Synopsis: In a
post-apocalyptic New York, the injured Marshall Strat (Alex Daniels) orders the woman he
is trying to protect, Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon), to go to the Bronx township to find a
"slinger" to take his place. No sooner has Pearl left than Strat is overpowered
by Fender Tremelo (Vincent Klyn) and his band of "flesh pirates". Hearing Fender
tell his men to go after Pearl, Strat begs him to let her go, insisting that the
information she carries could change the world. Fender says simply that he likes the world
the way it is, and cuts Strat’s throat…. Meanwhile, Pearl has been cornered in
an alleyway. Rescue comes from Gibson Rickenbacker (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who kills her
attackers. Pearl tries to hire Rickenbacker to take her to Atlanta. When he proves
reluctant, she reveals that she is a cyborg, and is carrying data which will help a group
of doctors to develop a cure for the plague that has decimated mankind. Suddenly, Fender
and his men attack. Rickenbacker is wounded and left buried beneath a pile of rubble,
while Pearl is captured. Fender informs her that he will take her to Atlanta – but
that once there, she will give the information to him…. Some time later,
Rickenbacker struggles to his feet and sets out after Fender. By the water, he finds a
scene of slaughter and a town in flames. Someone makes a move to attack. Rickenbacker
knocks out his assailant, only to find it was a young girl. He builds a fire, watching
over the girl until she recovers, and thinking back to when he was hired to guide another
young woman, Mary (Terrie Batson), and her two siblings into the country; of the brief
idyll that followed; and of the arrival of Fender…. The girl, Nady Simmons (Deborah
Richter), recovers consciousness. She tells Rickenbacker that Fender and his men stole a
boat; that she heard Fender say that his captive had a cure for the plague; and that they
were headed for Atlanta. Determined to help Pearl if she can, Nady tries to recruit
Rickenbacker to the cause, but he is unresponsive. However, as he is tracking Fender for
his own reasons, the two end up as reluctant travelling companions. Taking a shortcut
across the Wastelands, Rickenbacker and Nady are attacked by pirates, and must fight a
bloody battle to save themselves. That night, they camp by the water, waiting for
Fender’s boat to pass by. Nady offers herself to Rickenbacker but he gently rejects
her, as his memories of Mary intrude…. Meanwhile, on Fender’s boat, Pearl, too,
is lost in thought, looking back to her decision to sacrifice her own humanity for all
humanity, and allow her colleagues to transform her into a cyborg….
Comments: So – we meet
again, Mr Pyun….
I’m ashamed to admit it now, but when we
were first settling upon our choices for this, uh, tribute to Cannon Films, I actually
tried to weasel out of taking my fair share of the mutual pain by picking one that
wasn’t a real Cannon Film, but instead had merely been partially funded by the
company in exchange for some distribution rights. Well, my colleagues ruled against me,
and rightly so; my choice might have been within the letter of the Roundtable law, but it
was hardly within the spirit. All that was then left for me to do was to perform an act of
penance for my cowardice, and to choose an alternative film that was the real deal.
Which brings us to Cyborg, the opening
credits of which read:
Cannon Entertainment Presents
A Golan-Globus Production
An Albert Pyun Film
Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme
No-one out there can accuse me of trying to
avoid my portion of pain and suffering now, surely…?
And pain and suffering there was, aplenty. Cyborg
takes no more than a couple of minutes to establish itself as "An Albert Pyun
Film". In fact, considering that every single aspect of this production would, in one
form or another, reappear in the director’s later works, it could perhaps even be
said that Cyborg is the Albert Pyun film. All the familiar elements are
firmly in place. Firstly, and most obviously, this is a prime example of the
director’s apparent obsession with making films about cyborgs; an obsession not one
iota diminished by the fact that he clearly doesn’t understand what a cyborg is.
