CYBER CITY
(a.k.a: Shepherd)

Submitted by Danimal

THE STORY: Hello, boys and girls, it's the far future, and all life on the surface of the Earth has
been wiped out because satellites in space started shooting energy beams at each other. I don't
know why energy beams shot at satellites miles above the ground killed everybody, but go with
the flow, OK? Anyway, the survivors all live underground now, in great poverty and misery, and
a variety of religious cults compete with each other to keep the masses in their place. Nobody's
been above ground for a loooongggg while.

The Hero is a guy named Dakota. He's a Shepherd, which means he's a paid assassin for Religious Cult #1, the Church of Miles. Dakota's boss, Lyndon, is a meanie in an SS uniform. Dakota works in exchange for his "memories," which are glasses that play tape recorded home movies before your eyes. Dakota's "memories" are all of his wife and son, who were murdered some time ago by parties unknown. Lyndon provides these "memories," and, we soon see, alters them as he sees fit. Somehow Dakota knows this is happening and threateningly tells Lyndon and Miles that he wants the rest of his memories.

Lyndon orders Dakota to murder a woman named Lilith, who works for Religious Cult #2, the
Church of Sophia. (There's a Religious Cult #3, whose leader Rizzo speaks prophecies in the
same way that a bookmaker quotes odds, but he doesn't have much to do with the story). Miles
tells Lyndon to have somebody off Dakota after Dakota murders Lilith. Dakota goes off to kill
Lilith. But he is put off, like Chow Yun-Fat's John Lee from The Replacement Killers, when he
sees Lilith's cute, mute little son Abe. Dakota shoots a bunch of guys who were also sent to kill
Lilith, and also shoots the guy who was supposed to kill him.

Now the exciting padding begins. To make sure that Lilith and Abe are safe, Dakota brings them
right to Miles' underground storage locker. Lyndon and his goons pursue Dakota, Lilith & Abe (hereinafter DL&A). Dakota shoots some of them, and then the heroic trio escape. This scene has no purpose except to show some gunplay and to let Dakota give Abe his son's teddy bear. Then DL&A go to a cafe, where they see a nun burn herself to death. Then, for no reason, Lilith tells Dakota to get lost.

Meanwhile Miles and Sophia (leaders of the Religious Cults #1 and #2, remember them?) get
together and agree to cooperate to track down their two renegade Shepherds; apparently Lilith's a
Shepherd for Sophia just like Dakota's a Shepherd for Miles. Sophia will send her Tracking And
Cleansing Expert, Magdalene, after DL&A, and Miles will send more of his thugs after them
(there are 23 people credited as "Thugs" in the closing credits!) They are tracking the Shepherds down by use of special homing beacons implanted in their necks. For some reason, Lilith's beacon causes her great pain but Dakota's doesn't affect him at all.

Now the padding goes seriously surreal. Dakota goes to some hotel somewhere. The hotel
manager, who I swear to God was inspired by Dennis Weaver's character from Touch of Evil, asks Dakota if he's on the side of light or darkness. "I'm on the side that's going to kick your sorry ass if you don't give me a room," Dakota menaces him. So the hotel manager lets him in. Instead of going to his room, Dakota goes to visit a drunken ventriloquist played by David Carradine. The ventriloquist drugs him and tries to strangle him without any reason. Dakota escapes and finds some young thugs kicking the hotel manager's sorry ass. Maybe he wouldn't give them a room. Dakota ignores this and leaves. Then the thugs beat him up too. Then they leave. Are you following this carefully constructed plot?

Meanwhile, Lilith and Abe are sleeping in their car when they are visited by this creepy cannibal
guy. I swear he acts like Renfield with spiky hair. He does everything but shout "Lives! Lives!"
Renfield kidnaps Abe, but Lilith beats him up. Then he attacks Dakota, and Dakota beats him
up. How does this wuss ever get a meal? Dakota makes Renfield lead him back to Lilith, then
kills him.

So now Lilith goes off and finds Religious Cult #4, a bunch of peaceful-looking pagans, and starts
blowing them away with a very big pistol! She later explains that she and her husband belonged
to Religious Cult #4 until the cultists killed her husband. I was glad to hear this, because until then
it looked like she had just murdered a bunch of unarmed people for the fun of it.

Then DL&A go to a church-looking place that nobody else knows about and finally get in the
sack. Whew! Now that's over with. After an hour of padding, the plot finally starts moving
again! Magdalene, the Tracking and Cleansing Expert, drives up on her motor cycle, places a
flashing thingy on the door of the church-looking place, and drives away. The flashing thingy
never does anything, and Magdalene IS NEVER SEEN AGAIN! That's why they pay her
big bucks as a Tracking and Cleansing Expert. Maybe Lyndon is supposed to home in on that
flashing thingy, but that's obviously unnecessary because it was long ago established that Lyndon
could track Dakota without any help. Plus, if all Magdalene did was follow Lilith's beacon to her
hiding place, why didn't Sophia just tell Lyndon what signal Lilith's beacon was broadcasting?

Lyndon and his 23-odd credited Thugs arrive at the church-looking place and kidnap Abe.
Lilith almost dies from the pain of her beacon, so Dakota rips it out of her neck. At the same
time, Sophia and Miles learn about Lilith slaughtering Religious Cult #4. For some reason this
makes Sophia infuriated with Miles and she declares war on him. Lyndon has learned that Miles
plans to kill him, so he joins Sophia's forces in an attack on Miles' stronghold. We get to
see some very badly choreographed fighting. Sophia has some robots armed with
machine guns, but most of her forces are women who have no weapons and were clearly chosen
for their looks rather than their martial arts skills. I'm not being sexist here; I used to practice
Tae Kwon Do and I've met several women who were skilled and deadly martial artists. But these
particular ladies obviously have seen the inside of a modeling agency more often than the inside
of a dojo.

