Eliminators

Back when comic book team-ups weren't "in" on screen, an android (called a mandroid in the movie), a sexy engineer, her robotic pet, a treasure hunter and a ninja team up to stop a mad scientist who wants to transform into a cyborg and take over ancient Rome. But first they must battle lake pirates, deranged rednecks and Neanderthals. Eliminators are far from The Avengers in their disparate make-up and are more reminiscent of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And if The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are The Avengers of Victorian England, Eliminators are the Avengers of the 1980s VHS era. This B-movie masterpiece from producer Charles Band is a perfect encyclopedia of the clichés of the time and an entertaining mashup of all sorts of adventure and science fiction subgenres that, in its overwroughtness, beats even The Legend of the Golden Pearl. The charmingly nonsensical way in which Eliminators combines a huge number of then-popular action movies is reminiscent of the sight of a child playing with action figures collected from various shelves and inventing the most unlikely situations for them. At the same time, there's no shortage of occasional self-ironic adult commentary (“This is all some kind of weird-ass science fiction thing, right?”). The epitome of all this is the central mandroid (a sort of precursor to Robocop and Daniel Radcliffe from Swiss Army Man), who is made up of all sorts of interchangeable parts and tools that can turn itself into, for example, a tank or a jet ski. Come to think of it, the Eliminators would make damn good action figures. (29/06/2018)