(To be fair, he gets a lot closer to the mark in this film than elsewhere.) The action
takes place in the standard cut-price post-apocalyptic dystopia, consisting mainly of
artfully arranged rubble in the streets, and lots of abandoned warehouses and factories
with light streaming through them in a strangely familiar manner. (No giant fan, though, I
have to grant that.) The characters use a peculiar kind of jargon meant to remind the
viewer that this is the future, but which instead serves only to render what plot
points there are almost incomprehensible; while the screenplay itself is unabashedly
derivative of other, incalculably better movies, and yet for all that is irredeemably
tedious. Cyborg is basically by Mad Max out of Escape From New York,
with a smattering of Bladerunner thrown in for good measure, and plot trimmings
courtesy of – damn you, Pyun! – The Searchers. (The director himself,
however, seems to have seen it differently. Incredibly, Pyun once compared Cyborg
to a Sergio Leone film, thus rocketing himself into second place, right behind Jerry
Warren, on my list of people who require a bitchslapping of the most urgent and thorough
nature.) Indeed, the only vaguely original thing about Cyborg is the bizarre
decision to name almost everyone in the film after guitar models or manufacturers, an
inane conceit made even sillier by the fact that in the course of the film, practically
none of the characters is ever called by name. We do not learn, for instance, that our
hero is named "Gibson Rickenbacker" until the end titles. Frankly, I can think
of very few things that better define the word "optimism" than the inclusion in Cyborg
of a joke which assumes that, when the credits roll, the audience will still be in its
seat.
Now, all of this was painful enough; but when
I got to the end of Cyborg I found myself confronted by the most fundamental
difficulty of reviewing any Albert Pyun film. Since my last venture into this territory I
had forgotten (or blocked out) that the distinguishing feature of the director’s
works is that while they are often set against events of literally apocalyptic
proportions, nothing actually happens in the films themselves. This makes them
remarkably hard to write about. (Not that that’s stopping me from blathering on about
this one for several pages longer than necessary, you notice; I’m the Albert Pyun of
film reviewers!) Despite an opening narration (delivered in gravelly tones which we later
learn belong to the film’s Bad Guy, Fender Tremelo) that assures us of the collapse
of civilisation, genocide, anarchy, starvation and the plague, the plot of Cyborg
can be summed as "a guy walks around, gets beaten up a lot, and kills a bunch of
people". Now, it is certainly true that a plot summary can fail to do any film
justice – Citizen Kane, after all, could be summed up with "A man dies; a
reporter talks to people who knew him" – but in this instance justice is pretty
much done. However, while it’s highly unlikely that anyone goes to a film like Cyborg
looking for an intricate storyline or character insights, it has to be said that there is
an attempt at the latter, at least. If you tilt your head, close one eye, and squint
really hard with the other, you can see that this film is meant to be about the redemption
of Our Hero. Initially a "slinger", a killer of "flesh pirates" and a
guide-for-hire who leads the dispossessed from the nightmarish city environment into the
comparative safety of the country, Rickenbacker falls for one of his clients, and briefly,
unwisely, lowers his guard. The outcome of this fleeting interlude is all-too inevitable
(and not just because we’ve seen it in about a thousand different films over the
decades), and Rickenbacker gives himself over to his lust for revenge until his
experiences with Nady Simmons and Pearl Prophet finally persuade him that there might be
more to life after all than just the slaughtering of flesh pirates. Naturally, this lesson
isn’t learnt until after an incredible amount of physical violence has been dished
out and taken, including – in the film’s unintentional comic highlight –
the literal crucifixion of Rickenbacker on the mast of an abandoned boat. (The camera
pulls back here in what’s meant to be a moment of dramatic revelation, but which
instead left me speculating about just how the heck Fender & Co. got him up there in
the first place!?) Indeed, the only thing funnier than the crucifixion itself, is the
manner in which Our Hero gets himself down. I just bet that when he was three years old,
he threw some almighty big tantrums….
Now of course, it’s only weirdos like me
who worry about this "character" nonsense while watching an Albert Pyun film
– not to mention a Jean-Claude Van Damme film. Everyone else, sensibly enough, is
here for the fight scenes. In that respect, Cyborg fulfils all of its obligations.
We have fights in alleys, fights in buildings, fights in swamps and fights in sewers; and
at one point, JC even gets to do his beloved "wall-climbing splits" routine. And
if the final body count ends up (in action movie terms, at least) being merely impressive
rather than astronomical, the film makes up for that by being surprisingly violent and
bloody. (Cyborg suffered MPAA trims upon first release, and in some territories had
a number of scenes further pruned before its video release.) However, I have to say that I
found the fights overall to be a bit of a disappointment. They are well-staged, granted,
but they are also repetitively staged; by the twentieth bout or so, this proves to
be more than a little wearisome – as indeed does the behaviour of Fender’s
pirates, a largely inarticulate bunch, who spend an inordinate amount of time running
around bellowing "ARRRRRR!!!!" before being dispatched by Our Hero. (Remarkably,
these meatheads continue to bellow "ARRRRRR!!!!" even when they’re trying
to sneak up on Rickenbacker.) Nor are the fight scenes improved by the way in which they
have been put together, with an extremely annoying combination of slow motion action and
hyperactive editing. (The former, in particular, was a very unwise move, in more than one
instance giving us a good feel for the actual distance between the fist of the puncher and
the face of the punchee.) Be that as it may, these scenes do serve their purpose, which is
to prune away the minor characters and to set up the climactic battle between Fender
Tremelo and Gibson Rickenbacker. Actually, the most interesting thing about this showdown
is the sheer physical contrast between Van Damme and Vincent Klyn. Perhaps I can best
explain what I mean by saying that had Cyborg been made a decade or so later (and
on a rather higher budget), Klyn’s role would probably have been filled by The Rock.
