Waste of time

Sadly Over-hyped

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Just a note for convenience that this movie is alternately titled, "The Retaliator" on several online databases...just apparently not IMDB. Nor did it show up under searches on "retaliator" on IMDB as of the date of this "review".

THE RETALIATOR is a fairly middling entry in the field of low-budget TERMINATOR rip-offs which were all the rage back in the late '80s. There's an abundance of action, some of it done well, some of it done not so well, and a plot which also manages to drag in elements of ROBOCOP (the cyborg recovers her memory, which causes her to go berserk), but it's the low budget which ends up flooring this otherwise interesting epic-wannabe. Lots of the film takes place at night, which makes half of the action sequences hard to see and lessens their impact. The daytime scenes look and feel cheap and the film resorts to disorientating flashing lights at the climax in a vain attempt to be frightening.Location filming was done in Israel, to give the movie an impressive international feel, but even that's not entirely successful (yeah, so it's been filmed in a foreign country - it still ends up looking cheap!). The only people I can think would want to watch this movie are those who are fans of the two leads. Robert Ginty (a dependable B-movie hero since THE EXTERMINATOR) is on hand as a tough mercenary who gets injured a lot and runs around looking hard with a big gun, giving one of his customary stony-faced performances. Sandahl Bergman (CONAN THE BARBARIAN) is the female robot, and scarily looks like James Woods in this movie. Although she's saddled with really cheesy '80s big hair at around halfway through the movie, she still manages to create quite a scary persona by looking very alien-like. Bergman is given a good, tough role and gets to do lots of amusing things like talk to a computer over the telephone! There are a fair amount of car chases, cool car crashes, and plenty of explosions to keep things moving, along with lots of stunts (my favourite is when Ginty slides down the roof of a building to make his escape). The death scenes are frequent and often filmed so that they are powerful, with maximum impact (my favourite comes when the Retaliator squeals down a phone, bursting a guy's ear drum!), and there's a high body count for action lovers to enjoy. The violence level is high, with loads of shootings and people getting burned to a crisp, but the gore is low and limited to a severed hand and foot and there are no robotic special effects like the box would have you believe.Instead we must make do with some cheap rip-off robo-cam work which, whilst colourful, is hardly in the same league as the one used in THE TERMINATOR, or even the alien-vision in PREDATOR. Bergman finally gets cut in half by a bulldozer of all things, and the best effect they can muster is to have the old trick of burying her body in the ground with a gruesome body (severed at the waist) above. But the end result is that this has all been done before, on a higher budget, and with the style, suspense, and excitement that this movie lacks, despite the best efforts of a genre cast. My advice is to give it a miss.

Some five years ago, around the time of his untimely and unfortunate death, my movie buddy and I watched quite a lot of trashy Robert Ginty B-movies such as "Warrior of the Lost World", "White Fire" and – of course – "The Exterminator". We watched them as a tribute to Ginty, but obviously also because they always guarantee low-brained and ultra-violent entertainment. It's too bad that we couldn't get our filthy little hands on "Programmed to Kill" back then, because this also would have made a great installment for a Robert Ginty theme night. Although, in all fairness, it isn't Robert Ginty who steals the show here, but cult wench Sandahl Bergman. Also known as "The Retaliator", the plot is highly derivative of "The Terminator" (and arguably also of "Robocop", but it looks as if this film got released slightly earlier the same year) but correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think anyone is looking for originality or groundbreaking new story lines in an '80s actioner like this! Although a rather blatant rip- off, the script is nonetheless engaging and fast-paced, with plenty of gratuitous violence and cheesy dialogs. Bergman stars as Samira, a terrorist from the Middle East most wanted by the CIA because she herself is dangerous and because she's engaged to the brain of the terrorist organization. Together with her posse, Samira kills a bunch of tourists in Lebanon and takes two young American children hostage, but the CIA recruits mercenary Eric Mathews to set things right. The heavily wounded Samira is brought back to the States, but there she's secretly transformed into a cyborg and programmed to serve as a weapon against her former friends. This all goes well at first, but Samira's new circuits quickly go haywire and she turns against her masters. Once again, the reluctant Eric Mathews is brought in to save the day. "The Retaliator" – I actually prefer that title – is definitely a lot of fun while it lasts and features a couple of reasonably impressive and well-staged action sequences/stunts. In my personal favorite scene, Samira calls a CIA boss and kills him through shouting in the horn until his ears bleed. The climax is also quite exciting with a massive amount of explosions, machinery action and POV executions through cyborg-vision! Admittedly the film also won't make an everlasting impression and suffers from a few dull and pointless sub plots, like Mathews' troubled family situation. By the way, Ginty's teenage son Jason is played by Paul Walker – who also sadly passed away already – in one of his very first roles.

But the only line I remembered was the joke about "an E-ticket in Khadafy-land".This could have been an okay movie, if it had people who could act in it. Robert Ginty looks like he wasn't even trying. I don't think Sandahl Bergman could ever act, so I give her a pass.The plot is that a hot female terrorist is rebuilt as a killer cyborg so she can re-infiltrate her terror cell and kill all the terrorists. But instead, he programming snaps and she goes after anyone involved in either capturing her or turning her into a robot.The movie has some interesting scenes, and some dumb ones. I think it could have been an interesting film with better dialog, better actors. It also looks like they ran out of money at the end, with the final scene being shot at a private airport. The scenes in Beruit (or wherever) looked really good. The scene where he's infiltrating an office building, not so much.