Verdict
Summary
Kino Lorber has just released a double whammy of both of De Jarnatt’s films on Blu-ray: Miracle Mile and Cherry 2000. Both have been reissued in brand new HD masters and look great, and include a ton of bonus features, some of which have been ported over from Kino’s previous releases, but some are newly produced and added, including De Jarnatt’s short film Tarzana, which is fantastic. There’s just a ton of material here for fans to enjoy, including new features, interviews, shorts, bloopers, all kinds of stuff, as well as two audio commentaries, so there’s literally nothing to complain about here.
Plot:
A man’s android companion breaks down, so he ventures into a hostile wasteland to retrieve the parts to fix it … and finds a very real companion to fall in love with instead … except she’s a badass bounty hunter.
Review:
An underrated little cult film like Cherry 2000 always finds its audience. It takes place at an unspecified time after the “Border Wars,” and people live in crowded and congested cities where they work in mass numbers at industrial plants. A man named Sam (David Andrews) goes home to his beautiful android wife and they make love but get a little carried away. She short circuits and he is heartbroken because she is an obsolete model, the Cherry 2000. He learns that the only place where there is another Cherry 2000 model is in The Zone, a wasteland patrolled by bandits and cutthroats. He takes her memory chip with him to a bounty tracker named E. Johnson, a feisty redhead played by Melanie Griffith, and he pays her to take him to the warehouse where the old android models are stored in the Zone. They immediately encounter troublesome killers (led by a hammy Tim Thomerson) and go through great means to get to the warehouse. At one point, their car is picked up by a giant magnet and hung over the Hoover Dam, which is an amazing sight, considering that there are two stunt people who perform dangerous stunts on the car while it dangles. E. Johnson does her best not to resent the fact that Sam is in love with a robot when there’s a perfectly fine human right next to him who’s lonely and ready for real love. In the end, Sam ditches his ditzy android wife for E. Johnson, and they go off into the wastelands together in happiness.
At times, this is more a midnight movie curiosity than a full-fledged post-apocalyptic action adventure, but the mix of comedy and action is interesting and it works. The director, Steve De Jarnatt made the arresting Miracle Mile, a sort of polar opposite post-apocalypse movie than this. The score by Basil Poledouris is one of his best. Written by Michael Almereyda.
Kino Lorber has just released a double whammy of both of De Jarnatt’s films on Blu-ray: Miracle Mile and Cherry 2000. Both have been reissued in brand new HD masters and look great, and include a ton of bonus features, some of which have been ported over from Kino’s previous releases, but some are newly produced and added, including De Jarnatt’s short film Tarzana, which is fantastic. There’s just a ton of material here for fans to enjoy, including new features, interviews, shorts, bloopers, all kinds of stuff, as well as two audio commentaries, so there’s literally nothing to complain about here.
