Mutant Hunt (1987)

MUTANTHUNTI love in “Mutant Hunt” how after the hero Riker fights off the goons who can stretch their arms, cut off their limbs, smash walls, and explode when stabbed, the heroine looks on and proclaims “They’re not human.” NO SHIT! You think?! And you also have to appreciate a guy who lives in a house with white concrete walls, but still finds the time to hang weapons along the walls. All of which can work when he wants them to. No replicas for this schmuck. And seriously, who the hell hangs machetes on their walls?

“Mutant Hunt” is likely one of the many movies in the eighties that compelled so many hapless people to rent it based solely on the box art. The art for “Mutant Hunt” is pretty fantastic and most people likely went in completely crushed that “Mutant Hunt” is such a cheap movie. It’s so piss poor in the budget that the sets are extremely limited. So much so that the villain captures one of the characters and literally holds them hostage in the home of the hero! And for some odd reason the hero of the film lives in an underground parking lot garage of some kind with bare white brick walls with conveniently placed weapons, and a punching bag, for some reason. The villains all look like extras in Devo music videos, donning black jump suits and black sunglasses.

Why cyborgs need sunglasses, I’ll never know. Whenever the cyborgs malfunction, they spew yellow ooze that looks as if the production assistant poured nacho cheese on the actors. Taking place in the futuristic New York City (when it’s obviously just late eighties New York), we meet Riker and his friend Felix, two martial artists who probably went to the “West Side Story School of Fighting” as they literally do nothing but bounce around and jump back and forth whenever they’re fighting the evil cyborgs. The movie has almost no respectable plot, so there’s just nothing but filler. The filler is, of course, endless minutes of badly staged and poorly choreographed martial arts scenes, with hero Riker, and sidekick Felix battling the cyborgs with kicks and punches that always fail to hit their marks.

Does anyone have guns or knives in this futuristic New York or what? Director Tim Kincaid has an odd obsession with showing off Rick Gianasi’s body, as his biggest fight in the film is literally performed in his short white underwear in front of his girlfriend. He and the Cyborg bounce around and butt heads for ten minutes, and five minutes later, there’s yet another really boring fight that character Riker endures half naked. At only seventy minutes long, the writers only seem to have about thirty minutes of story, so there are just endless moments that are utterly baffling scene staged for reasons I can’t fathom. In one moment there is a young couple making out on the street, and they literally do nothing but watch as a cyborg kills a woman and rips her head off.

Even after the murder, and watching Riker fight and kill the Cyborg, they just sit there half asleep until it’s mercifully ended. Director Kincaid can’t direct to save his life, and has no idea how to create tension, atmosphere, or any sense of tone for a movie set in the ghettos of New York that we’re supposed to believe is the future. The final scene is laugh out loud stupid as our heroes walk from a distance side by side and victorious, but they’re so far away, it takes about two minutes before we can even figure out who we’re supposed to be looking at. “Mutant Hunt” is a ridiculously goofy action film, and one that rivals “Laserblast” in pure putrid genre entertainment.