STEEL AND LACE (1991)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological,sociological*


The "steel" of the title is a female cyborg-- apparently built in part from the body of a rape victim-- and the "lace" represents the sexy disguises the cyborg adopts to trap the men who caused the humiliation and demise of her original body.

The workmanlike story-- directed by a guy mostly known for visual effects-- has just one potential myth-moment in it. The film begins with a prologue, showing how a rich boy goes to trial for raping a young woman, Gaily Morton, and gets off because four of his buddies testify that he was never there. Gaily is torn up by this travesty of justice, and despite the efforts of her scientist-brother Andrew, she manages to kill herself. But before she dies, one of the script's writers shows his awareness of Greek mythology by revealing that "Gaily" is short for "Galatea." In Greek lore Galatea is a statue brought to life by the sculptor Pygmalion. STEEL, however, is not really indebted to that myth, but rather to the modern myth of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Andrew somehow gets hold of his sister's dead body and turns it into a cyborg-- which five years later, he sends on a killer rampage against the rapist and his accomplices.

There are naturally a couple of viewpoint characters-- a cop and an artist-- who become involved in figuring out the common thread between all the slayings. It's no knock against the writers and the director to admit that these are nothing characters; viewpoint characters are often not meant to do anything but serve as audience proxies. Nor is it surprising that the villains are one-dimensional evildoers. Emerson, the rich-boy rapist, needs only a thin mustache to make him into Snidely Whiplash, while his four accomplices are merely pathetic, whom Emerson treats like flunkies for having saved him from justice.

But the script might have done something with the Frankenstein-and-his-sister-bride motifs. Andrew's robot-making talents come out of nowhere and have no connection to anything except for avenging the death of his beloved sister. There's a desultory attempt to give Robot-Gaily a tragic dimension, in that she doesn't want to be a tool of death-- even though once or twice she seems to remember things that only Real-Gaily would know-- but the writers clearly made the cyborg's internal feelings secondary to coming up with slightly inventive ways for her to kill her victims. (Faint praise, but I did like the helicopter decapitation a little bit.)