UNIVERSAL SOLDIERS is another rip-off from The Asylum; I need not bother stating which film they're ripping off here, suffice it to say that this came out about 15 years too later. The story seems to have been written in an extremely sketchy way, and there's no script of a fashion - just characters going on and on, swearing and shouting at each other. A bunch of Z-grade actors run around the countryside and are occasionally killed by the titular menace, but this is embarrassingly amateurish rubbish, with no entertainment value whatsoever.

A top-secret government project to create the perfect soldier goes horribly wrong when the unstable cyborgs break out of their containment cells & massacre the scientists & military personnel guarding the project.Not to be confused with the Roland Emmerich-Jeff Woolnough-Mic Rodgers-John Hyams series starring Jean-Claude Van Damme & Dolph Lundgren, Universal Soldiers is a typical Asylum mockbuster. The Asylum, in case you don't know, is an independent production company in California with a bad history of ripping off other filmmakers' ideas & making their films on the cheap in order to make a quick buck, often having deceptive titles to confuse customers into buying their DVDs. In recent years, they have cleaned up their act somewhat & produced some reasonable genre films, in particular the Sharknado phenomenon of late.Universal Soldiers is typical of many Asylum mockbusters, made at the height of the company's output in 2007, where they produced numerous mockbusters that ripped off many big-budget mainstream genre films. This example is written by Geoff Meed, a South African actor who also writes his own scripts, & directed by Griff Furst. Meed & Furst had earlier made I AM OMEGA, a cheap I Am Legend adaptation that was one of the better films in the Asylum canon but Universal Soldiers is very different from that.The film is terrible. Or to put it more delicately, it is astoundingly inept. There is virtually no plot – all it consists is of a group of soldiers standing out in the open bickering amongst themselves in between being picked off by some pale-skinned cyborgs who use CGI spears to kill their victims. The visual effects border on the cheap – some remarkably poor CGI used for the cyborgs' vision – which looks like someone merged a computer desktop screen with a red-tinted filter. The makeup effects are barely passable & continuity goes out the window – characters' guns go empty in one scene yet magically replenish their ammo in the next. Meed's writing is also so slack that you can't take the film seriously – once all the cyborgs are dead (and it is never made particularly clear exactly how many of the cyborgs there are), there is a massive 50-foot robot skeleton thrown in just to keep the film going for another ten minutes or so.As far as acting goes, the actors do a remarkably poor job of playing a military unit. In real life, soldiers will conduct their business with a lot more efficiency than the losers depicted here. As it stands, none of them make any pretence at being professional. The Asylum's penchant for corner-cutting leaves some of the dialogue to be made unintelligible by wind shear.

You know, I wonder what this movie would have been like had I been able to hear what was going on half the time. Really, it sounded awful, absolutely awful. I couldn't hear half the dialog and even if I could it was overpowered by heavy nature sounds (including one particularly annoying seagull) and bad/inappropriate music.That said, I thought the film looked pretty good. I was impressed by some genuinely cinematic moments. Take away about 80% of the jv "predator vision" and don't artificially speed up shots (especially during fight sequences) and this film could have looked great. I like the "Saving Private Ryan" bland colors and choppy images but dial the latter back especially during the exposition sequences; it's too much at the wrong times.There was also some promising talent in front of the camera. Rick Malabri was quite photogenic though his character felt a bit one-sided and Kristen Quintrall was quite entertaining to watch though perhaps an errant boob falling free from her loose-fitting uniform whilst hanging from the rope snare would have enhanced the viewing experience. I would watch her work again...All in all I think of this film more in terms of what it could have been rather than what it was. It was butchered by bad sound and what I'm sure must have been too much rush and poor creative decisions by some producer. I could feel the art trying to break through but being stifled by time and business constraints. If nothing else, I hope all involved learned from the experience. If the talent of a select few is ever fully realized, than we might come to expect better, even great, things from an otherwise dismal and confusing film-making model.

Where can I start about how bad this is? Between the bad acting, pathetic special effects, bad sound (was everyone sharing a microphone or maybe the mike was only on the camera?) etc..., it was downright painful to watch this movie. I would watch Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirl before this turkey. There is one girl in here with ample cleavage that tries to 'sex' up the movie, but too bad her looks are barely average...The actors have never had any experience with firearms and I find that amusing considering it's a "soldier" movie. They wave their firearms around (and at each other) and keep guns pointed up and backwards etc..Hammy acting, and cheesy lines galore. The special effects obviously are hamstrung by a non-existent budget. I echo the review of someone else saying you'd be better off watching grass grow or paint dry. I get to rent movies for pretty much free and I wouldn't finish this one if someone paid me $20...