I went into Steel and Lace (original title "Lady Lazarus" more creative if less of a good sell for VHS) expecting to make a hackneyed "well, how about that Promising Young Cyborg! Huyuck" line, and quickly realized that with Bruce Davison as really the one pulling much of the Sordid and Ultra-Violent Revenge strings this could actually be on a double feature with Ben (1971), which was his breakout role also out for payback (I saw that pretty recently so it's still on my mind). This would likely make the bottom half of the bill, however, as, aside from Davison being in too little of the movie to be we'll defined past basic lines, when the movie isn't having our hard cheekboned blonde badass Wren slaughtering these late 80s-cum-early 90s wannabe Patrick Bateman West coast jerks all but tearing them new a-holes (at least one of the effects sequences comes close to that), we have too much time with (sadly) dull Detective David Naughton not stopping the determined young former Courtroom sketch artist Alison (Haiduk) getting too close to the 5 years gone comeuppance crimes.
That part of the movie isn't entirely bad persay, but it feels draggy and the filmmakers don't do much to make us interested in these two and the very vague sense that they may have a relationship. The real meat of the movie is this vendetta with Davison as the brother of this woman who leaped to her death only to resurrect her and robo-Frankenstein a way for her to not only go in and completely and (believably) all too easily seduce these chodes to their gruesome ends, even as the how of Davison's character managing to... *do* all of this is meant to be explained away by "hey, five years," albeit a soggy exposition dump not being here is kind of nice. Who needs an explanation when good time can be spent with a this Femme Fatale model 001 dispensing justice?;
I think a slightly balsier movie would've had more moral wrangling with the court sketch woman, and Haiduk decent enough in the part she could probably do it. I don't think the director and writers are that interested in depth so much as moving things along so we can get from one set piece to another. In that sense it's also inevitable to compare this to I Spit on Your Grave, though thank God this is more exciting than that. It doesn't do a whole lot to distinguish itself as far as most technical scope aside from the special effects (though director Farino comes from that background), and even in a restored blu ray it looks fairly cheap and drab, but... look it - sometimes seeing a head coming bloodily off a body with what's left of the spine acting as a flailing decrepit member (intentionally? Not? I dunno my Freudian reading of it) is enough for me to give a solid recommendation.
