Cyber Bandits

MOVIE #2,243 • SCORE 7/10 • 12.26.24
SERIES: JAMES HONG A-Z ACTOR FOCUS (Ch. 35)

I really should be compiling a list of all these James Hong movies where he’s only in a single scene. It has to be almost half of the films at this point. As is the case often (too often?), here we see him doing a Chinese guy caricature that’s still reads as offensive despite the fact that he’s Chinese. Here's the entirety of his six minutes of screen-time…


Oh well! RIP, James Hong’s Stereotype Chinese Guy character in the very bad (but mostly fun) 1995 sci-fi B-flick, Cyber Bandits.

I’m gonna pull some clips here with limited context. I can’t do a full a plot recap, folks. It’s the day after Christmas. What do you want from me??? In a nutshell: guy gets a tattoo with secret binary code hidden in that is needed to complete a super cyber weapon... wacky hijinks ensue.

This scene reminded me of that Tim & Eric episode when Paul Rudd interacts with “Celery” on the computer…


There is a hotel clerk character played by Catherine Dao who is doing what I can only assume is comic relief but it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen so I made a small supercut of all her screen-time…


I kind of loved the unserious tone here. It’s definitely not a comedy but it totally realizes that it’s a ridiculous B-movie, and not really in an annoying way.

Robert Hays (of Airplane! fame) is the only main actor who looks like he’s not having any fun, and that’s funny in its own way. Some of his lazy line reads of this incredibly dumb script were unintentionally hilarious…


The plot revolves around the creation and theft of a device (a steel pipe) that basically traps its victims’ minds in a permanent virtual reality of the user’s choosing. When they finally get around to deploying it, well, it’s about as anticlimactic (and genuinely comedic) as one might expect…


I don’t mean to oversell it, but this just has classic SBIG Energy (even if it’s not a ‘classic’ of the ‘genre’). It also has Adam Ant and Grace Jones in it. It's horrible lol. I loved it? If you’re a fan of “So Bad It’s Good” films, it’s definitely worth seeing...

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Cyber Bandits, also known as A Sailor’s Tattoo, is a 1995 science fiction film directed by Erik Fleming. It uses a screenplay by James Robinson and James Goldman (credited as Winston Beard). It was made by Lumiere Pictures and used visual effects by Steven Robiner. It was released on November 4, 1995.