I really need to talk about Mutant Hunt.
That’s a 1987 cyberpunk horror film, heavily inspired by The Terminator—it has no budget, actors who can’t act, badly choreographed fight scenes, and tons of gratuitous gore. And yet, despite everything wrong with this film, it somehow does a lot of things right.
For example, the costumes—while hideous—are incredibly memorable. The soundtrack is drenched in synth. This movie is 80s to the core, packed with maximum cheese and camp.
The plot? A genetic scientist does science stuff and turns humanoid androids (also called cyborgs… and, just to be clear, a cyborg is different from an android, but okay) into killing machines. He drugs them, which messes with their psychology—though the film explains it in a much clunkier way. The end result? These cyborgs start slaughtering people purely for pleasure. And man, are these cyborgs ugly. I mean, hideous. The practical effects are the highlight of the film—these things are nightmare fuel.
But let’s talk about the fight scenes. They’re inept. I don’t think anyone in this film has ever seen a fight in their life. One particular fight stands out—the bedroom scene where our intrepid hero, Matt Riker, battles cyborgs in his tighty-whities. And my first thought when I saw that was, this is kind of gay.
Because in a typical film, the director goes out of his way to show off the women—and the women in this movie were lookers. But no. Instead, the camera lingers on the leading man, leaving nothing to the imagination. Turns out, my instinct wasn’t off. The director, Tim Kincaid—who wrote and directed this film—later had a career in gay porn. He directed gay adult films for over 16 years after leaving Hollywood, and actually, he had already been making them back in the ’70s and ’80s. So, yeah—the subtext and undercurrents of Mutant Hunt make a lot more sense now.
But back to the film itself. Mutant Hunt is terribly written—just awful—but it has some memorably ridiculous lines. Some choice quotes:
“Don’t get me steamed, cyborg!”
“Who’d want to get a robot high?”
Hilarious. And I’m still wondering about the space shuttle sex murders—whatever those were—so grisly that now Inteltrax has government contract that allows them to hold anyone for 72 hours. Wow.
This movie is completely over the top.
I do have complaints, though. The streaming version is a mess. No digital remaster—it looks like a VHS rip, full of artifacts. It was unwatchable on my OLED TV, so I had to switch to my projector, which at least smoothed out some of the defects.
On the plus side, the audio mixing was surprisingly good. I complain a lot about how hard it is to hear dialogue in modern streaming releases, but this? No muffled voices. No absurdly loud explosions. I could hear everything without constantly adjusting the volume.
Here’s the thing: If I were living in the ’80s, walking into a Blockbuster, and I saw this on VHS—looked at the cover art, read the title—would I get exactly what I expected?
Yes.
This movie delivers on its promise. And for something like Mutant Hunt, that’s the best-case scenario.