Steel and Lace 1991 (US, 94 minutes)

Tagline- Shes’ tough. She’s tender. She’s all human. She’s all machine

Choice  words-   “Pretty, very pretty” (every time Gaily kills an enemy )

         “I don’t have to take this shit from a ghost”-when Gaily confronts the last victim Danny at his office

Review-

Pretty standard fare about a vengeful cyborg who goes after her rapists to seek retributive justice after death. Gaily was earlier a beautiful and vulnerable young girl who was gang-raped by five men (one of whom was known to her) and thereafter fails to get them punished since the main culprit sets up his other friends as alibis. A distraught Gaily commits suicide by falling off from the court complex rooftop and her brother Albert, a former NASA robotics engineer, takes it upon himself to avenge her death by recreating her as a cyborg with the face and form of a stunning woman who would manage to charm all men. Five years after her suicide, the five rapists have become successful partners in a real estate business which prospers through blackmail and extortion. Gaily adopts the technique of seducing these men and then transforming into her old self and killing them in innovative ways-drilling stomachs and crotches during make-out sessions and perforating necks after business meetings. As the rapists start falling dead, the suspicion rests on Daniel “Danny” who has already alienated his friends through his greed and megalomaniac need to control the business empire to the exclusion of others.

The special effects and gore are minimal, though the film does offer some interesting moments and subtexts, one where Gaily the killer machine masquerades as CIA agent Spoon to lure Toby, one of the offenders, by offering him witness protection and possible suspension of  sentence if he collects evidence against Danny and deposes against him in court. Once outside the shady bar where they held their secret talk, the agent transforms into Gaily and then displays her paraphernalia of metal tools and decapitates Toby. In her first stage of transformation, we can see the expanding breasts of the agent with the male physique which was a bit off-putting and reminded me of the last scene in Frankenhooker where the male protagonist is killed by his similarly ‘recreated from the dead’ girlfriend with different body parts of street hookers, which include the face and body of a man and huge heaving breasts of a woman! From the subtext point, the interesting bit comes in when the undead Gaily questions her brother about her previous life, her friends and personality and he rebuffs her interest by asking her to focus on her mission, possibly out of fear that Gaily would get distracted from her programmed course if she develops feelings and emotions. Another intriguing portion came midway through the movie, when Albert dismantles Gaily and feeds her memory chip into a huge computer (it was the early 90’s remember) and watches with intent at the mens' faces as they are dying after being attacked by Gaily. This was similar to two other movies I’ve seen before, Peeping Tom (1960) and 10 to Midnight (1983) where the cameras are deliberately placed close to the victim’s faces during their last moments to capture the palpable fear and terror and to signify the perverse pleasures of the killer. In this case too, Albert watches the lurid images of gory deaths as though he is obtaining a vicarious sense of satisfaction and victory by viewing their actual deaths rather than having merely seen them convicted.

Apart from these few thought provoking moments, the movie drags on from scene to scene without much energy and without invoking any sense of enjoyment or involvement in the viewer. There is the thick headed detective Dunn and his annoyingly inquisitive girlfriend Alison who tries to link the recent killings with the suicide of Gaily all those years back, but cannot get anyone to believe her and has no proof of her doubts till she catches Gaily at the scene of murder and tries to follow her in order to get to the root of the mystery. Perplexingly, Gaily doesn’t kill the nosey Alison and instead takes her hostage as they go on their last killing trip. While Alison can’t stop the murder of Danny, her cop boyfriend and his troop does show up in the end and tries to apprehend the brother-sister duo, but instead give them enough space and time to commit suicide by recreating the Gaily death scene by stating-“There is only one safe place now !”. This last scene has to be highlight of the movie, for instead of stopping Gaily and her brother from killing themselves, they simply allow them to go ahead with their plans. I wonder if their action (read inactivity) was prompted by a sense of apprehension that the investigation would have involved a cyborg which would have surely been a  frustrating job for Dunn and his associates !

The film was released on video-cassette by Fries Home Video and is also available on Laserdisc from Image Entertainment, but till date it hasn’t been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.