a review of 机器人猎手

2021 Cult Movie Challenge Week 1: Fred Olen Ray Week Movie #1: DROID GUNNER (aka Cyber Zone) A surprisingly competent knock-off of Blade Runner with a little bit of Terminator thrown in for fun. It eschews the more serious existential and film-noir themes of its inspirations in favor of a plot focusing on certain aspects of the futuristic sex industry, with "pleasure model" androids as the central McGuffin. This movie takes a generally leering, borderline misogynist attitude towards sex work, with lots of randomly-deployed nudity and scenes of lady sexbots throwing themselves at the heroes. But it ultimately has some fairly astute observations about the relationship between arch-conservatism and the market for vice. Ray's direction makes the most of the horrendously low production values, and even the use of what has to have been stock footage for the outer space and underwater scenes doesn't look too obvious in context. It takes the movie a while to bring Marc Singer and Matthias Hues together, but they actually make a pretty good buddy-cop team with some surprisingly good banter. Rochelle Swanson gets saddled with a pretty thankless role as a straitlaced robotic tech who ends up having to impersonate prostitutes (both human and robot!) for most of the film, but she manages to hold her own and maintain a certain degree of dignity while navigating the obligatory romantic subplot with Singer.