Nemesis

If nothing else, director Albert Pyun's Nemesis perfectly simulates the experience of watching bubble-era anime, the type of self-contained shocker sold on video cassettes, after they've been chopped-up and dubbed with an English language track that just so happens to be packed with swear words. No-one seems to be speaking with their own voice; unusual accents and strange cadences are ascribed to recognisable supporting players like Brion James, who otherwise do very little to arrest attention. Plotting is similarly threadbare, Rebecca Charles' screenplay a convoluted back-and-forth between interchangeable factions of treacherous cyborgs as they muddle towards some objective or other. Olivier Gruner, a kickboxing silver medallist and a former Commados Marine in the French Navy, brings a steely detachment to his Alex Rain, a mostly human bounty hunter who jets around the world under the auspices of an unusually hegemonic LAPD. 

Gruner gets to wear his hair at a variety of lengths in Nemesis, from a messianic bob when imprisoned in a seafarer's stockade to a tousled corporate cut when he's on the job. The best of these snips being a close crop that Rain pairs with rounded sunglasses, prickling memories of RanXerox from Heavy Metal, while cooking on a stakeout in Baja. Incomprehensible in repose, Pyun's film bolts upright whenever a firearm is in play. Seemingly every shot in Nemesis' shoot-outs, no matter how fleeting the coverage, has the featured actor holding their finger down like their lives depended on it. Dilapidated buildings, where most of the film's action takes place, are completely shredded by this incessant gunfire. Pyun finding a frequency somewhere between the comedic excess of a Merrie Melodies cartoon and the histrionics of Hong Kong's heroic bloodshed movies. Henchmen load up on the kind of weaponry found adorning a Boeing Superfortress then march forwards, through walls, firing as they go. A cornered Rain is similarly struck by the malleability of surroundings, using his MP5K and a bottomless cache of ammo to blast several successive floors of his flophouse hideout to splinters. 

Captain America - Albert Pyun's Director's Cut

If nothing else, this posthumously released Director's Cut of Albert Pyun's famously disappointing, straight-to-video Captain America demonstrates that a conceptual boldness, when assembling lower budget material, can paper over many of the more obvious cracks in the overall piece. This isn't the first release of Pyun's film to present itself as the director's preferred edit though. During the 2010s Pyun himself sold DVDs and Blu-Rays through his website of an 'Unreleased Director's Edition' that took the theatrical (or, maybe more accurately, rental tape) cut and embellished it with dupe-level reproductions of one or two of the elided sequences seen here. This newly released assembly though - recently unearthed by his wife Cynthia Curnan and the Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Video label - was scanned directly from a celluloid print that Pyun owned but did not have the facilities to review and represents a massive reorganisation of the material that the director was able to get away with before the film's financial backers stepped in and locked him out of the production. 

When compiling their preferred version of the film, producer Menahem Golan's 21st Century Film Corporation opted for a literal, chronological procession of filmed events, beginning their release with scenes set during the Second World War before the viewer and Steve Rogers are catapulted into the modern day for some clipped, low-cost soul-searching. Pyun's approach is wildly different in both tone and execution, deliberately withholding the comparatively expensive, period-bound setpieces that detail the origin of Scott Paulin's Italian Red Skull or the rocket-bound adventures of Matt Salinger's Captain America. These moments, bold as they are, are hampered by the kind of obvious corner cutting deployed when struggling to impart scale in cash strapped productions. Massive environments that are intended to read as frightening or impressive are instead airy and poorly dressed; performances are hampered by a harried flatness or some other, unconvincing tonal note born of expedience. Plainly, when viewed in their video tape entirety, there just isn't enough of the kind of striking, propulsive coverage required to cleanly navigate scenes designed (and failing) to be exciting. Pyun's Director's Cut solution is to break these moments up into arresting blips of information that are then deployed throughout a much more sombre film. 

We explore the simmering interior landscapes of the film's principle characters as they pick apart the lives that have trapped them in their current predicaments. Both Salinger's Steve Rogers and Paulin's Red Skull are fixated upon ideas of childhood or an innocence that they have subsequently lost. A heartbroken Rogers maintains an upbeat, gee-whizz facade but fails to reconnect with his former allies and worries incessantly about how he has contributed to the fallen world he now inhabits. This Red Skull, rather than the fanatical adherent of Adolf Hitler seen in the comics of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, is explicitly a kidnapped child. One who was mutated into a violent criminal to work in service of a power hungry, fascist state (in the modern era he counts American generals amongst his clients). Skull yearns to return to a parlour room within his childhood home, to play an uninterrupted arpeggio for his murdered family. Similarly, the rearranged sequences that turn over in the minds of super-soldiers are, fittingly, built with the storytelling language of serial cinema. Binary morals and motivation - not to mention super-powered rockets - are able to, momentarily, intrude upon a particularly downbeat interpretation of a 1980s struggling to free itself from an insidious and all-encompassing take on the military-industrial complex. Previously, viewers were asked to endure several minutes spent in a glaringly lit concrete bunker, complete with gleaming swastika, as resource poor filmmaking visibly strained to wring out something, anything, entertaining. Now we experience the same alarming iconography as the haunting, eidetic memory of an unnaturally strong man who believes himself to be a complete failure. 

