646f9e108c In the original movie, the cyborg-teachers were all destroyed. Well that&#39;s what we thought, but there&#39;s one more rogue military robot out there determined to clean up the education system. In 1999, the future is a violent metropolis where gangs rule the hallways and themes like education and higher learning are a mere memory. Jenna McKensie is a young, sweet high school teacher who witnesses the killing of one of her students by lethal gang member, Sanders. Jenna wants to testify, but Sanders and his group use intimidation and feara means to keep Jenna from talking to the authorities, which greatly upsets her boyfriend Emmett who wants to stomp Sanders and his gang out. Though Jenna refuses to be intimidated, she begins to ponder whether or not her actions will improve things at the decaying high school where she works. Enter John Bolen, a stone faced substitute teacher who is not predisposed with putting up with crap like his fellow faculty members are. John is definitely a teacher who believes in discipline…extremely strict discipline. When students are out of line to the point where the principal can&#39;t control them, John takes it upon himself to show student&#39;s the meaning of the term &quot;Out of School Suspension&quot;. Jenna takes a liking to the silent, stoic substitute and feels she has found a comrade who is willing to listen to her problems. When Sanders and his gang attempt to do harm to Jenna, John shows up in the nick of time and defends her. Seeing that Sanders and his crew have no respect for authority or the faculty, John decides that it&#39;s time to take matters into his own hands to deal with these &#39;problem students&#39;. As the bodies start piling up, Emmett and the local sheriff learn that an ex-C.I.A. operative named Gordon Ash is in town and is tailing John. It turns out that John isn&#39;t an ordinary teacher after all: he is actually the last of a group of cybernetic military fighting machines who were reprogrammed to teach students in the worst schools and those who misbehave are to be strongly disciplined. And it just so happens, that Sanders and his group are at the top of John&#39;s &quot;Termination&quot; list. But then, something screws around with John&#39;s mainframe and pretty soon, he&#39;s targeting everyone for deletion…even Jenna. Can Jenna find a way to stop her protector before he demolishes the whole school. A lame, by-the-numbers science fiction thriller. Occasionally I don&#39;t know why I bother watching films; the feeling hit me when watching this. One of those absolutely pointless, low-budget sequels designed to cash in, this offers nothing at all of worth. The reason I got it? The pictures on the box, sad to say. They showed some androids which looked pretty good, but on actual viewing of the film, there is none of this. In fact the reason I watched it was to wait and see the actual special effects of the robots - which were shown on the back cover. Come the twist ending, I realised that I had been horribly mislead. The substitute of the title is in fact NOT an android, instead a de-programmed man who struggles with his human nature. What a letdown!<br/><br/>The only special effects of note are a few uninspired death scenes and shootings - but there&#39;s no gore to speak of, at least nothing isgraphicyou would come to expect. The film shambles on from scene to boring scene, involving us in stupid and pointless teachers who sleep together a lot, argue and fight. The acting is incredibly bad - even worse than in a television movie. The substitute bloke is played by someone out of KICKBOXER 2, which tells you something about the level this film achieved. I had a quick look at some info on the first film in this series, and was amazed to see the cast including Malcolm McDowell and Pam Grier. What happened here! We get one nobody and a whole group of non-actors and actresses. It&#39;s insulting.<br/><br/>While there are a few okay-ish moments involving the sub murdering the students he doesn&#39;t like, these aren&#39;t really handled very well at all. They&#39;re not violent enough and there&#39;s nothing memorable. What little budget was available was obviously wasted on some huge explosions, which are nice to look at but,is the case with the rest of the film, lack substance. How many times do we have to watch the android bloke walk towards the camera while something explodes behind him? To make matters worse, some interesting-looking clips are shown - from the first film, presumably, just to rub in what we&#39;re missing out on here.<br/><br/>The big finale involves happenings at a paintball game, giving you some idea of the tiny scale events are played out on here. You know it&#39;s a low budget film when the background is bare and lacking in decoration or other actors (as it frequently is here). Events draw out for a ridiculously suspended &quot;will he kill he or won&#39;t he&quot; sequence where the substitute repeatedly tries to kill the heroine before being stopped (either by himself or by somebody else). I could have told you the outcome from reading the back of the box. This is a film to avoid at all costs,it&#39;s entirely, utterly pointless. I&#39;ve gotta start by saying that I&#39;m quite a fan of both 1984, and it&#39;s massively entertaining, sort of pseudo sequel 1999.<br/><br/>originally watching this film when first arriving on VHS (as I said being a big fan of 1999, the mere sniff of a sequel was all it would take to sucker me in a second time) I was hugely disappointed, where were the androids? where was the dystopian vision of the school system gone crazy, where was Stacey Keach&#39;s fantastic haircut and scaryhell eyes? where were the effects, where was the gore?<br/><br/>Upon a recent, beer soaked viewing of 1999 I thought why the hell not, lets wind up the old VHS player and give it another spin. And ya know what I&#39;m glad I did.<br/><br/>Whilst this is by no ways a great film, in fact it&#39;s not even a good 1999 sequel, it does have some interesting ideas (most of which are thrown out the window)<br/><br/>It all looks very 90&#39;s in that crossworlds, warlock 2, kinda way and the point of the original is completely lost, but the idea of the substitute, fighting against positive emotions (e.g his unexpected and unwanted feelings towards Jenna) the fact that he&#39;s not even like a killer android, more just a literature spouting, psycho ex-seal suffering from a real bad case of green eyes, adds some sort of Frankenstein meets fatal attraction element.<br/><br/>The acting is relatively mediocre, Sasha Mitchel isemotionless and stiffthe character he&#39;s playing,is pretty much everybody else and the direction issimple and uninspiringthe soundtrack. <br/><br/>The twist ending just adds to confuse matters I mean If he&#39;s not an android it still fails to explain how he manages to fire continuously for about five minutes without having to reload once, or how he can still throw some unruly, orange jump suited street punk student through a brick wall, I know these seals are tough, but really?<br/><br/>As for the very final shots of Jenna getting ready to teach a new class, loaded up with Johns knife, gun, kevlar vest and a new mission statement, massively betray her character, turning the rule abiding, war game loving belief&#39;s of the android into an ideal, instead of a malfunction.<br/><br/>Yet despite all of this I still quite enjoyed it, fun if you fancy a cheesy 90&#39;s, lowish budgeted sort of scfi action thriller, it deserves better than 3.8, not much better mind but fun all the same :)
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