But regardless of the fact that the Bad Guy is about a foot taller than Our Hero, and a
good number of pounds heavier, the fight reaches its predestined outcome when Rickenbacker
delivers a kick that lifts Fender into the air and lands him on a meathook a good two feet
off the ground – and after only one
"he’s-dead-ooh-no-he-isn’t" false ending, too! Cyborg concludes
with Rickenbacker accepting the mission that Nady Simmons had tried to force upon him, and
delivering Pearl to her medical colleagues. He then disappears into the night, redeemed
– or so we’re left to assume. One thing that the ending of Cyborg
doesn’t deliver is something I’d been expecting all the way through: the
revelation that Rickenbacker, or Fender, or both, were cyborgs as well. I don’t know why
I expected that – the film’s Bladerunner references, perhaps, or maybe
just JC’s stonewall inexpressiveness. Instead, the film-makers chose to go with a
"humanity is superior" message; a message somewhat muted, it must be said, by
the necessity of accepting the innate "superiority" of Jean-Claude Van Damme.
All of which brings us to perhaps the oddest
thing about Cyborg, the utter irrelevance of both its title and its titular
character, who barely even deserves to be called a MacGuffin. The cyborg in question is
the twee-ly named Pearl Prophet, and the film purports to be about her journey from New
York to Atlanta, with information stored in her database that will allow a small group of
doctors to develop a cure for the plague that has decimated mankind. There are just two teensy
problems with this scenario. Firstly, while we are assured by various characters of the
devastating nature of this disease, we see absolutely no evidence of it within the film
itself – or indeed, even of its existence. There are no scenes of the afflicted, no
agonising deaths, not even any twisted corpses by the roadside. It’s kind of hard to
put any emotional investment into a catastrophe that, for all we see to the contrary,
might be no more than a collective delusion. Secondly, in perhaps the most head-scratching
of the film’s various contrivances, Pearl’s journey to Atlanta proves
unexpectedly simple when Fender Tremelo decides to take her there himself. The reason for
this, if you can call it that, is that Fender decides he wants the data Pearl is carrying
for himself: not to cure the plague, but so that he can withhold the cure.
"THEN," he grates (just a word of explanation: Fender speaks all of his dialogue
upper-cased, if you get what I mean), "THEN I WOULD BE – A GOD!!" Of
course, a moment’s reflection reveals the slight flaw in ol’ Fender’s plan.
There’s no fun, after all, in tormenting mankind if mankind doesn’t know
it’s being tormented; similarly, it’s hard to get people to fall down and
worship you if they’ve never heard of you in the first place. In short, Mr
Tremelo’s impending godliness would seem contingent upon a non-existent means of mass
communication. However, this unlikely desire for divine elevation in our Bad Guy serves
its purpose, which is to prevent Fender from simply ripping out Pearl’s circuitry
when he first captures her, and thus ending the film five minutes after it starts. (He
could have done it quite easily, too: in order to prove her story to Rickenbacker, Pearl
lifts off her wig to show him the unprotected wiring at the back of her head. Uh, I
believe that’s what’s known as a "design flaw".) And you know, perhaps
I’m underestimating the infrastructure still extant in this post-apocalyptic
hellhole. After all, this is a world where people can travel from New York to Atlanta in
about the same time it took the shark in Jaws: The Revenge to get from Amity to the
Bahamas; where despite the toll taken upon the population, and the distances between the
clutches of survivors, everyone seems to know everyone else; and where, while most people
live by firelight, there’s electricity whenever it’s truly needed – like
when Pearl was to get her data out of that impressively long-lived "computer
system" in New York. Handy, that.
