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.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Kickboxer

Unlike say Bloodsport and its all-American superman Frank Dux, Kickboxer revolves around a character that will be visibly grow before our eyes. Jean-Claude Van Damme's Kurt Sloane has the basics in terms of an ability to hurl his leg out and, thanks to his brother's career ending injury at the hands (and elbows) of Muay Thai legend Tong Po, the drive to push himself beyond his limits. This is the hook that keeps the film ticking over. Bloodsport had to invent and repeat personal stakes to drum up interest in Dux. Kickboxer casts that kind of prefab character aside to laser in on the underachiever boiling by his side.

While Kickboxer does throw in a tasteless, late-in-the-day sexual assault to remind dimmer bulbs that bad guy Po is a real piece of shit, they needn't have bothered. The entire film has kept teenage boys of all ages invested by always tracking towards a clear, aspirational goal. The taste in Kickboxer is how Kurt's transformation is handled, it's The Karate Kid with some queasy hang-ups about Thailand and a firm nod towards deliberate bodily destruction folded in. With the latter in mind, the key moment in Kickboxer occurs early on. Backstage, prepping for his brother's disastrous fight, Sloane stumbles upon Po drilling his legs, silently kicking an enormous concrete beam over and over again. Sloane reacts with horror. He's seen something massive and terrifying - a man so completely numb and mechanical that he can make himself less yielding than support architecture.

Kickboxer charts Sloane's progress from a glorified whipping boy to someone who can perform similar feats. The film misses a trick by failing to tie Van Damme's eventual success to these moments of tibia calcification though - ideally Sloane should prove his dominance by shattering Tong Po's invincible leg or, at the very least, withstanding a greater degree of punishment than his opponent. A mid-film fight between Sloane and an underling in which the two of them trade and withstand each other's kicks is a more satisfying application of the bloody-mindedness Van Damme has immersed himself in than some smoke-filled temple fight designed to evoke a savage otherness the filmmakers have decided to apply to Thailand.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Black Eagle

Despite the video shop real estate given over to the actor, Jean-Claude Van Damme is not the main attraction in Black Eagle. That poisoned chalice belongs to Sho Kosugi, star of umpteen Cannon Group ninja films and one of the more detestable Bruceploitation films, Bruce Lee Fights Back from The Grave. Kosugi is an interesting character though, a Japanese karate champion turned actor who treats this film (and apparently every other one) as an extended opportunity to take his children to work.

Kosugi plays Ken Tani, a CIA super agent able to code-switch between an unassuming, hunched academic and his lithe, knife wielding super-identity The Black Eagle. Tani has completely dedicated his life to protecting the aims and ideals of the United States, asking only that he be granted an annual fortnight of peace and quiet to hang out with his two sons. Naturally Uncle Sam reneges on this promise, packing Tani and his kids off to Malta to visit art museums but also stalk nosy Russian trawlers.

Since the focus is off him, Van Damme only gets a few, brief chances for his Soviet heavy to capture our attention. As ever, the actor is happy to disrobe, performing his trademark splits in various states of undress. As the film trundles on, there's an emerging sense that director Eric Karson doesn't quite know what to do with either actor. Kosugi and Van Damme are shot at arm's length, all the better to capture the holiday destination environments.

Karson and Cinematographer George Koblasa do dream up a few fun shots, their best portraying Van Damme as a kind of muscle piston pumping through a well-oiled routine. His body is pored over and objectified; overpowering brawn glimpsed in a canted, low-angle appraisal. Karson and pals also swipe a few of the tricks Robert Clouse demonstrated on Enter the Dragon, ignoring the moments when stabbing heels meet vulnerable throats to focus on the deranged glee surging over the face of the striker.

Opportunities to delight in this destruction are few and far between though. Black Eagle moves with all the vim of a tourist nursing sunstroke. Malta's blazing Mediterranean heat has been baked into the film, dictating not only the sleepy onscreen performances but also the film's baggy, undisciplined shape. Stakes crash into the film, delivered with all the elegance of a brick being placed into a malfunctioning blender. The film is pitched like a classic 70s Euro thriller, selling adult intrigue with brief blips of adrenalised action. Instead you get an illogical bore that lurches slowly from sequence to sequence, never quite managing to work up a head of steam.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - Bloodsport

Frank Dux is a very interesting person. As well as being a super important ex-CIA agent and a noted ninja historian, Black Belt magazine favourite Mr Dux spent the late seventies fighting in hundreds of underground, full-contact martial arts matches before retiring completely undefeated. Contrary to what the Los Angeles Times would have you believe, these entirely credible events definitely happened. Dux's stories so impressed Cannon Group moguls Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan that they stumped up the cash to turn his life story into a film.

Macho fantasist Dux found his perfect big screen avatar in Jean-Claude Van Damme, both men defined by their desire to be regarded as some sort of exciting object. Dux used tall tales to attract gullible marks to his ninjustsu McDojos. Van Damme, thanks to disastrous test screenings that deemed an early assembly unwatchable, was given carte blanche to edit the rhythms and shape of Bloodsport around centrefold spreads of his muscled physique.

Schwarzenegger's frame was oversized and lightly comical, his brawn presented as the machinery required to become a human gun platform. Stallone was smaller but steely, his body a work-in-progress that seemed to be unconsciously stressing the flayed elegance of rejected messiahs. Compared to his peers, Van Damme's mission is simple. He wants to be appraised and desired, explicitly linking glimpses of his engorged figure with the the act of sex. Van Damme fucks women and he wants you to know it. Viewed in this context, Bloodsport's fights are more about the graceful slow-motion arc of a perfectly chiselled leg than any sense of genuine conflict.

Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1980s - No Retreat No Surrender

Whereas a film like The Karate Kid is interested in self-determination and how men at different stages in their life can have positive emotional impacts on each other, No Retreat No Surrender is literally about how cool it'd be if your Bruce Lee poster came to life and anointed you, some crummy white kid, to be his successor. Kurt McKinney plays Jason Stillwell, an LA import who spends his days in Seattle creeping around The Little Dragon's grave and rolling his eyes at his pacifist / coward father.

Director Corey Yuen, a Peking Opera School classmate of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, has fun undermining the staid drilling of Emerald City karate with the kind of fluid but punishing training regimens made famous by Shaw Brothers' The 36th Chamber of Shaolin or Seasonal Films stablemate Drunken Master. The not-too-subtle insinuation being that flexible China produces more complete fight forms than prissy old Japan. Although Yuen's raw, onscreen materials are slower and sloppier than his Hong Kong pals, the director assembles a few crisp exchanges, particularly towards the end of the film.

Predictably, Jean-Claude Van Damme is this (basically terrible) film's greatest asset, an allegedly Russian enforcer who chews up and spits out the film's irritating extended cast in a concluding martial arts tournament. Given about ten minutes of screentime, Van Damme is instantly able to communicate the defining characteristics of his star persona - an arrogance based in absolute ability. There's a real sense of pitilessness with Van Damme, you believe he loathes anyone he considers weaker than him. He's also exciting to watch, a wide-eyed lunatic with a hairstyle held with polyurethane, hurling out leg upon leg at the blubbering nothings who dare challenge him.