User reviews

"Cherry 2000" was a huge commercial failure and it's hardly ever mentioned today, but I found it surprisingly entertaining. Sure, the script is unimaginative and the film has no real vision and the action scenes are strictly routine, but the two leads are enormously, effortlessly likable. They make a deeply sweet pair. Maybe the film should have concentrated more on their love story and less on the familiar action aspects of the story. And the violence of a couple of scenes seems rather out of place. But even with its weaknesses, this movie is, fitfully, absorbing and very entertaining.

until I saw this film. It's absolutely hilarious. And Ben Johnson was just a treat. Melanie was never so pouty and sexy, but that Mustang she drove steals the show. A really underrated film with lots of very wicked things to say. This relates to Mad Max about like 007 related to spies or (Chief) Inspector Clousseau related to detectives. Well, it's not in the same class, but it takes a stab at camping the Road Warrior.

I will not attempt to describe this movie. It would be fruitless. You may at first be frustrated by the seemingly inept invocation of all the tried and true cliches of the "genre" - from Mad Max to its weirder post-apocalyptic cousins. But this is not Circuitry Man in reverse - it is much, much stranger. By the time the polka-dotted bikini-wearing ex-girlfriend of the hero is playing hostess at the disney-esque bubble-dome camp of the desert-dwelling homicidal outlaw gang... oh, never mind. By the way, Melanie Griffith was much better looking before lip surgery. Almost hot, in fact. But rest assured, this is a work of genius, exposing a deep understanding of the rift between genders during the height of the supposedly post-sexual-liberation 1980's, an almost sublime sense of humor about sexual alienation and most of all, the erotic link between women and cars in American culture is finally completely laid bare.

In fact, this movie is so profoundly subversive that it could only be made under cover of shlock. Do not be fooled by what seems like coke-addled acting and tourette-syndrome editing. This film is high art. Especially the part where the robot says "is that your hand?" Stay up late and watch it on TBS tonight! And take notes!

If narrow comedy is a thing, this is it. Most of the jokes are in the premise and signs on buildings. The plot has quite a few holes and things that just don't make sense. She tells him they don't want to be wandering around Zone 7 in the daylight, then they get there in morning and drive around all day. Was that a joke? The end was very predictable but I was still surprised for some reason. Definitely worth watching once.

Curious futuristic sci-fi offering has a sexy performance from Griffith and likable work by Thomerson, plus an intriguing high concept premise. It doesn't totally come off, but there's definitely some interesting stuff going on amidst the flaws. Scifi movies about the future often don't date well and this one is no different, but it's not without its charms.

Some action sequences are jarring and out of place; perhaps they should have concentrated more on romancing the two leads, who have nice chemistry. This is grade-c stuff, but somehow whenever I see it on the tube I pause for a while and check it out. Despite flopping when released, this movie has taken on a formidable cult status since. Might be worth a look, especially if you enjoy post-apocalyptic stories like ROAD WARRIOR or WATERWORLD.

Cherry 2k is a low budget one-off adaptation of the Mad Max concept mixed in with futurist technology ideas and a very cool love story. The male star goes on a quest to replace his lost robot sex android. That's the basic plot.

What's unusual is that this movie succeeds in mixing these elements without screwing up. The Sci-fi perspective doesn't overwhelm the overall plot, and vice versa.

Very few B grade movies from this time period were watchable, much less worth keeping in one's collection. Fortunately, Cherry 2000 bucked this trend and deserves a spot on the shelf of any cult classic and/or Sci-fi movie collector.

Sure it's all too obviously influenced by "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior", but it's still consistently engaging entertainment for cult film enthusiasts. Credit has to go to production designer John Jay Moore and cinematographer Jacques Haitkin for giving it just the right slightly futuristic look, and it's got some gorgeous rural vistas to take in. It's a little episodic, but it's also got some energy, and some nifty moments.

Melanie Griffith offers a delightful performance as female "tracker" E. Johnson (the E stands for Edith), hired by lonely man Sam Treadwell (a fairly stiff David Andrews) to take him to a dangerous area where he can find a replacement for his robot wife Cherry (Pamela Gidley). On their journey they run into colourful characters played by such wonderful acting veterans as Ben Johnson, who's endearing as Six Fingered Jake, and Harry Carey Jr., as Snappy Tom.