Cyborg was only the second
starring role for Jean-Claude Van Damme, and his inexperience shows all too clearly. While
his performance in the previous year’s Bloodsport was reasonably assured
(perhaps because JC himself felt at home in the martial arts atmosphere), here he seems
quite lost – at least in between the fight scenes. It didn’t help, of course,
that at this point he was still struggling with his command of the English language; and
nor did his production team do him any favours, considering the dialogue to was given to
deliver, and the ridiculous costumes he was asked to wear. All of this, however, pales
into insignificance beside the simply horrendous hairdo that JC sports during his
all-too-frequent flashback scenes: it looks like he’s tried to make himself a wig out
of a ball of wool. The welcome disappearance of this nightmare ’do, by the way, is
supposed to represent the renegade Rickenbacker’s "taming" by the girl,
Mary; it’s significant, dontcha know. (Mind you, JC is scarcely alone when it
comes to jaw-dropping hairstyles: this is yet another "post-apocalyptic" movie
where civilisation is going to hell in a hand-basket, but everyone took a moment to rescue
their hair-dryers, curling irons, and braiding machines.) Understandably, in his
"character" scenes, Van Damme wavers between an embarrassment he’s not yet
actor enough to conceal (he’d eventually get there, as anyone who’s seen Knock-Off
can testify), and a state of frozen immobility which suggests that, like a threatened
animal playing dead, he thought that if he sat long enough without moving, the cameraman
would eventually go away and leave him alone. The only time he comes out of this comatose
condition, other than during the fights, is when he has his inevitable Action Movie Hero
Moment: "FENNNNDERRRR!!!!"
If JC underplays as Rickenbacker, Vincent
Klyn as Fender Tremelo turns in some overacting that almost reaches Richard Burtonian
proportions. He growls, he bellows, he chuckles, he snarls – anything to let us know
that he’s EE-VIL. Mostly, however, he just whips off his dark glasses and shoves his
creepy pale eyes directly into the camera. (My theory? They’re pale because no light
could possibly penetrate those shades of Fender’s, considering the inch-thick mud
that’s plastered all over them. I guess only wussies clean their glasses.) As a
screen presence, Klyn is effective; as an actor, he makes JC seem--- Well, no, perhaps
that’s taking it a bit too far…. The rest of the cast is negligible, consisting
mainly of body-builders like Rolf Muller and stuntmen like Alex Daniels; asking little
more from them than an occasional "ARRRRRR!!!!" was a wise decision. Dayle
Haddon has nothing to do as Pearl but look noble; while with Deborah Richter’s Nady,
Albert Pyun keeps his record for creating unappealing heroines intact. Having said that, I
have to confess that the only sequence in Cyborg that rang true for me came
courtesy of Ms Richter. On the trail of Fender and Pearl, Rickenbacker and Nady find
themselves on the coast near Charleston; and Nady proceeds to strip off and plunge into
the water. This is, of course, the film’s Contractual Moment Of Nudity; but after the
grime and violence that Nady has temporarily escaped, it is also quite believable. Later,
sitting by the fire and wrapped in a blanket (as is Rickenbacker, although we did not see
his swim, and were consequently spared the trademark JC butt-shot; I guess at this stage
of his career, he didn’t have the clout – or the ego – to force the issue),
Nady weighs up Rickenbacker’s lack of response to her attempts to recruit him to her
cause, then observes astutely, "You’re not going to be here when I wake up in
the morning, are you?" Desperate for his help, she then tries to buy it the only way
she knows how, and lowers her blanket invitingly. Rickenbacker leans towards her, but
surprises her, and perhaps the audience too, by gently pulling her blanket back into
place. He then retreats to his own side of the fire. It’s a nice little scene, no
more than that, but well performed by both actors, and a welcome moment of naturalism in a
film that is all too often aggravatingly artificial; a quality, if that’s the right
word, that seems to infect a great deal of Albert Pyun’s work. This film’s main
virtue is not its direction, or its acting, or even its fight scenes (at least, not as far
as I’m concerned), but rather its visuals. Thanks to some classy cinematography by
Philip Alan Waters, Cyborg is a lot more interesting to look at than you might
expect. (Waters seems not to have done principle cinematography for anyone but Albert
Pyun; he deserves better.) As for the film overall--- Well, it’s neither as flat-out
annoying as Captain America, nor as boring as Omega Doom, nor quite so
mystifyingly pointless as Mean Guns. In short, it’s the best Albert Pyun film
I’ve seen so far; and if by that I seem to be damning Cyborg with faint
praise, well, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that under the circumstances, faint
praise is the best that I can do.
"I have absolutely nothing to add here."
This image was stolen from The
Charter Terminal
just 'cos I couldn't help myself....
Details from IMDB |
Director: Albert Pyun