Lyndon joins Sophia's forces assaulting Miles' stronghold, because he's learned that Miles wants
to kill him. He finds Miles and CRUCIFIES HIM! Dakota & Lilith arrive and rescue Abe,
whom Lyndon abandoned. Dakota finds Lyndon, and Lyndon gives him glasses containing his "true" memories. These reveal that Dakota's wife had been cheating on him with Lyndon; Dakota's son caught them at it and Lyndon murdered both of them. Dakota now kills Lyndon, and Sophia and Miles are obliterated in an explosion.

Somehow DL&A now find a door that leads to the outside world. Abe somehow knows the
combination to the door lock, and they walk out and find that it has become a balmy paradise
while humanity has been underground. The end.

This movie has it seriously in for organized religion. Anybody who expresses any religious
sentiment is quickly exposed as a hypocrite and fraud (except, oddly, for Dakota at the end).
Heck, I'm an atheist, but I believe there are churchmen who are honest and good people; I think
this movie caricatures them unduly. Movies like this make a terrible mistake when they
underestimate religion; it's honest and sincere fanatics that represent religion's most dangerous
side, not the cynical, corrupt Bakker/Swaggart types that are lampooned here.

Dakota is played by See Thomas Howl (oops, wishful thinking there, I meant C. Thomas
Howell). Miles is played by everybody's favorite Roddy Piper, who looks like he's having the
time of his life! Heidi von Palleske plays Lilith; she is completely flat (no, dammit, I'm not
talking about her chest, I'm talking about how she delivers her lines). The only things she does well are to sound passably motherly when she talks to Abe and to look realistically in pain.
Mackenzie Gray as Lyndon is a pleasingly nasty antagonist.

This movie is pretty bad. The plot was about as unoriginal as they come, plus the religious
criticism is stupid and simplistic. It seems there's a direct-to-video movie every month about the
hit man/hit woman/secret agent who turns against The Organization, usually to save some
innocent; this movie had absolutely no idea what to do with this tired premise, so it padded out
half its running time with filler. At least the filler was so utterly irrational and bizarre that it
never got really boring. You could call it a by-the-numbers story, but where they went from 1 to
4 to 6, then back to 3 . . . well, you get the idea.

Best Lines: "Never rains but it pours, huh, Dakota? Whatever rain is." - Lifelong troglodyte Lyndon waxes philosophical while giving Dakota his next assignment.

"With any luck, this'll kill me." - Dakota drinks the ventriloquist's beer. It didn't kill him, but
his stupidity almost did.

"Time to kick some holy ass!" - Church leader Miles introduces a new interpretation of the
commandment to love thy neighbor.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?:

1.) Miles drops his mask of religious fervor and admits his hypocrisy while talking to Lyndon in
an early scene. Then he feeds Lyndon the old holy-roller routine for the rest of the movie. This
is ridiculous. Lyndon made it perfectly obvious that he saw through Miles and wasn't impressed
by his scripture-spouting.

2.) Important agents of religious cults have no bodyguards.

3.) These religious cults are portrayed as being as tough, corrupt and violent as the Mafia (Miles
even is made to quote directly from The Godfather). But when the final battle between Sophia
and Miles occurs NOBODY HAS ANY GUNS! They do it all hand-to-hand! Hello?*

4.) If I wanted to live, I don't think I'd give a man documentary proof that I'd murdered his wife
and son. Especially if that man is a trained assassin. And if Lyndon doesn't want to live, why is
he mad enough at Miles' plot to kill him that he joins the attack on Miles' stronghold and crucifies him?

5.) Paging the continuity editor! Lilith holds a gun on Dakota, but when we see her in close-up,
the gun barrel switches from silver to black! When we cut back to the master shot, it's silver
again.

6.) Dakota beats Miles' bodyguards to a pulp, tells him he wants the rest of his memories, then
turns around and leaves! That's asking for a bullet in the back, and I'm amazed Miles and/or
Lyndon didn't give it to him. Well, I'd be amazed if I didn't know this was a bad movie.

7.) Ripping an implant out of someone's neck is a remarkably easy and completely bloodless
procedure.

NUDITY AND SEX: Plenty. See Thomas Howl goes at it with Palleske and two other ladies.

HUH?: When Renfield kidnaps Abe, Lilith goes after him unarmed and ends up having to beat
Renfield up with a beam. But when she goes after Religious Cult #4, she pulls this HUGE
FREAKIN' GUN out of her backpack and starts blowing holes in them! Where the !@#$% did
she get THAT from? And why didn't she use it before?

What is with Dakota throwing away all his weapons? He brings this gigantic sniper rifle to kill
Lilith. The rifle disappears halfway through the scene. He gets an automatic pistol out of Miles'
storage locker for his next gun battle, then somehow loses that and ends up killing Renfield with
this sorry excuse for a knife that looks like some shiv a prisoner would make out of a broken cup.
Then he loses that too, and punches people out for the rest of the movie, until he somehow gets a
gun again in the last scene.

I still haven't got the foggiest idea why Dakota lost his memories in the first place, and ended up
dependent on Lyndon for these home-movie glasses. How could he know that some of his
memories were missing? How could he even know that the home-movies in the glasses Lyndon
gives him at the end were any more genuine than the ones he'd been given before?

THE TALLY: This is a very stupid movie full of non sequitur dialogue. It's so bizarre that it's
never really dull, and it has some funny moments (see Best Lines). Attempts to be serious are
laughably inane. Recommended by this Assistant Demon for two devils.

* Sophia comes up with a handgun at the very end, but can't hit the broad side of a barn, or Miles either for that matter.