There are many, many things wrong with this 1987 “Maxploitation” flop that had the misfortune of being released the same year as ROBOCOP (and by the same production company), which bulldozed it in every aspect. CHERRY 2000 nonetheless emerges as a conditional success, due largely to the performances of Melanie Griffith and Tim Thomerson, whose achievements are rendered all the more impressive by the fact that both were miscast.
CHERRY 2000 (1987) Trailer
The production of CHERRY 2000 was a troubled one. The script was written by future indie auteur Michael Almereyda, and Irvin Kershner the initial director. He was replaced by MIRACLE MILE‘s Steve De Jarnatt (whose prior directorial experience amounted to a couple shorts) just as production was about to commence. According to De Jarnatt, “I don’t think (anyone has) ever had as hard of a shoot as this,” and Griffith has called it her “least favorite” entry in her filmography.
The setting is a post-apocalyptic one, yet the film begins in a futuristic Anaheim suburb, in which the well-heeled Sam Treadwell (David Andrews) has found love with Cherry 2000 (Pamela Gidley), a sex robot. Thus, Sam is quite nonplussed when Cherry shorts out during a bout of bubble bath sex (one would think such a ‘bot would be waterproof, but never mind).
Sam heads to the sleazy Gloryhole Hotel, where he meets the working-class tracker E. Johnson (Griffith). She agrees to usher him into “Zone 7” in the Navada desert, where murder is commonplace and baked rattlesnake a delicacy, in her 1965 orange mustang (making the MAD MAX connection explicit). In Zone 7, it seems, there’s a warehouse containing Cherry 2000’s double.
The ensuing odyssey sees this pair tangling with Lester (Thomerson), a “total wacko” who controls Zone 7, and sends Sam and E. into a drainage tunnel of the Hoover Dam. There they meet Jake (Ben Johnson), an elderly acquaintance of E. who’s unable to prevent Sam from being whisked off to Sky Ranch. There he meets the high spirited Lester and his retinue, but manages to break out with E.’s help. From there the two make their way to the location of the Cherry 2000 double, which happens to be in a sand blanketed Las Vegas.
My verdict: CHERRY 2000 deserves credit for wreaking some interesting twists on the Maxploitation formula. The unevocative desert settings, however, could have been much stronger, as could the thematic content. The film has been proclaimed a feminist statement, and if so it’s an extremely dated one, with the idea of a feisty female heroine outdoing her male partner in machismo no longer as novel as it seemed in 1987 (these days, in fact, that gambit is pretty hackneyed).
The action scenes are competently pulled off but underwhelming, not least because the best such set-piece, the Hoover Dam sequence, occurs midway through, and nothing afterward matches it. In fact, the following sequence, set in the Sky Ranch, is so laconic it knocks the remainder of the film completely off course.
But as I stated up front, it’s the performances that make this film. Melanie Griffith cuts an enormously striking figure with her cherry red hair and endearingly disaffected air that isn’t exactly character-appropriate (the famously terse acting style of her daughter Dakota Johnson had its antecedent in CHERRY 2000), but does effectively counterpoint the sex kitten persona she cultivated in NIGHT MOVES (1975) and BODY DOUBLE (1984). Tim Thomerson, for his part, adequately captures his character’s jokey and high-spirited nature, but fails to impart the menace and devilish charisma Lester is supposed to exude. Oh well: at least he, like Griffith, is always fun to watch.
Vital Statistics
CHERRY 2000
Orion Pictures
Director: Steve De Jarnatt
Producers: Edward R, Pressman, Caldecot Chubb
Screenplay: Michael Almereyda
Cinematography: Jacques Haitkin
Editing: Edward Abroms, Duwayne Dunham
Cast: Melanie Griffith, David Andrews, Ben Johnson, Tim Thomerson, Brion James, Harry Carey Jr., Michael C. Gwynne, Pamela Gidley, Laurence Fishburne, Jeff Levine, Jennifer Mayo, Cameron Milzer, Howard Swain, Jack Thibeau, Robert Z’Dar