My review was written in May 1986 after a Cannes Film Festival Market screening.
"The Vindicator" is an extremely strange horror/sci-fi film with too many plot twists for its own good. Filmed in 1984, feature has sat on the shelf for over a year at 20th Century Fox and is, unfortunately, not crazy enough to give Fox a follow-up to its midnight hit "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".
As its alternate title "Frankenstein '88" implies, pic is yet another update of the Mary Shelley classic. For the space program, scientist Alex Whyte (Richard Cox) is working on creating a nearly indestructible cyborg using a human brain, metal body and special computer hookup with programming from his Primates Lab's "rage reinforcement" experiments on chimpanzees. This hookup causes the cyborg to react violently and lethally to any threatening stimulus, unless ordered off by a remote control device.
Whyte's colleague Carl Lehman (David McIlwraith) is angry at Whyte for diverting research funds to his own experiments, and Whyte has a henchman kill Lehman in a lab explosion. Using Lehman's corpse, Whyte creates the first of his Frankenstein monsters, but the creature escapes before the remote control unit is attached to it, making it a deadly monster that will attack anything that approaches it.
Although a ruthless killer, the creature still has Lehman's memories, making it a self-divided, rather pathetic being. Lehman's pregnant wife Lauren (Terri Austin) tries to help it while Whyte hires a talented and ruthless female bounty hunter (guest star Pam Grier) to track it down and destroy it.
This familiar story provides the springboard for a dizzying array of mostly unconvincing plot twists, particularly in the final two reels when one is never certain who is going to pop up and get the drop on whom next. Because the artificial (post-synchronized) dialog is so cliched and silly, the net effect of rather well-staged action sequences is a horror parody.
Earnest cast, especially the pretty but unpersuasive leading lady Terri Austin, is laughable, with even Pam Grier making very little of a patented macha role. Tech credits are okay though the lab facility looks more like a shopping mall than a high-security installation. The Frankenstein monster designed by Stan Winston Studio has a new look, in its tattered state (and backlit) closer to The Mummy than the original Karloff makeup job.
