Hands of Steel / Blood Hands

Gem of a film …
This movie was great and definitely worth a watch. The story line was easily comprehensible and the movie was well paced and moved along well. The performances were all well done. I particularly liked the character “Raoul Morales” but Daniel Greene’s performance was strong, and perhaps best of all was Janet Agren as the sympathetic, hard working, wants to do what’s right type. I also found myself interested in the world that these characters inhabited, where environmental degradation has advanced and the political movements are deeply influenced by ecological causes. The negative reviewers typically point to the films poor special effects (by modern standards) and cliched 80’s action feel. Those aspects are present, but they don’t make the film any less enjoyable. I highly recommend this film.

100% AWESOME 80s ACTION
This is not a “so bad it’s good” movie. No, no, no. This movie is 100% AWESOME. Regular hookers. Cyborg hookers. Arm wrestling. Arm wrestling with rattlesnakes. Truckers. Helicopter chases. Guys shooting rifle grenades out of shotguns. A laser that makes no sense. AND JOHN SAXON. JOHN SAXON!!! Watch this movie for the love of god.

Terminator Light, Really Light
This movie appears to be Italian made, and in many ways it inherits the history of the Maciste and Hercules movies made during the 1950’s and 1960’s. The movie includes a body-builder type running around doing feats of strength, all loosely tied together with a moderately incoherent plot.The underlying plot is that the bad guys want a good guy dead, and our protagonist, Paco Queruak, played by Daniel Green, is supposed to kill the good guy. Daniel Green made many appearances on television and in other movies, including “Me, Myself and Irene,” “Shallow Hal,” and who could ever forget his appearance on “Elvira: Mistress of the Dark”? His roles have typically been “muscle bound guy who has few lines.”The mover and shaker behind all the manipulation is John Saxon, who has about five minutes of screen time, perhaps just so that they could associate his name with the movie. Saxon has had a long and successful career with so dozens of movie and television credits, including “Joe Kidd,” “Enter the Dragon,” and “The Last Samurai.”After not killing the good guy, the whole rest of the movie is about the bad guys chasing the wayward bad guy, who is supposedly a cyborg. This movie has a bunch of titles, none of which seem to relate to each other. The title in the U.S. seems to have been “Hands of Steel.” The original Italian title was “Vendetta dal Futuro,” which, roughly translated, means vendetta of the future. Some other titles seem to include “Atomic Cyborg” and “Return of the Terminator,” recalling that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “The Terminator” was released the year before. Strangely, the title that seems the closest to the movie may be “Hands of Steel,” because our hero, Paco, ends up in some arm wrestling contests.Witness the excitement as our hero drives through acid rain! The excitement increases as our hero arm wrestles his way through a bunch of desert hicks in Arizona. See our hero tortured on the back of a tow truck! Yes, this movie is a ball of excitement from beginning to end. I also do not want to forget the scientist whose lab of carefully arranged dryer hoses is destroyed by the bad guys. Yes, this movie is truly cutting edge or any era.Sadly, Claudio Cassinelli, who plays Peter Howell, one of the bad guys, died in a helicopter crash during the filming of this movie. The helicopter somehow ran into a bridge and both the pilot and Cassinelli perished.One thing about this movie that I find strange is that the back story of the assassination still occasionally intrudes as the movie progresses, even though the back story adds nothing else to the plot. Perhaps it was supposed to heighten the urgency of finding Paco, but it fails in that. Paco failed to assassinate the good guy, the good guy lived, end of story. Someone else could have referred to his continued recovery rather than having any focus on him. However, the same thing applied to other scenes that have nothing to do with Paco. It appears that the director and producer wanted to find something else in their movie besides muscle man Paco running around chopping wood and performing feats of strength, and their answer was to throw in scenes of FBI news conferences, and scenes of the good guy recovering in the hospital.This movie includes other marvelous features, including a phenomenally low budget, and awful dialogue. I would complain about Daniel Green’s acting, or lack of acting, but Green was supposed to be a cyborg, so that explains the wooden expression.Even though this movie is filled with clichés of all sort, even though the budget was low, and even with the dated, repetitive soundtrack, this movie is actually watchable, which is why I gave it three stars. You do need to be in the right frame of mind to watch this movie, and you should have a penchant for cheesy movies about bad guys and rednecks running around in the desert chasing a “cyborg,” with a dash of science fiction thrown in for good measure. It appears that one of the titles attempts to capitalize on the success of “The Terminator,” but if that is the case you would have to call this movie “Terminator Light.” Indeed, because the cyborg part of the movie is minimal, it would be really light.Good Luck!

