A killer cyborg grows a conscience and takes up arm wrestling in the astonishing 1986 Terminator rip-off, Hands Of Steel, on Amazon Prime now.
If it isn’t an adage among filmmakers and artists already, then it should be: if you can’t be good, then at least be outlandish. Not everyone can make a classic like The Terminator, but if you’re going to rip it off, then make something as weird as The Time Guardian – a half-forgotten sci-fi action film starring Carrie Fisher and Dean Stockwell. Or make it as unintentionally amusing – and sporadically exciting – as Eve Of Destruction, the 1991 killer robot thriller starring Paul Verhoeven regular Renée Soutendijk.
Among the numerous Terminator rip-offs that crowded into video shops in the 1980s, Hands Of Steel – which has appeared on Amazon Prime in the UK – might be among the most wildly entertaining of them all. Imagine if you were watching The Terminator, but all of a sudden Arnold Schwarzenegger grew a conscience, tore up James Cameron’s plot, and instead went off on a personal journey of romance and macho wish-fulfillment in the badlands of Arizona.
Imagine too that the resulting film somehow ripped off Sylvester Stallone’s Over The Top and Patrick Swayze’s Road House – before those were even made. That’s the kind of evening’s entertainment we’re talking about here.
Directed by Sergio Martino (here by the name Martin Dolman) and released in 1986, Hands Of Steel (or Vendetta dal Futuro) is an Italian genre offering that tries to make the most of a visibly tiny budget. It’s set in a near-future USA ravaged by poverty, crime and ecological crises; acid rain is so literally acidic that it can punch holes in cars, while there’s gloomy talk of terminal diseases emanating from dumping grounds of toxic waste.
Against this backdrop, a group of environmental activists is considered such a threat that its already frail leader, the Reverend Arthur Mosley (Franco Fantasio) becomes the target of a corporation whose pollution has caused much of the trouble in the first place. Determined to shut Mosley up, evil CEO Francis Turner (John Saxon) sends out a killer cyborg, the superbly-named Paco Queruak (Daniel Greene) to terminate – sorry, ‘neutralise’ – the poor chap.
At the critical moment, however, Paco goes against his programming, leaving Mosley badly wounded but still alive. Paco then takes a car and rushes off on a road trip, winding up at a remote motel run solely by Linda (Janet Agren). It’s here that Hands Of Steel switches genres entirely for a while; a destitute Paco pays for his lodgings by running errands and serving as a bouncer for Linda’s establishment, which also happens to pay host to a local arm wrestling tournament.
Big and brawny, Paco soon ends up participating in the competition himself, beginning with a bout against mouthy trucker Raul (George Eastman). Meanwhile, both the FBI and Turner’s small army of corporate assassins (including an ice-cold Claudio Cassinelli) are fixed on hunting Paco down.
As rip-offs go, the way Hands Of Steel casually pilfers ideas from other 80s films makes it quite unpredictable; just when you think you have a handle on where it’s going, it veers again into some other genre of borrowed idea – its late swerve into Blade Runner territory is simply too good to spoil here. The it goes all First Blood for a few minutes before its bewildering climax.
Not everything in Hands Of Steel works, admittedly; the FBI characters, even by the standards of this sort of movie, really are clueless, and fail to add much to the plot beyond some exposition (“Do you know what a cyborg is…?”). John Saxon, a stalwart of B-movies such as these, seems bored and even uncomfortable at times (though there may be a good reason for this, which we’ll get to in a moment).
Better known in the 70s for his work on some terrific Italian giallo movies (The Strange Vice Of Mrs Wardh, Torso, to name but two), Martino’s skill as a director still shows in certain scenes. Paco’s first display of arm-wrestling power is met with a superbly-timed bit of stunned silence. It’s also hard to think of many other films where its lead karate-chops the head off a snake. And the final 20 minutes is packed with some thoroughly entertaining and well-staged action, including a soldier running around with an absurdly huge laser cannon.
Hands Of Steel’s history has a tragic side to it that we’d be remiss to avoid mentioning, though. During filming in July 1985, a stunt which involved flying a helicopter under Arizona’s Navajo Bridge went wrong, killing both the pilot and actor Claudio Cassinelli. In the wake of the accident, the film had to be reworked so that it was John Saxon’s character in later scenes rather than Cassinelli’s.
That dark pall aside, Hands Of Steel remains a highly watchable footnote in 80s film history. Beyond even its sheer entertainment value, there are its connections to other movies. Donald O’Brien, who has one measly scene as a luckless programmer, was a mainstay of Italian cinema, including the original Inglorious Bastards from 1978. Janet Agren, who gives the best performance in the whole movie, also appeared in such genre gems as Lucio Fulci’s City Of The Living Dead (1980) and Richard Fleischer’s Red Sonja (1985).
Darwyn Swalve, who plays one of Paco’s arm-wrestling opponents, later appeared in Police Academy 6 and Barton Fink. Daniel Greene went on to become a Farrelly brothers favourite, appearing in everything from Kingpin (1996) to Peter Farrelly’s Oscar winner, Green Book (2018).
Listen out, too, for some catchy none-more-80s music from Goblin keyboardist Claudio Simonetti, which is only slightly diminished by its overuse. If you imagine that James Cameron had used Brad Fiedel’s unforgettable “duh-dun-dunn-duh-dunn!” theme for even incidental moments – like Schwarzenegger fiddling with a car stereo, say – you can imagine how it might blunt its impact.
Equally noteworthy is Hands Of Steel’s above-mentioned resemblance to Over The Top and Road House. Sylvester Stallone made the former – a big-budget arm wrestling drama – for Cannon Films in 1987, and was paid a reported $12m for his efforts.
According to Cool Ass Cinema, Stallone and Daniel Greene knew each other; they worked out at the same gym and Stallone even helped introduce Greene to Sergio Martino. Did Stallone somehow get the idea of arm-wrestling truckers from Greene? It’s impossible to say for certain.
As for Road House, the similarities between that 1989 film and Hands Of Steel are quite striking. In Road House, Patrick Swayze also played a stoic, muscular man with a murky past who becomes a bouncer in a rough-and-ready roadside bar. The place is populated by greasy guys in denim, much like those in Hands Of Steel. Swayze even dispatches one bad guy in a grisly scene strikingly like a moment in Martino’s film. Coincidence? Perhaps.
As you’ve probably gathered, Hands Of Steel isn’t some forgotten classic of action cinema, but it undoubtedly serves as a distilled essence of its era’s genre output. Sweaty, muscle-bound heroes; machine guns; cyborgs; cars that erupt in surprisingly huge balls of flame. Hands Of Steel isn’t good, but it’s definitely outlandish – in a quintessentially 1980s way.
Hands Of Steel is available to stream now on Amazon Prime, and also on disc courtesy of 88 Films.
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