“You stick your tongue in my client’s mouth, and I’ll sue your ass off!”

Kaleb’s rating: A character named Johnson and an actor named Johnson, in a movie being reviewed by a Johnson.

Kaleb’s review: In the most unabashedly misogynistic portrayal of the future I’ve ever seen, love as we know it is a thing of the past. Traditional relationships are obsolete, with almost all women having effectively become extremely paranoid prostitutes, with pimps having been replaced by lawyers.

Wage slave Sam Treadwell, the gallant hero of our tale, won’t go for all that paperwork and artificiality, opting instead for just the artificiality, in the form of his smokin’ hot robo-squeeze, the titular Cherry 2000.

See, it seems that if one has the scratch and is in good enough with a shady artificer named Slim (what else?), one can pay a higher one-time fee, and become the proud owner/fianceé of a flawlessly sweet and obedient android babe. Sam’s friends think he’s crazy for not forking out chunks of cash night after night to have strictly-defined, lifeless sex with women who fairly radiate loathing and lack the etiquette to at least pretend the whole thing isn’t a tremendous chore, but Sam rationalizes that his relationship is ultimately no less genuine than theirs, and a fair bit more enjoyable.

Sadly, Sam — and by association, Cherry — falls victim to the old adage, “If you’re going to have a robot girlfriend, you should really get freaky with her in the kitchen.” Sound advice in most instances, except that in this case, soapy water from an overflowing dishwasher infiltrates Cherry’s inner workings through avenues not explicitly stated, and she goes transistors-up. How Sam is not also electrocuted, or why a robot designed to do what Cherry is designed to do would not be able to cope with fluid ingestion (not trying to be needlessly vulgar or juvenile, just sayin’…) is never explained.

Happily, Slim is able to salvage Cherry’s basic memory — her soul, as it were — which can easily be installed into a new chassis. The problem: Cherry 2000 bodies can only be found in The Zone (there’s always one of those) a dangerous wasteland ruled by Lester, leader of the Sky Ranch cult (kind of like Club Med, but with pillaging) and, all in all, the most positive and encouraging psychopath ever.

What’s a robot fancier to do? Why, hire a tracker, of course! Specifically, the spunky and Melanie Griffith-y E. Johnson — rather creepily also the name of my uncle — who is tough as nails and will totally change her shirt in the other room whenever she feels like it, without caring who sees her nipply silhouette!

Anyway, Sam and E. go on a road trip in her sweet car, there is an abundance of bullet-shooting, a really odd sequence involving deliberately getting the car snagged by a Sky Ranch-controlled crane, and Ben Johnson. Yes! Ben Johnson is awesome! My dad had breakfast with him once, and yours didn’t.

Through the course of the carnage — and thanks in large part to that special bonding effect that only carnage has — Sam and E. start to have a thing goin’ on, of the Me and Mrs. Jones variety. This, much to the surprise of absolutely no one. The whole weird love triangle resolves itself in a thoroughly predictable fashion which does not involve a partially-bionic three-way (Am I the only one who knows what sells?).

Okay, so there’s the real plot synopsis, plus harmless ending spoiler. The thoroughly-incorrect, imaginary, cut-n-pasted plot synopsis that I somehow came away with when I first stumbled across this movie goes more like so, relayed in the voice of the dopey stoner I have never been:

“So there’s a dude, who’s, like, this gruff bounty hunter in the future, or whatever, and he finds this robot chick out in a wasteland, or something, and, like, she needs help. I guess. They probably pork at some point.”

Yeah, I have no idea how I came up with that. You can see bits and scraps of the real movie in there, but I must’ve been half asleep or reading the synopsis out of the corner of my eye, or somesuch.

The reason I even bother to bring it up is that my hash-cloud synopsis is one variation on the basic plot structure of every Robot Chick anime in existence. If we were to flesh it out a bit more, the bounty hunter and the robot girl — who is, of course, an amnesiac and/or living under a false identity — would develop either a romantic bond or a father/daughter relationship, depending on the age gap; there would be comical fish-out-of-water moments and unassuming nudity; and the robot girl would ultimately be revealed to be either a) a state-of-the-art killing machine, stricken with conflict and guilt over her dark past, or b) a weapon of last resort against some world-threatening evil. In either case, she would get blowed up for the greater good. Throw in an ambiguous epilogue, and you’re done.

The interesting thing is, while I do love Robot Chick anime — probably my favorite genre, as a matter of fact — my initial discovery of Cherry 2000 happened back in the late 90s; a good half-decade prior to the Great Anime Renaissance of Roughly ‘04; that is, the point at which I really started to get into anime. This means that my eerily-anime-ish made-up synopsis was concocted years before I had ever even seen a Robot Chick anime.

It’s like, I was taking cues from my own future, man! All time exists simultaneously, or something! It’s pretty wicked! I don’t know what’s going on!

So anyway, I thought that was kind of interesting and worth sharing, but now that I’ve taken the time to write it out, I see that I was wrong. I actually lost interest about halfway through while writing it, so I certainly can’t blame you for skimming down to where the review becomes relevant and coherent again. Which is… now:

Cherry 2000: Not the live-action anime I was expecting, the titular Cherry gets maybe ten minutes of total screen time (still time enough to deliver some of the film’s best lines), the ending is kind of meh, there aren’t any standout performances, the plot is at times illogical, and the special effects are total cheese.

All is not bleak, however. I really like Melanie Griffith’s voice. It’s kind of… gooey. And of course there’s the previously mentioned Ben Johnson; he can class up any joint.

Like a grizzly bear made of liquid metal, this one’s kind of hard to pin down. As to where it falls on the Atrocity Scale, I mean. I’m vaguely aware that it’s a terrible movie, but I still enjoy it, and mostly unironically at that. So I guess I’ll give a cautious recommendation, and urge you to keep in mind that I have a mushroom cloud-sized soft spot for anything post-apocalypse.

And also, I dearly hope that everyone realizes that my last name is Johnson, and I was not, in fact, referring to myself as a penis earlier.

Didja Notice?

• Is that Laurence Fishburne? It is!
• Slim’s shop also contains Gort, and the robot from Lost in Space.
• Recycling portrayed as Orwellian drudgery. There’s a new one.
• E. drives the most complicated Mustang ever.
• It’s difficult not to like Lester.