Natural City is a 2003 Korean SF film about cyborgs living with humans. It lifts it's look and feel from Blade Runner and Japanese Anime. A cop is collecting cyborg head chips to make a buck to pay a black market scientist to transfer the brain chip from his cyborg woman to a real woman. The cyborg woman is at the end of her 3 year life and the cop is all broken up about it. Can't do his job well and his boss is worried about him but not enough to do much of anything. The scientist wants to transfer the chip into a young prostitute's head. The plans don't work out so well as a rogue cyborg soldier drops into the story. The rogue wants to transfer control of the cyborg soldiers to himself. There's some good amount of battling going on when the cyborg and cops get together. The cops are no match for the cyborg soldier and they get slaughtered. Eventually they have to blow up the building to get rid of the rogue cyborg. The young prostitute is saved. It's all way too melodramatic and drags on way too long at 113 minutes. Still, parts were interesting enough that it might have been more appealing if it had been shorter and faster paced. There are too many lingering scenes with nothing going on. The CGI isn't too bad, a little behind the west for 2003 but passible. I'm not sorry to have seen it but I wouldn't need to see it again. You can find out if you like it, the whole movie is on YouTube.
Our second feature was The Relic. It's a 1997 Peter Hyams film with Penelope Ann Miller, Linda Hunt, James Whitmore and Tom Sizemore. Penelope is the scientist and Tom is the cop. She works at the Natural History Museum in Chicago, a thinly disguised Field Museum of Natural History. A shipment of boxes arrives from a colleague in South America. The ship some of the boxes were on had been found on the Illinois River with no crew or passengers. Tom is investigating, his partner thinks it was drug related, the bodies, torn to pieces in the bilge, makes him think it's something else is going on. That night there's a murder at the museum and Tom comes over to have a look at the dead guy. He's all messed up, head torn off, brain lying on the floor of the bathroom. The investigation puts a crimp in the big gala event. The museum hopes to make a bunch of money with it. A bum is found in the tunnels that go under the street, he attacks and the police shoot him dead, the guards wallet is found in his pocket so they allow the gala to go on. Of course the monster comes chomping and there's chaos for the rest of the movie. Penelope manages to blow the monster up in the lab and she saves her bacon by hiding in a water tank.
There was plenty going on most of the time and I enjoyed it. I'd seen it years ago and had forgotten most of the story. There's a good monster, some practical by Stan Winston, some fairly good CGI. The monster on fire was particularly good. The cast was ok. I'd watch it again sometime and if I find it cheap I might buy it too.
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