| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CYBORG
Rating: 
USA. 1989.
Director – Albert Pyun, Screenplay – Kitty Chalmers, Producers – Yoram Globus & Menahem Golan, Photography – Philip Alan Walters, Music – Kevin Bassinson, Visual Effects – Fantasy II Effects (Supervisors – Ernest Farino & Gene Warren Jr), Special Effects – Joey Di Gaetano & R.J. Hohman, Makeup Effects – Thom Floutz & Greg Cannom, Production Design – Douglas Leonard. Production Company – Cannon.
Cast:
Jean-Claude Van Damme (Gibson Rickenbacker), Deborah Richter (Nady Simmons), Vincent Klyn (Fender Tremolo), Dayle Haddon (Pearl Prophet), Haley Patterson (Haley)
Plot: In the ruins of post-holocaust New York, a lone martial arts fighter Gibson Rickenbacker rescues a woman, Pearl Prophet, from marauding gangs led by Fender Tremolo. Rickenbacker learns that she is a cyborg entrusted with getting vital medical data to a plague-ravaged Atlanta and agrees to escort her across the anarchic Badlands. But they are pursued all the way by Fender and his gang.
Cyborg was the first big breakthrough of director Albert Pyun. Albert Pyun is a prolific director of B-budget genre action films. (See below for a full list of Pyun’s genre films). Cyborg set the path for Pyun’s career throughout the 1990s where he has made an extraordinary number of films that that almost always centre around martial-arts or kickboxing cyborgs, usually in Cyberpunk or post-holocaust settings. These have included Nemesis (1993), Knights (1993), Heatseeker (1994), Nemesis 2: Nebula (1995), Nemesis 3: Timelapse/Nemesis 3: Prey Harder (1995), Nemesis 4: Death Angel (1995), Omega Doom (1995) and Adrenalin: Fear the Rush (1996). In this case, Pyun made Cyborg for Israeli producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus who had made a great many action films featuring Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson throughout the 1980s.
As became the formula with most of Albert Pyun’s later films, Cyborg features a star recruited from the martial arts/kickboxing world taking on cyborgs/androids (which are always interchangeable terms in Pyun’s films) in a post-holocaust setting. In this case the martial artist that Pyun recruited was Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was then not quite the superstar he became a couple of years later and was making a lot of B-budget action fodder like this. Pyun certainly creates wall-to-wall action without let-up. He shoots with an overuse of slow-motion while filling the soundtrack with strident washes of synthesizer sound, something that makes for interestingly stylized approach to all the action. But there’s really no plot to hold any of it together – Cyborg just stumbles from one action sequence to the next. And the action scenes go so far beyond the bounds of credibility that by the end the numbing chaos of wall-to-wall gymnastics leaves nothing of interest other than the pure mechanics of the ludicrous ‘hi-yaing’. As in Pyun’s debut film, The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982), the film contains a scene where the hero of the piece gets crucified and has to tear his own nails out.
While Jean-Claude Van Damme has some nifty, lithe moves, he is so insipid and inexpressive as a character that what dialogue scenes there are are left high and stranded. Vincent Klyn looks rather cool in his sunglasses but the wide-eyed and seemingly inexhaustible roar he delivers his performance at the top of reduces him as a villain to nothing more than a brute monster like Jason Voorhees. Cyborg must also be the first film where the characters are all named after brands of guitar.
Cyborg purportedly began life, intended to be a sequel to Golan-Globus’s Masters of the Universe (1987). There were several sequels, which only have the slightest connection to this – Cyborg2: Glass Shadow (1993) and Cyborg3 (1994), both of which are actually superior to this and quite worthwhile films.
Albert Pyun’s other films are:– The Sword and the Sorceror (1982), Radioactive Dreams (1986), Vicious Lips/Pleasure Planet (1987), Alien from L.A. (1988), the uncredited Journey to the Center of the Earth (1988), Deceit (1989), Captain America (1990), Dollman (1990), Brain Smasher: A Love Story (1993), Knights (1993), Nemesis (1993), Arcade (1994), Heatseeker (1994), Hong Kong 1997 (1994), Nemesis 2: Nebula (1995), Nemesis 3: Timelapse (1995), Nemesis 4: Death Angel (1995), Omega Doom (1995), Adrenalin: Fear the Rush (1996), Postmortem (1997), Ticker (2001), Infection (2005), Cool Air (2006), Bulletface (2007) and Left for Dead (2007).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
|