As became the formula with most of Albert Pyun’s later films, Cyborg features a star recruited from the martial arts/kickboxing world taking on cyborgs/androids (which are always interchangeable terms in Pyun’s films) in a post-holocaust setting. In this case, the martial artist that Pyun recruited was Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was then not quite the superstar he became a couple of years later and was making a good deal of B-budget action fodder like this. Pyun certainly creates wall-to-wall action without let-up. He shoots with an overuse of slow-motion while filling the soundtrack with strident washes of synthesizer sound, something that makes for interestingly stylised approach to the action. However, there is no plot to hold any of it together – the film merely stumbles from one action sequence to the next. The action scenes go so far beyond the bounds of credibility that by the end the numbing chaos of wall-to-wall gymnastics leaves nothing of interest other than the pure mechanics of the ludicrous ‘hi-yaing’. As in Pyun’s debut film, The Sword and the Sorceror (1982), the film contains a scene where the hero of the piece is crucified and has to tear his own nails out.

While Jean-Claude Van Damme has some nifty, lithe moves, he is so insipid and inexpressive as a character that what dialogue scenes there are are left high and stranded. Vincent Klyn looks cool in his sunglasses but the wide-eyed and seemingly inexhaustible roar he delivers his performance at the top of reduces him to nothing more than a brute monster like Jason Voorhees as a villain. Cyborg must also be the first film where the characters are named after brands of guitar.