The Vindicator (1986)

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely the worst movie.

Absolutely Fantastic

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Well I just got done watching this movie and it's a great flick.The acting's top notch for a production like this. The highlights for me were Richard Cox as Whyte and David McIlwraith as the Vindicator/Frankenstein. The story overall has its twists and turns and keeps you entertained.Some movies move very slow. The only thing that can be said about this movie maybe is that it moves a little too fast sometimes.I don't understand why James Rolfe from cinemassacre.com didn't like it. It's got a lot of drama, intrigue and action. Very recommendable.I don't regret paying those few bucks for the DVD at all.PS: One bad part - the exploding truck. Too much for my taste.

"The Vindicator" is a weird little Canadian B-Movie. At first glance it would appear to be just another cheap (extremely cheap!) "Terminator" knockoff, but strangely enough it also shares some qualities with the original "RoboCop," which hadn't even been released yet when "Vindicator" appeared (1986). Coincidence? Who knows? Anyway, the story is thus: scientist Carl Lehman seems to be a pretty nice guy who works for a super duper secret government high-tech research lab, reporting to a sleazy boss named Whyte, whom he butts heads with about project funding early in the movie. Carl's got a loving wife at home and a baby on the way, which makes it all the more tragic when he is suddenly killed in a "lab accident." But wait! Carl's not really dead after all! Whyte has extracted Carl's brain and inserted it into his pet project, some sort of experimental bio-mechanical space suit. When Carl wakes up inside his new body, he understandably goes a little nuts, trashes the lab, and escapes. This is a problem because Whyte (for reasons known only to himself) has programmed the mechanical suit with a "Rage Reaction" program, which will cause Carl to kill anybody who touches him for any reason. In hindsight, that little addition to Carl's psyche was probably not the best idea.So Robo-Carl wanders aimlessly through the movie for a while, killing a couple of random muggers and other assorted background characters, till he returns to his home and contacts his wife (this scene is supposed to be heartbreakingly touching, I guess, but turns out comical because Carl's robot voice is so heavily synthesized that you can barely understand a word he says). He of course tells her to leave the city and never come back because she's in danger, but she wants to stay and help him, yadda yadda yadda. Eventually Whyte hires a gang of commando thugs led by "Hunter," an apparent ninja assassin played by Pam Grier (!)to hunt down and destroy his runaway creation, using Carl's wife as bait, and predictable (but laughably cheap looking) mayhem ensues.I'm a B-Movie kind of guy but "The Vindicator" was so half-assed that it turned into high comedy pretty quickly. I'm assuming that a good hunk of the budget went into Stan Winston's robo-Carl suit design, because that actually looks pretty cool, but the rest of the movie suffers from a cheap, made-for-TV kind of look. The script could've used a LOT more work, but then maybe the filmmakers had gotten wind of "RoboCop" going into production and rushed to get "Vindicator" out so they couldn't be accused of ripping them off. Either way, judging by the other comments here on IMDb, I'm not the only one who's noticed the parallels between "Vindicator" and "RoboCop," and obviously "Robo" is the superior film, so there's no need to waste your time sitting through this piece of nonsense unless you want to see a film that can best be described, at best, as a rough draft of "RoboCop" if it were made by an 8th grader.

Scientist Carl Lehman (well played by David McIlwraith) gets blown up something terrible in a deliberate chemical explosion. He has his brain transplanted in the body of a nearly indestructible metal cyborg suit by his evil colleagues who are led by wicked obsessive fellow scientist Alex Whyte (a perfectly hateful portrayal by Richard Cox). Lehman embarks on an all-out killing spree. It's up to nasty mercenary Hunter (a wonderfully loathsome turn by the divine Pam Grier) to put a stop to him. Director Jean-Claude Lord, who previously helmed the under-appreciated slasher psycho thriller "Visiting Hours," stages the plentiful action scenes with considerable verve and maintains a zippy pace throughout, thus ensuring that this flick sizes up as an enjoyably trashy sci-fi/horror action outing. Paunchy character thesp Maury Chaykin easily cops top acting honors as disgusting fat creep Burt, who in the movie's single most tasteless sequence has a brutal fistfight with Lehman's pregnant wife Lauren (a winning performance by the lovely Teri Austin). Stan Winston's nifty make-up f/x and Paul Zaza's thrilling score further add to the overall sleazy fun.

Going into this movie, I was expecting a Robocop rip-off, what I got was a fairly entertaining Robocop rip-off that also reminded me of Darkman and The Guyver in equal amounts. Imagine my surprise then, to learn that this fairly obscure little movie actually predates all of those films by a good few years, and the only films that are blatant influences on it are The Terminator and Frankenstein.A brilliant Scientist is killed by his boss to be recreated as an invulnerable Cyborg who will obey his every command. However, when the control chip for him is detached, he escapes, visiting his mourning wife, while being hunted by a Bounty Hunter(played by Pam Grier) and the company's scientists and hired muscle, before he decides to put an end to their schemes.It's not brilliant, and all of the aforementioned movies, barring maybe the first Guyver, are better than it, but that doesn't mean it's not a fairly good B-grade Sci-Fi movie that never bored or failed to entertain me. The effects, done by Stan Winston, are actually pretty good, although the Cyborg's design could have been better, it's actual creation is excellent. Acting in the movie is fairly divided, with the main players all doing very well, but the supporting cast are pretty dreadful.Worth watching to see a sort of Pre-Robocop Robocop.