You know you'll be in for a good time when you look over that supporting cast: Marshall Bell, Laurence Fishburne, Michael C. Gwynne, Brion James, Jack Thibeau, and Robert Z'Dar. The always welcome Tim Thomerson has a particularly amusing role as an unconventional desert dwelling despot, whose followers have it in for people such as Edith. Overall the movie isn't overly flashy, but it's pretty exciting at times, especially the entire sequence with the crane and the water pipe. The soaring score composed by Basil Poledouris ("Conan the Barbarian", "RoboCop", etc.) is fine accompaniment.

Although Thomerson as Lester shows himself to be a serious psycho, this never gets too, too unpleasant, with director Steve De Jarnatt keeping the action moving and having fun with the offbeat little details provided by screenwriter Michael Almereyda (story credit goes to executive producer Lloyd Fonvielle). "Cherry 2000" does know how to send you away with a smile on your face. It may have gotten a limited release in theatres in the 1980s, but 26 years later it proves enjoyable enough to deserve a rediscovery.

Seven out of 10.

Filmed in 1985, but shelved and not released on VHS until 1987, perhaps the most telling thing about Cherry 2000, is that it's producer, Edward R. Pressman, reportedly confessed that the films distributors, Orion Pictures, were "stumped" by the films confusion of genres, which led to the long delay in it's initial release.

Seeing it for the first time, it's easy to see why it was such a marketing headache. For starters, it isn't really any good, however, in being a crazy mish-mash of bits of everything, and having the good sense to never take itself too seriously, it's hard to feel annoyed with it.

The film is set in the year 2020. Mankind has progressed to the extent that it's now possible to own a fully functional, supermodel, stay at home girlfriend (Cherry) who knows exactly how to treat her man – we never see male model counterparts. In the first scene, our lead character, Sam Tredwell, ( David Andrews) has a soapy, after dinner mishap with his own Cherry 2000 doll, which kick-starts the plot of him having to travel the wastelands of 'Zone 7′, to find another one. Yes folks, it's as ridiculous as it sounds.

Co-starring with Andrews is a jaunty looking Melanie Griffith, who seems to be playing a female 'Rambo', running and gunning her way through her scenes. Surprisingly, some of the stunt work, locations and set pieces are genuinely quite stunning, which makes it all the more a shame that the end result is such an elaborate mess.

Cherry 2000 is like Mad Max, but madder. It doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be, and ends up being not much of anything. That said, there is fun to be salvaged amongst it's bonkers sense of humour, and the people in it seem to be having a good time. A guilty pleasure for some, perhaps.

This is the kind of film that gets under your skin. One of a small subgenre of Sci-Fi Westerns, its small flashes of inspired writing make it worth watching some night when there's nothing else to do. Cameron Milzer is particularly notable as a blackly comedic psycho-girlfriend, but Tim Thomerson and Melanie Griffith are no slouches themselves. Pleasant bleak visuals and an interesting score from Basil Poledouris (Robocop, Hunt For Red October, & the Conan films, as well as 60 other movies) make for a modest repeat viewability factor. Fun and stupid!

A road-movie and science-fiction film, which has become a cult film, that is funny and entertaining despite the downs.

The film has a great inventive and a good premise, and the characters are, a priori, quite attractive. However, the script is badly developed, the acting is pedestrian, and the special effects are very cheap, so you end laughing at he result, not getting engaged by a futuristic story. In other words this looks like a spoof movie, instead of a sci-fic one, which is what pretends to be. If the movie had been presented as a comedy, and not taken itself not so seriously, I would certainly have rated the film higher, as I laughed more than with many comedies.

The cast counts with a very young Melanie Griffith in the role of the naive but daring E. Johnson, and with David Andrews as the sexy-hero Indiana-Jones of the future Sam Treadwell, who don't seem to have any chemistry on camera and do not shine in their performances. However, I found Pamela Gidley good and believable as robot Cherry 2000, and Jeniffer Mayo deadpan hilarious as Ronda.

Sometimes we need to eat a gourmet dish and others we fancy a burger. Well, this would be the burger!

"Cherry 2000" is a sort of post-apocalyptic science fiction Western, a cross between "Mad Max" and "The Stepford Wives". The year is 2017, thirty years in the future when the film was made in 1987. Following some unspecified apocalypse America is divided into at least two parts. In the big cities civilisation goes on much as before. The deserts of the American West, however, have become a lawless wilderness, dominated by violent gangs, similar to those in the "Mad Max" films, who roam the desert in cars or on motorbikes.

