matt Riker says, thanks ever thought about mercenary work? Elaine tells her, yeah, she'd be great at it. But here, Z still injured and on the ground, he's got to get one last pot shot off. So he shoots at Paul, but it's non fatal. It just hits him in the arm. And then Matt Riker says, I'm not going to take a bad guy out when he's on the ground. Just kidding. He shoots Z and then Z bursts into flames and then starts wiggling around making mechanical sounds. And I was like, what is Z a cyborg? That doesn't make any sense. Doesn't make any sense. But it does. It's a head scratcher. What would that mean for everything we've seen so far is Z himself was also cybernetic. Maybe he just has a lot of cybernetic parts. Like he's augmented himself a lot. I don't know. Oh, kind of like Johnny Felix, except instead of just getting a phone in his ear, he's parts all over. Yeah. When you're the Intel Trex CEO, there's all sorts of like brand new bleeding edge gear you can have loaded up inside you. He's like Alex Rain and Nemesis. He keeps getting his machine percentage out. Man, can you imagine totally different visual cinematic worlds? But can you imagine those two cybernetic visions converging here? It's like Jetsons Meet the Flintstones. Nemesis meets Mutant Hunt. That should have been a crossover event. Absolutely. And then the sort of the coda to the film is elsewhere on the street, a mother calls to her child who's out playing on the sidewalk below. And we see the child. And this is the Amber Dawn who was being called for earlier, who's like a little kid, not an adult. And the child locks eyes with the goopy cyborg who's down on the street there and the cyborg smiles. I think it is supposed to recall the scene in the original Universal Frankenstein with the kid and the monster. Yeah. I guess so. It doesn't really have any depth or meaning here, but it's just kind of a fun way to round things out. And I don't know. I can imagine an Amber Dawn character creating, establishing a relationship with monstrous cyborgs and eventually becoming either the Nemesis of Alex Reign or fighting alongside him. I don't know. Oh, wait, I have a question. I'm sure we do see, but I just forgot. What happens to demean at the end? Do we know? Great question. I have no idea if she just runs off. I don't remember her getting blasted or torn in half or anything like that. I don't want to say we don't see it because I may have just not remembered, but I forget what happens to her if we see. So good question. I will go as far as saying not firmly established. I don't remember it because, again, she was one of my favorite characters here. Okay. Well, that is Mutant Hunt, a Rob Strong selection, good pick. I love it. I'm going to order the disc. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, this one, I wish I'd had time for the disc, but as you mentioned, we were both traveling at the time and I just needed something to watch on the airplane for Weird House. And this is the sort of film that I find that if I'm flying, I need to watch a film of this caliber. I haven't completely come up with a reason for why that is, but this is what works for me. Films like this, films like Franken Hooker, these I need to watch amid strangers aboard an airplane. I was getting distinctly self-conscious about this older lady next to me seeing what I had on my screen while I'm watching it. I don't know. She needed to be exposed to Mutant Hunt. She's probably looked it up already and she's ordered her copy as well. I would hope so. That would be nice. All right. We're going to go in the hunt right here, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there if you have thoughts about Mutant Hunt or any of the films we've discussed in this picture, or films we've covered in the past in Weird House or films you think we should absolutely cover in the future. Reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder to everyone. Stuff to Boy, Your Mind is primarily assigned in Culture Podcasts with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays, we set aside all of that and we mostly just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema. Look us up on Letterboxed. We're a weird house. We have a nice list of all the movies we've covered over the years and sometimes a peek ahead at what comes up next. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow, Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.