Every once and a while, unfortunately not very often, you encounter a film for which you had low or even zero expectations, but then it turns out to be surprisingly enjoyable! I used to always refer to "Scream for Help" as an example for this, but it looks as if I can now also refer to "Steel and Lace" as an example as well! Being a low-budgeted and early 90s Sci-Fi/cyborg rip-off starring a couple of washed up B- movie stars, I just started watching "Steel and Lace" with all my brain functions switched off, but it didn't even take 10 minutes before I sat there with a big and sleazy smile on my face! The very simple but ingenious premise can be described as a hybrid between cyborg flicks like "The Terminator" or "Robocop" and rape & revenge horrors like "I Spit on your Grave". The beautiful and talented Gaily Morton was the victim a gang-rape, but during the trial in court, the nasty culprit Daniel Emerson and his buddies are set free due a lack of evidence. The poor girl can't handle the acquittal and commits suicide by throwing herself from a rooftop. Five years later, Gaily's scientist brother Albert recovered her body and turned her into a hi-tech cyborg with as sole mission to eliminate her assailants one by one. The murders in "Steel and Lace" are downright fantastic! Disguised as femme fatale, she lures them to sleazy hotels or empty meeting rooms and subsequently disembowels, decapitates or viciously castrates them! Enter David Naughton ("An American Werewolf in London") and the ravishing Stacy Haiduk as respectively a police inspector and a freelance reporter; both investigating the murder series and both suspecting a connection with the infamous trial. Particularly the first half of "Steel and Lace" is a lot of fun, with even a handful of hilarious lines as well. Upon discovering the first corpse, who got killed by a drilling device coming out of the cyborg's stomach, Detective Dunn makes the intelligent remark: "It looks like someone dropped a bowling ball right through him". The police doctor's reaction is even better, as he lifts the sheet that is covering the body, looks as him and stoically says: "This man has a hole in him
" The make-up effects are very good, which shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, since director Ernest Farino previously worked in the visual effects department of such classics like "The Terminator", "The Abyss", "The Thing" and "Dreamscape". The second half is less entertaining, since it primarily focuses on Haiduk's private investigation and Gaily's human conscience that slowly develops itself again, but by then "Steel and Lace" already turned into a guilty pleasure for sure.