The film does not dwell much on futuristic technology, with one exception. The central premise of the film is that, before the apocalypse, science managed to perfect humanoid robots. The main character is a young man named Sam Treadwell who owns a "Stepford Wives" type female robot who acts as his housekeeper and sexual partner. As these robots are programmed to have warm and affectionate personalities and never have a headache at bedtime Sam is very happy with this arrangement, until his beloved short circuits during a love-making session on his kitchen floor. This presents Sam with a problem. His lady-friend was an obsolete model, the "Cherry 2000", no longer being manufactured, but he knows he will not be happy with a more modern replacement. (If the number 2000 was supposed to indicate the year in which Cherry was first manufactured, this is yet another in the long list of sci-fi predictions which have proved sadly premature- human colonies on Mars by 1987, and all that sort of thing).

Sam discovers that there is a supply of Cherry 2000s in an abandoned warehouse, and decides to recover one and install the previous model's memory chip. There is, however, one further problem to be overcome. The warehouse is situated in the now lawless desert, beyond the pale of civilisation. He therefore enlists the help if Edith "E" Johnson, a "tracker" who makes a living through guiding people through the wasteland, but in order to reach the warehouse they have to avoid the attentions of Lester, the leaders of the gangsters who now control the desert. Sam also runs into his former girlfriend Elaine, now Lester's mistress, and the sort of neurotic, foul-tempered woman who could drive any man into the arms of a robotic substitute.

The film is intended to be an action-adventure story, but it suffers from one fatal weakness; it stars Melanie Griffith. By playing a tough, sassy character Melanie was obviously hoping to get away from her bimbo image, but the inconvenient truth is that most of her best performances have come in films where she either plays a straightforward bimbo (as in "The Bonfire of the Vanities") or a bimbo with hidden depths (as in "Working Girl" or "Born Yesterday"). Here as Edith she seems hopelessly miscast. Her normal blonde locks are hidden beneath a lurid red wig, making her look like the second cousin to a Belisha beacon, but she makes no attempt to disguise her high pitched, breathy, little-girl voice, hilariously inappropriate on the lips of a tough action heroine. She would probably have been better playing the robot Cherry, the girl with the artificial, carefully manufactured bimbo personality.

There is occasionally some sharp dialogue; I liked, for example, the exchange when Elaine, told by Sam that her new boyfriend Lester is a psychopathic killer, snaps back "Don't impose your values on me, Sam". (This does not, however, imply that Elaine is deeply in love with Lester; her only reaction to his death is "Well, no sandwiches for him"). The action sequences are not badly done, but as I pointed out when reviewing the original "Mad Max" there should be more to a film than the quality of its car crashes. None of the actors make much impression, other than Griffith who makes an impression for all the wrong reasons. Overall, "Cherry 2000" is a rather dull bit of eighties sci-fi marred by miscasting. It is sometimes described as a "cult film", but cults, whether cinematic or religious, are often mystifying to those who are not already True Believers. 4/10

Cherry 2000 is a nifty B movie that takes place in a not too distant future where some unexplained apocalypse has occurred and made items that were once plentiful scarce. Human relationships have broken down so much that every interaction has to be arranged by lawyers and hooking up at a bar involves a lengthy legal contract. It's no wonder then that our protagonist Sam prefers to stay at home with his sexbot, a vintage Cherry 2000 model who is essentially a traditional subservient housewife. Unfortunately, during a frothy romp in front of the dishwasher his Cherry malfunctions, leaving him no alternative but to hire a guide to take him to the dangerous zone to find a replacement model at the robot junkyard. This guide turns out to be a spunky, independent woman (played by Melanie Griffith!) and...you can probably guess the rest but that doesn't mean it isn't fun getting there. While it's true that several plot points wouldn't hold up under close scrutiny this is a B movie so that sort of adds to the charm. No real complaints here and it was interesting seeing Griffith in that role.

It had been so long since I watched this movie that I almost forgot what a terrible actress Melanie Griffith was. She was worse than Keanu Reeves and as bad as Nicholas Cage.