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Cyborg: Director's Cut / Slinger

Although not in the same league as a full-on control freak like Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme was nevertheless given plenty of opportunity to put his own authorial stamp on his 1980s releases. Following a disastrous test screening for Bloodsport, The Cannon Group allowed the star to supervise the film's re-edit - how much worse could it get? Healthy box office returns ensured that this benefit was soon extended to the rest of the company's collaborations with the actor, including 1989's Cyborg. To give him his due, Van Damme had a clear and consistent methodology when assembling all of these features: they are vehicles for his body to be pored over and admired. Plot concerns rank a distant second.

Slinger is Albert Pyun's attempt to reconstruct his vision of Cyborg, freed from studio notes and a film star who jealously guarded his brand. Thanks to a diligent collaborator, Pyun had an 88 minute VHS workprint to excavate anything absent from the theatrical release. Newly recorded voice overs and dialogue loops were used to paper over missing or unfilmed scenes, framing a story that diverges on several key details. Objectives are more clearly delineated in this alternative cut, characters act with specific, stated purpose. The analog video assembly also predates any MPAA censorship, giving Pyun one or two more instances of violence to grab attention with.

This Director's Cut doesn't simply rescue a preexisting piece, it goes further with Pyun adding and subtracting from his film, eagerly working towards an impressionistic draft that simulates what could have been, had he been allowed full creative control and a greater financial freedom. In terms of form, it's clear from this new edit that Pyun wanted to hold on his images longer, to let them sink into his audience and expand in their minds. Lacking the coverage to actually amplify these moments, Pyun switches back and forth between the blotchy, deteriorating analog signal and a pristine theatrical source, effectively replaying the beat. In truly dire editorial predicaments he simply turns what little footage he has into self-contained loops.

These primitive techniques, coupled with an excretable epilogue sequence, threaten to shake the viewer out of the film but, thankfully, Slinger has one more ace up its sleeve, Tony Riparetti and Jim Saad's brand new soundtrack. Indeed, this Director's Cut is an object lesson in how much of an impact music can have on a film. As released, Cyborg was saddled with a reedy, synthetic score by Kevin Bassinson. Despite the striking apocalyptic imagery, the audio accompaniment was painfully low rent, a supermarket keyboard's approximation of an orchestra, piped out to tinnily underscore the futuristic action. By comparison, Riparetti and Saad's suite is a blazing catalyst, full of wailing, heroic guitars and the kind of pounding, electronic beats Chu Ishikawa wove into the Tetsuo films.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Cyborg

One of the more intriguing ideas in Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog (adapted for the screen in 1975 by LQ Jones) is that cinema-going has survived into the wasteland, taking the form of mouldy old pornography - these snippets projected up on shattered walls to placate the roaming gangs of shell-shocked rapists. In that scenario film explicitly functions as escapism, providing a glimpse of the soft female bodies denied to that world's gibbering, starving men. Albert Pyun's Cyborg goes one better, imagining the kind of art that a society coping with an extinction event might actually produce. Cyborg is monosyllabic and cruel; its characters defeated.

Despite being named for Dayle Haddon's automaton and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Cyborg's most important character is Vincent Klyn's Fender. The film opens with his narration, filling the audience in on the catastrophes that have facilitated Fantasy II's meticulously detailed establishing shots. Fender enjoys this new milieu, the rampant lawlessness allowing him to grow into his psychosis and actually thrive. While the weak hole up in the rubble, Fender and his gang of bodybuilders crash over the ruins, gobbling up anything or anyone that takes their fancy. Pyun can't help but betray his allegiance in these moments. Klyn's face is framed in a series of extreme close-ups, the actor's eyes blazing while he preaches his apocalyptic nihilism directly to the audience. Cyborg belongs to Fender.

Cyborg is subsistence filmmaking. Sets and costumes inherited from a cancelled Masters of the Universe sequel, the shoot itself costing a quarter of the pre-production outlay for that failed He-Man project. Van Damme plays Gibson, a post-apocalyptic mercenary who takes his payment in canned goods. This destitution is reflected in the stark, basic plotting. There's a listless quality to the film, a pervading sense that everything is being made up on the spot. Probably because it was. Cyborg motors on a baggy, improvised game of chase, complete with a viciousness that reflects a population who have grown up insular and surrounded by extreme violence.