Movie Reviews : There’s Blood But No Guts in ‘Cyborg’

“I like scars--really,” says a girlish, love-starved refugee in “Cyborg” (citywide), trying to woo the bloodied beefcake hero with a little idle flattery about his battle blemishes. This movie too, jam-packed with clockwork bits of the old ultraviolence, is mostly for people who like scars--really.

It imagines a nasty future in which the survivors of an overwhelming plague slice and dice each other at length, often for no reason other than that they’re bad, they’re bad, they’re really, really bad. If you experience a little deja vu over this future, it’s because we’ve seen it dozens of times before, most notably in the “Mad Max” trilogy. There’s no vehicular manslaughter in this one, though; everyone just walks, all the better to engage in sudden sword and knife fights along the way.

The lead villain, a predictably leather-clad young hunk named Fender Tremolo, is the sort of unsavory fellow who will, as they used to say, kill a man just to watch him die. (Women and children too. Barbed-wire torture and crucifixion are a couple of his favorite time-killers.) As played by Vincent Klyn, this indestructible behemoth bellows homicidal instructions to his followers with the sweet voice and good will of a professional wrestler--or like the very similar sadist-in-chief of “The Road Warrior”

On the other side, there will of course be a sullen, silent type who turned mercenary after losing his wife and children to the savage pirates. He will of course be prodded back into righteous activism by the nagging of a new woman in his life. He is not Mel Gibson, but rather Gibson Rickenbacker, a.k.a. muscly Jean-Claude Van Damme--you know, “the first hero of the 21st Century.”

The musicians among us may have sussed by now that virtually all the characters are named after guitars or amplifiers. That little in-joke is the beginning and end of the wit to be found in “Cyborg,” which has as humorless and stupefyingly awful a screenplay as you’ll see playing on a screen this year. Script credit goes to a mysterious Kitty Chalmers--which, if it isn’t a pseudonym, probably should be.

But how much script can there be in a movie that almost never lets five minutes pass without unleashing another bone-snapping, blood-spilling epic fight scene? And although director Albert Pyun (“Sword and the Sorceror”) brings out nothing but the worst in the mercifully brief recitations of dialogue, he does know how to stage and pile up effectively brutal action sequences till you feel as though you’ve been through four world wars in under 85 minutes. It’s desensitizing violence in all its glory: You may cheer during the rousing slugfests, then hate yourself afterward.

Credit for the dumb fun must also go to cinematographer Philip Alan Waters and editors Rozanne Zingale and Scott Stevenson, who keep the carnage-filled proceedings as pretty as they are fast--and to sound effects editor Bill Van Daalen, who may have been the busiest man in post-production, given hundreds of loud jaw-socks and jugular-slashes to juggle.

“Cyborg” (MPAA-rated R for every manner of unpleasantness) doesn’t offer much hope for man’s civilized nature in the wake of disaster, but viewers may find one glimmer of light in its future: the seeming absence of firearms. These gangs were able to stockpile sharp kitchenware, but apparently the semiautomatic weapon ban had some effect in the 1990s after all.