Boring

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Prolific exploitation helmer Jim Wynorski has whipped out over 80 low budget mellers in his 25 year career and has acquired a reputation for producing grade-Z schlock. "Storm Trooper," however, qualifies as an above-average epic for Wynorski compared to his usual nonsense. This uneven marital breakdown drama meets sci-fi shoot'em up relies on straight-up, dramatic human interaction rather than the usual impersonal relationships between synthetic characters. Mind you, "Storm Trooper" is nothing to rave about, but it surpasses the typical Wynorski potboiler. Indeed, "Storm Trooper" may rank in his top ten. The action is confined to a single evening, something you rarely see in these features so it observes the unities of time, place, and action.The Tannis Corporation loses a police cyborg prototype when one of two escapes from a high security military research laboratory, and the military scramble teams of trigger-happy thugs to recover the android. General Beckett (Arthur Roberts of "Big Bad Mama 2") contacts his superior at the Central Intelligence Agency, General Gardner (Jay Richardson of "Bad Girls from Mars") about the escape. Predictably, General Gardner is appalled by this conspicuous lapse of security. "If word leaks out about this operation of yours," Gardner asserts, "why it going to make those Watergate conspirators look like choirboys next to us." Meanwhile, a depressed wife, Grace (Carol Alt of "Thunder in Paradise"), shoots her abusive, highway patrol motorcycle cop husband, Randle (Tim Abell of "Sexual Roulette"), in the back. She blames Randle for the death of their eight-year old son Kenny because Randle had taken their son with him. The details are never clearly spelled out, but Grace remembers later how a kid who had no intention of shooting Kenny had shot him because the youth got in the way of his target. Presumably, the target was Randle. The android (John Laughlin of "Motorama") wears an outfit that he obtained from a human. The name on the outfit is Stark, so everybody refers to the android as Stark. Stark gathers a small arsenal, appropriates a motorcycle from an unsuspecting innocent bystander and tears off into the night. Anyway, the cyborg finds himself the target of a massive manhunt. He has an exciting showdown with one of its pursuers, McCleary (veteran character actor Ross Hagen of "The Mini-Skirt Mob"), on the highway. McCleary is driving an eighteen wheeler while Stark straddles a motorcycle and they hurl themselves at each other, except that Stark has an explosive device. Stark survives the high-octane encounter, but McCleary, the eighteen wheeler, and the motorcycle are fried. Starks staggers off to the house where Randle and Grace live. He shows up moments after Grace kills her husband. Grace's dog Rocky attacks Stark, and Grace drags the dog inside and ties him up. She still thinks that the man is outside when he walks in on her and she brandishes her gun. Stark collapses and Grace points her gun at him. "You've just come to wrong place at the wrong time." She contemplates killing Stark in cold blood and relents. Instead, she puts hand cuffs on him. At this point, Grace has no idea what predicament that she is caught up in with the man on her kitchen floor. Meantime, the military wants to end this nightmare before more people die and Deaton (Rick Hill of "Deathstalker") enters the fracas, but he has no better luck.Stark eliminates most of the hired guns for the Tannis Corporation and then discovers the corpse of Grace's dead husband in her bathtub and reverts to his protocol as a policeman and tries to arrest her. She blows Stark up and cherry picks weapons and apparel from the dead. One of the gunman, Corporal Roth (a miscast Corey Feldman), contributes an eye patch. As the last few minutes of this disposable 96-minute thriller concludes, our heroine who is pretty handy with hardware has decked herself out to look like Nick Fury on a motorcycle and then rides off. The best scene has Grace taking a shower with her defunct husband sprawled at her feet while she carries on a sarcastic, one-sided conversation with him that mimics his comments about her before she shot him. No, "Storm Trooper" has nothing to do with Nazi Germany, this contemporary for its time suspense-thriller is average stuff with not as much blood and gore as it could have used. The ending is better than anything else. Carol Alt looks as sexy as always, even though she doesn't show off her statuesque body. John Laughlin gives a thoughtful performance as the naive android who wants to protect Grace, while Rick Hill is good as the ruthless leader of an assault team.

Alright! A sci-fi/horror/action B-hybrid directed by Jim Wynorski and in the final scenes we get to see a cyborg with a defleshed metal head killing off multiple people! As with any Wynorski-flick, he throws in a whole bunch of crazy ideas and subplots that mostly don't lead to anywhere. But "Storm Trooper" is more like a two-movies-for-the-price-of-one kind of deal. On the one hand we got the drama/thriller part (as such the film opens) with Carol Alt killing her incredibly annoying & ungrateful husband (a plot that simply leads to nowhere). And on the other hand we got the 'escaped cyborg on a rampage' part, "Night of the Living Dead"-style. With Carol and the Cyborg being the ones trapped inside the house and a bunch of special OPs/bounty hunters playing the role of the zombies, trying to break into the house. Needless to say this flick is not up there with the greatest. Zach Galligan (of "Gremlins"-fame) especially is painfully bad and Corey Feldman (in a small supporting roll) is once again completely wasted on this movie. Wynorski even rips off one of his own movies here, since I am 99% sure he used some stock footage of his previous film "976 EVIL II" (the scene with the exploding truck and the motorcycle). Yes, it's so not good and so much fun. This is strictly for Wynorski-fans only. And I am one of them, in case you didn't know already.

**may contain spoilers** This film really is so bad its good. Everything about this film is badly done, from the script to the sets. But somehow, you have to keep watching, half (if not more) of the fun is waiting for the next tragically bad moment and then spending the next 10 minuets taking the mick out of it. At One point Grace (the main character) is trying to drag something like a terminator into a bath to hide him, it takes her about 20 minuets! she then tries to clean up his blood, she scrubs the floor for about five seconds and then genuinely says "that'll do" leaving a big puddle of blood still on the carpet. Another laughing point is that you rarely, if ever, see more than one person with a gun on screen at any one time, its like they could only afford one gun (and it looks like a prototype for mars attacks). funny, but for all the wrong reasons.

This film is not only bad it is poor. But, this one is so bad you have got to see it. I love really bad movies that are trying to be good. The acting is bad, the lighting is bad, the direction is bad, the lighting is bad, oh, well, you get the picture. When you have an afternoon free watch this stinker. While you are laughing it will be hard to remember, this is not a comedy.