Do you remember that scene in RoboCop where RoboCop shoots a rapist in the dick?  RoboCop nails the guy perfectly through the thighs and skirt of a would-be victim, doubly traumatizing her before ineffectively referring her to a rape-crisis center so he can swiftly move on to enacting more police-state violence elsewhere on the streets of Detroit.  The straight-to-video sci-fi slasher Steel and Lace is essentially a feature-length remake of that scene, except with both the rape victim and the avenging cyborg embodied by one character.  Curiously, it plays that violent rape-revenge scenario with the softer, melodramatic tones of a Lifetime movie instead of the tongue-in-cheek humor of Verhoeven’s classic satire.  It’s no less violent than RoboCop, though.  Directed by special-effects artist Ernest D. Farino—who cut his teeth staging kill gags for the likes of Charles Band, Roger Corman, and Fred Olen Ray—its revenge robot’s body-destroying gadgets vary from scene to scene, depending on the momentary whims of the gore department.  As the title suggests, it’s a wild mix of hard & soft tones, a volatile sentiment that’s echoed by its original tagline: “She’s tough. She’s tender. She’s all woman. And all machine.”

Originally scripted under the title Lady Lazarus, Steel and Lace stars New Orleans local Clare Wren as a victim of sexual assault who loses her court case against her gang of business-bro attackers.  While the ponytailed yuppie scum celebrate their legal victory, she leaps from the courthouse roof to her death, becoming a victim of suicide as well as rape.  Devastated, her techie brother (Bruce Davison) brings her back to life as a rape-revenge Terminator that hunts down each of her Reaganite attackers one-by-one.  She bores holes in chests, she sets men aflame, she decapitates; she even sucks one deserving “victim” dry during penetrative sex, using his dick like a plastic straw.  She’s also a master of disguise, often appearing as single-scene characters before removing her face Mission Impossible-style to reveal the robo-woman beneath.  That shapeshifting ability lends a fun air of mystery to the film, as the audience is never fully sure which minor character is going to be revealed to be the Lady Lazarus robot next: the hot secretary, the hot lady at the bar, the male FBI agent who’s supposedly investigating the murders, etc.  The cops on her trail actually solving that mystery don’t add much to the movie (least of all David Naughton as Detective “Clippy”), but the inventiveness of the robo-murders more than make up for their bland asides.

Much like the dick-shooting scene in RoboCop, there’s an unshakeable sadness that settles on Steel and Lace once the novelty of its over-the-top violence wears off.  Wren recites the mantra “Pretty, very pretty” to each of the investor-bro villains before disposing of them, righteously spitting their own words from her attack back at them.  It’s a cathartic reversal of violence during the first couple of kills, but it gets increasingly sad the longer she’s forced to dwell on it, especially when her brother makes her replay each act of revenge on video so he can obsessively salivate over them like homemade pornography.  Worse yet, she doesn’t really seem to know who she was when she was alive and attacked, asking haunting questions like, “Who was I? Did I have friends? Was I happy?”  The only other woman of the note is the courtroom reporter who sketched her throughout her trial (Stacy Haiduk), whom she frequently locks robo-eyes with in an attempt to make a genuine social connection that has nothing to do with her former self’s rape or her brother’s revenge.  It’s likely silly to seek genuine pathos in this straight-to-video rape revenge RoboCop knockoff, but the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome did such a wonderful job restoring it to a Fine Art quality that I can’t help myself.  It’s just as visually crisp & thematically meaningful to me as the time RoboCop shot that dude in the dick.

-Brandon Ledet