I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

THE RETALIATOR is a fairly middling entry in the field of low-budget TERMINATOR rip-offs which were all the rage back in the late '80s. There's an abundance of action, some of it done well, some of it done not so well, and a plot which also manages to drag in elements of ROBOCOP (the cyborg recovers her memory, which causes her to go berserk), but it's the low budget which ends up flooring this otherwise interesting epic-wannabe. Lots of the film takes place at night, which makes half of the action sequences hard to see and lessens their impact. The daytime scenes look and feel cheap and the film resorts to disorientating flashing lights at the climax in a vain attempt to be frightening.Location filming was done in Israel, to give the movie an impressive international feel, but even that's not entirely successful (yeah, so it's been filmed in a foreign country - it still ends up looking cheap!). The only people I can think would want to watch this movie are those who are fans of the two leads. Robert Ginty (a dependable B-movie hero since THE EXTERMINATOR) is on hand as a tough mercenary who gets injured a lot and runs around looking hard with a big gun, giving one of his customary stony-faced performances. Sandahl Bergman (CONAN THE BARBARIAN) is the female robot, and scarily looks like James Woods in this movie. Although she's saddled with really cheesy '80s big hair at around halfway through the movie, she still manages to create quite a scary persona by looking very alien-like. Bergman is given a good, tough role and gets to do lots of amusing things like talk to a computer over the telephone! There are a fair amount of car chases, cool car crashes, and plenty of explosions to keep things moving, along with lots of stunts (my favourite is when Ginty slides down the roof of a building to make his escape). The death scenes are frequent and often filmed so that they are powerful, with maximum impact (my favourite comes when the Retaliator squeals down a phone, bursting a guy's ear drum!), and there's a high body count for action lovers to enjoy. The violence level is high, with loads of shootings and people getting burned to a crisp, but the gore is low and limited to a severed hand and foot and there are no robotic special effects like the box would have you believe.Instead we must make do with some cheap rip-off robo-cam work which, whilst colourful, is hardly in the same league as the one used in THE TERMINATOR, or even the alien-vision in PREDATOR. Bergman finally gets cut in half by a bulldozer of all things, and the best effect they can muster is to have the old trick of burying her body in the ground with a gruesome body (severed at the waist) above. But the end result is that this has all been done before, on a higher budget, and with the style, suspense, and excitement that this movie lacks, despite the best efforts of a genre cast. My advice is to give it a miss.

OK, you have seen Universal Soldier with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren. A real macho film.This film came out five years earlier, and feature a female in the lead role - Golden Globe winner Sandahl Bergman (Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja).It's a mostly forgettable movie, but it is interesting in the fact that it is really timely right now. Bergman plays a Middle Eastern terrorist who is captured and turn against her friends after some nifty programming like the Universal Soldiers. But, as you may suspect, something goes wrong and she goes after those that cyborg-ed her.I really only tuned into it because the initial action took place in Crete, and I couldn't resist that. Heck, I might have been there playing in a softball tournament when they were filming.

"The Retaliator" / "Programmed To Kill" would probably have been better if it had focused more on Sandahl Bergman's nearly unstoppable robot / killing machine and less on Robert Ginty's CIA agent / mercenary. In the pantheon of 1980's action stars, Ginty ranks pretty low. He just doesn't have much charisma. His family troubles in this movie are dull, and his reckless character is not very likable (at one point, he even blows up a jeep full of American security guards just doing their job - trying to protect the government facility that he had just infiltrated!). Bergman is a good pick for the part of a female killing machine, but the script barely even gives her any speaking lines, and the budget doesn't allow for much in the way of special effects and extra powers. Some fine stunts, but too many of the action scenes are filmed in near-darkness. Pretty forgettable, all in all. *1/2 out of 4.

Still-timely plot involving a female Middle Eastern terrorist who is caught and re-programmed to go after her former comrades ... all well and good, until the programming goes awry. Straightforward, simple plotting, the action is never allowed to lapse, AND ... this will never happen again ... NO political grandstanding on who is right and wrong in the Middle East situation. Suitably unpretentious production and very workmanlike acting all around, and Sandahl Bergman turns in a rather unnerving performance as Samira, the death machine; the only other actress this good in such a role at the time was Claire Wren in "Steel and Lace," another movie which will appeal to those who like this one. This movie cries out for a remake, maybe with Michelle Rodriguez, though it won't happen; a DVD release of this one would be better.