Cherry 2000 is part cyberpunk, part post-apocalyptic, part comedy, part action, part drama, part romance and just a dash of 80s cheese!
(A very strange blend of worlds that made studio ORION very confused about what to do with the resulting film they made, resulting in the premiere being on VHS instead of in-cinema!)

I won't give away anything, just add that if you like sci-fi, especially the flavour of playfully cheesy 80s sci-fi, you'll at the least like this, at the most LOVE this!

Bang! We’re back into the 80s as director Steve De Jarnatt, could his name be more eighties, takes gives us a Mad Max/Blade Runner/Miami Vice mash-up on a budget. This could make the film dreadful, camp and hilarious – it does.

We start with every macho-eighties man’s fantasy feminine, attractive, sex-robots, tailored to your needs. So far, so yuck. Then we have Kevin-Costner-lite David Andrews as our hero who just wants his fantasy perfect sex-woman-robot thing back, perfect, like last time, with all the sex. This was after one particularly gross-out face-sucking scene where Cherry 2000 short-circuits. All that unbelievable technology and it’s not waterproof?

So far so ‘yeeeewwww’.

Luckily, we get to Brion James, Brion Jamesing up the screen, a sort of Blade Runner, Star Wars-style-bar with some lovely scenery chewing and finally a lovely young Melanie Griffiths actually playing a tough-guy women role perfectly.

I could help thinking that the same role a man would involve a whole lot of steroids, cheesy one-liners and macho posturing, whereas Melanie, considering the role and film underplays to perfection. She just seems to me to be a normal woman who happens to be good at this job in a tough world.

No showboating, boasting or look at me theatrics. For a low budget sci-fi, post-apocalyptic thriller her character was definitely taking a stance for feminism although it was still slight. Her mentor was an older wiser man, and she really loved not-Kevin Costner too, in the end. At least she was as grossed out by sex-bots as the viewer should have been – although I have a feeling hordes of teenage boys from this era probably were not.

The acting varies from good to ‘that’ll do it’s a wrap’ but considering it was 1987 and you can see the edges of the whole film creaking from the budget this was okay. David Andrews was not a convincing hero for me, and his character seemed to start off as a normal office-droid salaryman with a creepy love for a sex-bot and then changes to a less bulked Rambo near the end – tacking on his backstory as a war veteran doesn’t really cut it.

Tim Thomerson villains-up the piece in his inimitable Thomerson 80s-90s style but he is hamstrung by some cardboard cut-out, and once again, utterly incompetent henchmen that for some reason still work for him despite him being ruthless to the point of your life expectancy in this role being measured in days.

The script is a bit stilted and corny at time, whether this was by design or as I suspect more to do with the era is a matter for the viewer in all honesty.

The cinematography was actually enjoyable for me. This is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, set in 2017(!?) and rather than go dark, grimy and future-tramp-chic we get bright light and Don Johnson white trousers and Hawaiian shirts, a nice funny change. It is so eighties/nineties but within the genre so different.

The film zips along at a fair pace and does not leave you bored as we skip from one action scene to another as our heroes continue on their quest. My quibble is some of the set pieces, even considering the film that they are in, do not make any sense and seem to be more in the vein of ‘here are some locations and equipment can you fit the story around them, we have two weeks shooting time?’ The valley, mine, magnet crane action was both illogical in the extreme, made no sense in the narrative and was unfortunately silly, which was clearly not the intention of the director.

Cherry 2000 is from another time, not the future, and should really be viewed like this, Melanie Griffiths proves what a good actor she is and at least she gets a strong lead but of course she falls in love with the man and he rescues her. They were making steps in a new direction here folks only bear in mind it was the late 1980s.

An enjoyable movie, if only for just seeing what scenes and set pieces were influenced by what films and funnily enough how much Blade Runner 2049 could have been influenced by this film. Notwithstanding the late eighties, early nineties sensibilities this is an interesting brightly lit future noir restricted in its ambitions by its budget.

Whatever happened to Steve De Jarnatt surely a relative of Marty DiBergi?