This movie has a most excellent device that if it were to be invented would most likely cause the demise of the human race. Yes, the female sex robot. You just know guys would happily forgo real women for the super sex starved droid that can not have children, does not have that time of month, and is always in the mood. Granted it can only make you a burger and fries for dinner, but that is more than most women know how to do these days anyway. They could probably make a male version for females, but their heads would probably explode because no matter how hard you try to program it to act perfectly, it will still somehow set a woman off by making her mad, or by making her cry the robot would then just short circuit because no matter what it tries it fails. Yes, this is going to get me into a lot of trouble if my girlfriend ever reads this, but my sense of humor is very strange and I am getting a good chuckle. Well on to the rest of the movie. Man and his robot chick start having sex and water gets into the droid and it short circuits. Kind of a flaw right there as you would think they could make these things waterproof. Well he finds out it is impossible to fix and the dealer tries to sell him a newer model, but our hero will not have none of that as he is sort of in love with his bot and so off he goes to a bizarre forbidden zone to find another Cherry 2000 (the name of the particular model of bot he covets). He gets some help from a very attractive Melanie Griffon character and there is a cool scene with a car and a tunnel of water and then our hero gets captured by this weird group in the desert/forbidden zone place. He gets help from a lady he knows, but the main guy in this place is a tad insane, though actually somewhat friendly too. The movie is kind of all over the place because at times it is seemingly trying to be a comedy and at other times a Mad Max type adventure. So not perfect at all and not great, but it passes the time.

A recent article in The Telegraph predicted that, by the year 2050, human-on-robot sex would have overtaken human-on-human sex; I reckon they could be right if the robots look anything like this film's titular model, the Cherry 2000, created to fulfil its owner's every desire. Blonde, beautiful and obedient, Cherry (Pamela Gidley) seems like the perfect match for Sam Treadwell (David Andrews), which is why he goes to such great lengths to find a replacement body for her memory chip when a frolic on the kitchen floor results in some serious blown circuits. With the only Cherries still in existence to be found in the robot graveyard of Zone 7, a desert wasteland inhabited by dangerous psychopaths, Sam hires the help of pretty 'tracker' E. Johnson (Melanie Griffith), and comes to realise that his ideal woman might not be battery powered after all.

Director Steve De Jarnatt's other film, Miracle Mile, is an almost flawless example of '80s apocalyptic cinema—an extremely tense, darkly humorous, and touching example of low-budget film-making revolving around a compelling dilemma—what would you do if you discovered that WWIII was imminent?

Cherry 2000, a post-apocalyptic adventure that takes place in the near future of 2017 (next year, as I type), also poses an interesting question—will sex with a machine ever be as satisfying as the real thing?—but despite a much bigger budget than Miracle Mile, the film proves far less successful, thanks to an awkward blend of genres, its clumsy, episodic nature, and questionable performances. Writer Michael Almereyda and rookie director De Jarnatt must shoulder much of the blame, the slapdash story and chaotic direction leading to some really disjointed sequences, including one spectacularly ill-conceived action set-piece in which our heroes cross an obstacle via electromagnet. Griffith is the film's other obvious weakness—she looks lovely (even with her bad hairdo and dubious wardrobe of tasselled post-apocalyptic attire), but fails to convince as a tough cookie who can handle almost any situation.

Cult actors Robert Z'dar (Maniac Cop), Tim Thomerson (Trancers, Dollman), and Brion James (Bladerunner, Enemy Mine) join in the 'fun', but can do very little with the messy material (which might explain why Thomerson doesn't even seem to try). Also keep an eye out for an early appearance from The Matrix star Laurence Fishburne in a role that he'd most likely rather forget about.

Okay, "Cherry 2000" has finally achieved "cult film" status. But unlike many other cult movies, it actually deserves the title.

There are many things to like about this flick. The nuanced, likeable Ben Johnson has a good role that even delivers some tragedy (how often do you get that in a b-movie?). The charismatic Griffith is alternately contemplative and kick-ass. Of course, Tim Thomerson as Lester nearly steals the show, providing a truly strange, ruthless villain.

The effects are cheesy, sure, but they never look fake, unlike a lot of the CGI films coming out today. When you see E. Johnson's Ford being dangled over the Hoover Dam, that is an ACTUAL car, not some stupid digital effect.

The movie does lay its message on thick, but considering the obvious budget constraints they were working with, that's a perfectly excuseable flaw. The satire is at times hilarious (watch for Larry Fishburne's turn as a lawyer with Morpheus-esque reflecting sunglasses, and the final exit of the villain is truly visually ironic). I bought this on DVD (having never seen it on TV) and really liked it...maybe you will, too.

Utilizing that unique brand of '80s outrageous cheesiness, this movie maintains that fine balancing act between not taking itself too seriously and not making any sense at all; resulting in a textbook example of an enjoyably bizarre action film.

Overall its a disjointed mess that flirts between action, comedy, satire, and drama but never nails any part. It's very Mad Max (on a budget) and the overall plot of looking for a new sex robot is so unappealing that you can never like the main character. They try, but the script is just too messy to work.