Great Italian scifi
Hands of Steel is an often overlooked Italian scifi movie, from director Sergio Martino, the director of the best Italian post-apocaplyse movie, “After the Fall of New York”. It stars Daniel Greene (the truck driver who died from “Falcon Crest”), as a cyborg named Paco Querack. He is ordered by his superiors to kill revolutionary environmentalist Arthur Mosely, but at the last second his conscience kicks in, and Paco lets him live. Paco is now on the run from the men who created him.With great music from Claudio Simonetti (of Goblin) and featuring the last performance of Claudio Cassinelli (who died in a helicopter crash during the making of this movie), Hands of Steel is an excellent scifi film (although not quite post-apocalypse).

Nothing wrong with the movie itself , but the delivery was shocking. The Package on the outside was good but the inside was broken???So i don’t trust this seller. It was good as new. Yeah right!

Très agréable petit film qu’est ce “Atomic cyborg”. Mais calmons-nous et ne crions pas au chef d’œuvre du B-movie si vite.Car ce film ne fait que s’inscrire dans la continuité des productions identiques de l’époque, que ce soit au niveau bruitages, musique (Pompée sur Terminator), scénario (Structuré comme celui de “blastfighter, l’exécuteur”, avec romance rythmée par quelques périls pendant les deux tiers du déroulement et final explosif), décor (On pense inévitablement à “Tonnerre”, bis de Rambo avec Mark Grégory des “Guerriers du Bronx”), et budget bien entendu (Ca, pour voir des effets spéciaux “robotiques”, faudra se brosser). Le manque de surprise est de mise, tant tout est convenu, du moindre coup de feu à la moindre cascade ou explosion, sans parler des personnages : Une sorte de mercenaire, Paco Queruak,(Qui est surtout un cyborg, rafistolé qu’il a été après un accident) manque d’achever sa mission qui consiste en l’élimination de “personnes gênantes”, et prend la fuite. Son patron, un type évidemment pas net, riche industriel sans scrupule (John Saxon) décide de le faire éliminer aussi. Paco se réfugie dans le désert, et prend gîte et couvert dans une gargote miteuse, tenue par une gonzesse qui louche bien vite sur lui, compte tenu du bat de beau gosse que c’est. Etant donné que le lieu est particulièrement désolé, tout ce qu’il y a à faire dans ce bouge est de jouer aux cartes, boire et faire des concours de bras de fer, bien sûr… Alors à partir de ce moment-là, c’est le festival : sueur faisant briller les muscles saillants, dents serrées sur des rictus soit méchants soit d’efforts, tablettes de chocolats, bastons pour sauver la belle, vous l’avez compris, ce film est pour les filles ! Ciblage pour les midinettes qui fantasmaient sur Rob Lowe et Patrick Swayze, on est en plein dans l’époque. Mais le bellâtre, robot de son état, ne doit être équipé pour tirer son coup que de ses inévitables calibres, et il nous fera d’ailleurs patienter jusqu’à la dernière partie du film pour commencer à utiliser sa cracheuse de plomb. Bon, le tout dure vingt minutes, il est vrai. Mais tout est attendu. Rien ne surprend. C’est juste agréablement rythmé, et la chute est nulle, en plus. Ce bis de Terminator aurait pu être nettement meilleur.On appréciera tout de même un clin d’œil à “Blade runner”, avec ce robot-prostituée qui se démasque en agressant Paco, lançant le long passage d’action final.A recommander, oui, même si ça ne vaut pas 2019 après la chute de New-York (Alors monsieur Martino ?), parce que c’est très plaisant, après tout…Un film pour les belles soirées d’été-barbecue, à regarder en mangeant des glaces.