Albert Pyun's 1989 Science Fiction Hit Jean-Claude Van Damme Vehicle Cyborg is a Fascinating Disaster

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Cult writer and director Albert Pyun died recently at sixty-nine after a very public battle with Dementia and Multiple Sclerosis. Pyun’s directorial career began with his greatest commercial success. He roared out of the gate with 1982’s The Sword and the Sorcerer, a fantasy adventure that grossed nearly ten times its four million dollar budget.

The film’s extraordinary success opened doors that subsequently closed mysteriously. He was at one point tapped to direct an adaptation of Total Recall with William Hurt in the lead that never happened.

Later that decade Pyun was tapped by Golan and Globus, the larger than life schlockmeisters behind Cannon, to direct a sequel to Masters of the Universe and the very first feature film adaptation of Spider-Man at the same time.

From the perspective of 2022, that seems insane but in the 1980s superhero movies were widely dismissed as silly comic book nonsense for children. They didn’t need big budgets or stars or, in the case of Roger Corman’s notorious take on The Fantastic Four, to be legally released in any way.

Pyun’s grubby cut-rate take on the wacky web-slinger wasn’t even slated to star an actor. Instead Cannon tapped stuntman Scott Leva for the lead role before the plug was pulled around the time Golan and Globus ran out of money.

Cannon wasn’t going to make a Spiderman movie or a sequel to Masters of the Universe but they had spent millions on sets and costumes for the doomed projects that they did not want to go to waste. So the ever industrious Pyun very quickly wrote a screenplay for a post-apocalyptic science-fiction movie that could be shot for a mere half million dollars.

According to an IMDB trivia entry, “Albert Pyun's original cut of "Cyborg" was much more stylized. It was in black-and-white, had a rock score, had more violence and had all of Jean-Claude Van Damme's dialogue - including extensive narration - dubbed by another actor.”

The entry goes on to say “Cannon held a test screening of this version for a small audience and they hated it. Only one out of 100 people surveyed liked the film.”

I love the idea that Pyun, an exploitation filmmaker who spent his career cranking out low-budget action movies with slumming stars for the direct to video market made a movie so inaccessible that it generated near-universal disapproval. I suppose it could be worse, and the original cut could have scored a perfect zero percent approval rating. But making an action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme that damn near the entire universe despises is a perverse achievement in its own right.

So Pyun was yanked off of the project and the film was given to twenty-something martial artist Van Damme and his friend and frequent collaborator Sheldon Lettich. In Van Damme and Lettich’s hands, Cyborg shed much of its ambition and artiness and became a conventional action movie highlighting The Muscles From Brussels’ martial arts prowess.

From a commercial standpoint, the move worked. A movie 99 percent of the general public hated in its original form became a movie that debuted at number four at the box-office, grossed ten million dollars and spawned a pair of sequels, one of which starred Oscar winners Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie as well as arthouse staple Elias Koteas.

I’m tempted to seek out Pyun’s director’s cut but the 85 minute version is a grueling endurance test without anything in the way of humor or levity. So the prospect of watching something darker and grimmer is not terribly appealing.

Cyborg begins by ushering us into a bleak future decimated by a plague that has transformed society into a flaming husk of its former self. Survivors are terrorized by marauding bands of pirates led by the towering, sadistic Fender Tremolo (Vincent Klyn).

Thankfully hope for humanity exists in the form of Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon), a cyborg who must travel from New York to Atlanta in order to share vital information on finding a cure for the plague with scientists at the CDC.

The potentially world-saving half-robot finds an ally and a protector in Gibson Rickenbacker (Van Damme), a “Slinger”, or mercenary, whose family was brutally murdered by Fender.

Van Damme’s stoic splits-proficient savior professes to be motivated solely by revenge and a desire to murder Fender for taking everything that he cares about but he’s a secret idealist masquerading as a cynic. You know, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Han Solo in Star Wars.

Pearl Prophet is purloined by pirates. Gibson sets out to find her and Fender and hooks up with Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter), another weary survivor whose family was destroyed by the plague.

Nady throws herself at the haunted martial artist because a movie like this angrily demands gratuitous nudity. The glum sexuality in Cyborg re-defines “arbitrary.” Nothing can distract Van Damme’s Slinger from his grief and gloom, not even naked female flesh.

The problem with Cyborg, as with so many sub-par Van Damme vehicles I have written about for this column, is that it seemingly makes a conscious choice to not be fun.

Instead of letting Van Damme be Van Damme and be silly, sexy, goofy, self-deprecating and entertaining Cyborg turns the international icon into a glowering, humorless man of action who says next to nothing because he’s always ready to let his fists and feet of fury do the talking.

Pyun had a real gift for composition and framing. Cyborg is clearly the work of someone with deep reverence for the masters, a student of film who has immersed himself in the worlds of Kurosawa, Woo, Peckinpah, Walter Hill and John Ford.

Cyborg is full of memorable shots and striking imagery, most notably a set-piece where our maverick hero is crucified by the bad guys and lingers near death high in the sky, a post-apocalyptic Jesus suffering for mankind.

It’s a scene that will stay with me long after the rest of the film has disappeared from my memory but it also captures the ponderous self-seriousness that makes it such a bore and such a chore to sit through.

As he would do throughout his career, Pyun did the best with the very limited resources he had at his disposal but you can’t make The Searchers by way of The Terminator with five hundred thousand dollars and sets leftover from a never to be realized Masters of the Universe sequel.

Van Damme was at the height of his youthful beauty when he made Cyborg. Van Damme isn’t just handsome, he’s beautiful. He’s gorgeous. He is a perfect physical specimen I never get tired of looking at.

Van Damme is a terrific martial artist who can pull off playing a Clint Eastwood/John Wayne-style stoic badass even if that’s the least compelling aspect of his persona. But Van Damme is not fun here. That consequently means that Cyborg is not fun.

Cyborg takes itself way more seriously than a movie where the main characters are named after guitar brands and the sets and costumes are hand-me-downs from projects Mattel and Marvel nixed should.

Going through Pyun’s filmography I realized that I have seen and written about half the movies he made, primarily direct to video quickies with suspiciously star-studded casts. 1998’s Crazy Six, for example, stars Rob Lowe, Mario Van Peebles, Ice-T and Burt Reynolds. I have no idea what it’s about or if it’s any good but according to its Wikipedia entry, “Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club wrote that "Lowe is predictably awful" yet "despite Lowe's performance, Crazy Six is palatable, with Pyun giving the film an appropriately seedy aura of glamorous decay.”

What does that guy know? Sure, he’s reviewed a lot of Pyun movies over the years, but that doesn’t make him an expert or anything.

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