Universal Piece of Shit

As is typical of crap cover art, nothing this awesome actually happens.

Holy shit, I just hit the motherlode of manky films.  Universal Soldiers has nothing to do with Jean Claude Van Dam.  It's way, way worse than that.  Another fine product from The Asylum, this movie tells the tale of a team of marines and scientists battling to survive on an island while being hunted by military cyborgs.  That sentence is the coolest and most dishonest thing you will ever read about this plot.  What really happens is that a bunch of amateur actors spend a weekend in the Southern Californian countryside wearing camping gear fatigues and carrying what are clearly toy guns.  They are being stalked by what appear to be homicidal glam rock fans who like to climb trees and kill their prey by throwing sharp bits of wood at people.

Military Inaction

According to Universal Soldiers, the best way to deal with a survival crisis is for everyone to march slowly out in plain sight then stop every 5 metres to have a screaming match.  The cast literally do this, taking it in methodical turns to freak out and step on each other's lines.  Subordinates are yelling shit at superior officers, scientists are yelling abuse at soldiers, and I'm pretty sure I saw one girl yelling at a tree.  But the acting is not my real grievance here.  These people were certainly paid gas money just to make noises.  No, the real gripe is a total lack of attention paid to detail.

I'm a bit of a gun nut hobbyist.  I like to know how they work and what they can do.  I've never been in the military, and the closest I've ever gotten to a live fire scenario is blatting off rounds at the local pistol range.  But for a military themed action film, the producers and cast seem to know so much less then me.  Within the first few minutes one marine is complaining about how low he is on ammo, despite the fact he is wearing a double bandolier of the stuff.  Yes, I know that no armed force has issued bandoliers since the 19th Century but - hang on, upon closer inspection this soldier is wearing bandoliers of empty brass casings.  My bad.

One unlucky grunt is packing a combat shotgun, or at least a Taiwanese toy factory version that's been resized for ages 6 and up.  They don't even bother to post-edit in any muzzle effects for it.  Instead the poor guy is seen simulating imaginary recoil out of synch with the occasional sound effect.  At one point, while trekking aimlessly around with the others, he even throws the gun down in disgust saying "This won't do any good!"  I'm not sure if that was a line or if he was just berating the props department.  Either way his commanding officer orders him to retrieve the weapon, just in case they get in a water pistol fight later on.

Then there's the other two marines armed with the heaviest fire-power the team can muster - a pair of plastic molded M-16 assault rifles.  Unless you really know what to look for, these rifles seem pretty genuine until they are fired in battle.  Once again, no post-edited CGI, so instead what they have to do when discharging the guns is attach what can only be described as black-painted party poppers on the end.  From my tenuous experience with The Asylum studio I have concluded that all their films share the same half a dozen toy guns, and that they simply can't afford a professional armourer to organise blank-firing replicas. 

They also can't afford any army consultants to explain, well, anything service related.  Like rank.  At one point, after Major Expendable is dispatched by a thrown stick, the squad's burly sergeant declares that he's taking comand, despite the lieutenant standing right next to him.  That same sergeant then, during a later imaginary ambush, orders his obviously disinterested troops to "Fall out!" and flees behind a tree for cover.  "Fall out!" is what you say when dismissing a parade, Sergeant Panic.  "Fall back!" is the universal command for 'run away and hide!'  In between yelling confusing orders and contrary tactical advice, he spends most the time running away from things he can't see while doing the same types of tumbling safety rolls that I used to when trying to impress Joanne Gladigau in year 5.

Military Cyborgs: part man, part machine, part animal?

There are 2 antagonist cyborgs stalking our heroes, a pair of army experiments to make super soldiers.  They look like a couple of Borg who got lost on the way to a KISS concert.  According to the somewhat baffling snippets of exposition, these volunteers have been biologically altered to be stronger, faster and more stupid looking than anyone else in the film.  At one point one of the characters who isn't even a scientist explains that the cyborgs can change shape and size through molecular control, which would've been kinda cool if they so much as bothered to do so while on camera.  In addition to having bits of metal arbitrarily welded to their faces, these guys apparently also have animal genes spliced in, presumedly to help them with their embarrassingly obvious wire climbing and wire flying abilities.  Oh, and like I keep saying, they are the masters at chucking wood at shit.  Even the third, ultimate cyborg - a 50 foot tall cartoon robot - uproots and hurls a telephone pole because, you know, a giant military warbot with inbuilt weaponry might give the tax payer the wrong idea.  The next logical step is to create a Transformer that turns into a catapult.

I haven't mentioned any plot holes yet due to lack of plot to perforate, but the supposed mission required to rid the island of killer cyborgs is to "reboot the mainframe".  Hmmm, unfortunately the film makers don't quite understand what a 'mainframe' usually is.  According to them it's a dusty old CRT monitor and keyboard sitting in the corner of a disused utility shed.  They also think that 'rebooting' means switching off all power on the island for a few minutes while still randomly tapping on keys in the dark.  Anyway, this convoluted process manages to shut down one cyborg, while being ignored by the other, and also activates the superbot.  Nice try, flesh-sacks.

Happy Ending (for the viewer)

Almost everyone dies, but who cares because the only hot chick survives.  How?  By pulling out the radio hidden in her ass for the last 80 minutes and calling in an air strike on the megaborg thingy.  The airforce arrives by using stock footage of 3 completely different types of fighter jet then firing a cartoon missile into the metal giant's chestoid area.  But wait, the pretend explosion had no effect!  Luckily for Pfc Perky the killdroid is standing next to an electricity sub-station so she fires a round into a transformer and the ensuing lightning bolts fry that fucker but good.  Because, fuck you, that's exactly how electricity works, okay?

I gotta admit, plenty of scenes in this flick had me laughing hard.  The cyborgs somehow being in two places at once, marines dying in depressingly horrible ways, and scientists turning on the troops because all the director wrote in the scene notes was "do some sort of plot twist now".  This movie managed to score a rating on the IMDB of 1.4 out of 10, but you can bet that it will still turn a profit for The Asylum and get screened on the Sy Fy channel.  These guys simply don't give a shit.