There was a time in the mid-’90s when anything with the word “virtual” slapped on the cover promised the future — virtual sex, virtual crime, virtual this, virtual that — and Virtual Combat threw its hat into that cracked, overlit ring with all the grace of a Power Glove stuck on dial-up.
Don “The Dragon” Wilson, that stone-faced relic of bargain-bin martial arts glory, plays David Quarry, a tough cop in a leather jacket, naturally, who grunts his way through a digital dystopia where sexy VR girls are popping out of simulation pods and murdering people. The premise sounds promising if you’re drunk or concussed, and maybe it looked good on a napkin at Hooters, but onscreen it plays out like a rejected Red Shoe Diaries episode shot with a leftover LaserDisc budget.
The villain, Dante (played by Michael Bernardo, whose delivery is somewhere between a Mentos commercial and sentient dryer lint), is a “synthoid” — part human, part program, all dull. He escapes the VR world into ours, because apparently someone didn’t install a firewall at the police department’s wet dream simulator. He struts around town doing generic bad-guy things, leaving a body count as unconvincing as the CGI muzzle flashes.
Ken McLeod as John Gibson shows up, looking like he missed the audition for a Mentos commercial and ended up in a slow-motion kickboxing sequence instead. Greta (Dawn Ann Billings) and Cathy (Carrie Mitchum) are there too, blinking and breathing, maybe to round out the cast or maybe to remind us this is technically a movie.
But let’s not kid ourselves — the only one who leaves a mark here is Athena Massey as Liana, a synthetic woman brought to life from the simulation. She’s built like a Bond girl designed by an overworked programmer and acts with more conviction than this script deserves. Massey walks through this movie like she knows it’s garbage but figures she’ll at least look good while the flames rise. And she does. If there’s one pixel of pleasure in this low-rez mess, it’s her.
The rest? A grab bag of cinematic clichés, karate chops, and clunky cyber-jargon that would’ve embarrassed Johnny Mnemonic. Stella Stevens pops up as Mary, doing her best to survive the screenplay. Turhan Bey as Dr. Cameron looks like he wandered in from a completely different film and decided to stay for the coffee. Meanwhile, Michael Dorn lends his voice as Virtual Dante, proving that even a great voice can’t save lines that read like they were written by a fax machine.
And then there’s Rip Taylor as a pitchman. Why? Who knows. Maybe the producers lost a bet.
Every action scene is filmed like the cameraman is being held hostage. Every explosion looks like it was rendered on a TI-82 calculator. And the dialogue — my god — it’s like someone fed RoboCop fanfiction into a blender and hit “purée.” Lines are delivered with the emotional depth of an answering machine, and the pacing makes you wish the movie came with a fast-forward button welded to the remote.
Virtual Combat tries to be Blade Runner meets Bloodsport but lands closer to Techno Cop meets Whoops! I Married a Hologram. It’s a neon mess, wrapped in clunky exposition and padded with recycled sci-fi jargon. The fight scenes, supposedly the film’s bread and butter, are slower than dial-up and choreographed with the intensity of a Tai Chi class for retirees.
The Final Verdict
This isn’t a film. It’s an unintentional comedy skit that forgot to be funny. It’s a cyberpunk wet fart masquerading as a martial arts thriller. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll probably turn it off. But you will remember Athena Massey, because in a world full of bootleg VR rejects, she was the one line of code worth saving.
1.5 out of 5 broken VR headsets. One star for Athena. Half a star for the guts it took to release this thing to the public.
