Steel and Lace (1991)

Warning: there will be spoilers all over, but that’s okay, the film’s not making terribly much sense anyway!

When, after years of court sessions, the lies of his accomplice cronies help acquit Daniel Emerson (Michael Cerveris) of the rape of classical pianist Gaily Morton (Clare Wren) he did indeed commit, she kills herself by jumping from the roof of the court building.

Years later, Daniel and co have turned being human garbage into their actual professions, working as developers who still do their own thugging. So nary a teardrop will fall from the audience when these charming gentlemen are killed off – going by the sequence in which they committed perjury in Gaily’s case, no less – by a very interesting woman wearing many different faces, kitted out with useful tools like a giant drill in the middle of her chest. Underneath said faces is that of Gaily, though, for her clearly very talented and equally crazy brother Albert (Bruce Davison) has built a robot based on her, or turned her corpse into a cyborg, or something.

While that’s going on, the film also spends time with former courtroom artist turned fine artist Alison (Stacy Haiduk), who is revisiting some of her old courtroom drawings for a “then and now” project. She also happens to be the ex-girlfriend of the cop trying to solve the murders, one “Clippy” (don’t call him Clippy) Dunn (David Naughton), so she gets absurdly involved.

Ernest D. Farino’s sci-fi horror rape revenge movie is a complete mess, as if someone had taken about three movies with a similar plot but very different protagonists and tones, taken their favourite scenes, stitched them together, and called them a movie.

So expect a seriously played, if weird, scene between Gaily-bot and Albert concerning the nature of guilt, grief and revenge to be followed by a bit of exploitational horror in which a masked (that is, played by a different actress) Gaily first seduces one of her victims to then dispatch him in a ridiculous and gory manner, followed by the misadventures of Alison. That last part of the movie seems mostly made to provide the audience with more exposition than even the dumbest of us could ever need, and bring it to length without straining the budget.

To be fair, Haiduk plays her part in the boring bits of the movie with great intensity, an effort that stays in marked contrast with Naughton, who is looking so bored you’d expect him to drift off and pick his nose any second now.

The serious dramatic bits aren’t working out terribly well, either. Wren’s and Davidson’s performances are – to nobody’s surprise -perfectly fine, but the film never manages to distract from the enormous silliness of the whole cyborg affair, the sleazy way the Gaily-bot is kitted out, and so on, enough to make the melodrama actually work.

So, really, it’s the exploitational horror elements here that are memorable, be it Gaily-bot making a hug extra-special with her giant ass drill, Gaily-bot gender-confusing a guy before she decapitates him by impersonating a very weird and on first look male FBI agent with breasts, Gaily-bot castrating a guy (one assumes with the cutting vagina her totally stable brother must have built into her), and so on. These scenes are all pretty awesome tasteless fun, but they don’t jibe terribly well with the rape revenge motives. In a film with an actual brain in its head and something to say, you just might get away with a victim of rape seducing her victimisers before she kills them, but it feels less than pleasant in a movie that’s mostly about the cheap thrills. In this context, I can’t help but notice that this is a rape revenge movie where the victim doesn’t even get actual agency in her revenge, for she’s literally programmed by her brother to do what she does, and has no choice one way or the other.

A better movie might even have done something with this in combination with the glee Albert seems to feel watching Gaily’s kill footage – this one just lets these elements stand, with little idea what to do with them.