OK, we admit it: we have a weak spot for Albert Pyun movies
ever since we caught his directorial debut, The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982 /
trailer),
in a double feature with Beim Jodeln juckt die Lederhose (1974 / full movie),
complete with Spanish subtitles, at some long-gone grindhouse down the street
from Langer's Deli
on Alvarado.
Then and there we knew that we had found a contemporary B-movie master, a
director with enough talent to both write an entertainingly trashy script and
direct with enough visual flair that the obvious low budget becomes only an
added cheesy seasoning. (It also didn't hurt that the move featured both
Richard Lynch
[12 Feb 1940 – 19 June 2012] and the once-hunkadelic
George Maharis,
seen below not from the movie, two of our favorite "unknown" actors.)
For a while, Pyun was an extremely active man, churning out as many as
five films in one year — in 1992, however, he only released two features: the
less-than-commendable experiment, Deceit (final scene),
and Nemesis, which has proven to be one of his most enduringly popular and
well-received films. Easy to see why, for this flick is definitely one
craptastically entertaining cyberpunk flick, even if it does lose its theme somewhere
amidst all the action.
Taking a sizable amount of Blade Runner (1982 / trailer)
and a liberal dose of Terminator (1984 / trailer),
Nemesis is a good ol' fashioned man versus machine action flick set in a
dystopian future, one where most of the landscape is either lush or burnt and
everyone — including little old grannies — has a gun. Now and then Nemesis poses
existential questions about what makes a human "human" and when is
one just a machine, but while this theme does raise its hand every so often to
let the viewer know it's still there, for the most part this and other themes generally get lost
in what is probably some of the most non-stop action ever found in a movie not
made in Hong Kong.
OK, we'll admit that our DVD was pretty fucked: hazy and
boxed, it looked as if it were copied from some ten-year-old VHS, but even the
low-grade quality couldn't take the edge off of some truly great action
sequences, explosions, and shootouts — the last all the more ballistic since, in
the future that is that of Nemesis, weapons never have to be reloaded and one has to shoot a
hundred rounds to hit anything further away than two yards.
Though set somewhere in 2027 — ten years hence, by now —
everyone wears 1990s high style. And you know what? It doesn't really look all
that bad anymore, especially on the babes: no way would we tell Rosaria (Jennifer
Gatti) not to sit at our table, much less would we shoot her dead, even if she
did insist that we were nothing but an android. (Women have said worse to us.)
True, she did try to kill our intrepid hero earlier in the movie, but hell: he'd
just wiped out her entire team. But at that point in the tale, Alex (the beefcakey Olivier
Gruner, of Soft Target aka Crooked [2006]) was a cop on the job and 86.5% human, fully convinced he was doing good
for mankind. Only later, after he becomes even less human and suffers an
intense case of burnout, does he begin to question his life and work — at which
point his old boss Commissioner Farnsworth (the eternally underrated character
actor Tim Thomerson, of Fade to Black [1980 / trailer], Cherry
2000 [1987 / trailer],
and way, way more) — implants a bomb on his heart and forces him to find his
former android handler and lover, Jared (Marjorie Monaghan), who seems to have
joined the underground.
In all truth, for all the talk about how "Alex is the best",
he sure seems to get shot a lot, and with so many bad guys always so close on
his tail and hidden around every corner, it seems odd that anyone would need
him to find anyone. But the plethora of non-characters — familiar faces that come and go in the movie include genre faves Brion James and Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa —
does allow for a lot of chase scenes, shootouts, stunts, and deaths.
One
dispensable non-character who shows up for all of five minutes is Billy, played
by a young "Tom Janes" (aka Thomas "Hung"
Jane), whom we never see dressed and who spends most of the time displaying his pre-Nautilus
butt to the viewer. He disappointed us greatly by not asking, unlike Dolly Sharp aka Helen Wood
in a somewhat similar situation in an earlier, more-famous movie, "Do you
mind if I smoke while you're eating?"
Needless to say, Jared went rouge because though an android,
she found something human within herself. But even as she found her humanity, she
lost her form — it is more her "presence", her "soul" you
might say, that ends up helping Alex rediscover his humanity, even as her
presence raises yet another existential question: to what extent are we
ourselves simply due to our memories, and if they are copied, is that copy us?
(A question handled with far greater intelligence and restraint in the
excellent German sci-fi flick Transfer [2010 / German trailer].)
Nemesis suffers somewhat from its elliptical plot development,
which tends to jump about like a frog on a hotplate, and the plethoria characters
that come and go. For that, it has hot babes, great locations, and yitloads of well-staged,
over-the-top action and explosions, if perhaps one too many chase scenes and
shootouts that last too long. Gruner only kicks butt about once or twice — not
much for a guy known for kickboxing — but for that he shoots up half the world,
which also shoots back. How he ever manages to keep his face and chest as cleanly
shaven as he does is beyond us, for he never seems to have a moment's peace
anywhere in the movie. Former TV sex symbol Deborah Shelton (of Blood Tide
[1982 / trailer])
shows up for a short time as the android Julian to drive the plot forward
before going down in a hail of bullets; she has a nude scene and, interestingly
enough, her obvious breast implants even serve to emphasize her character, as she
plays an artificial human, if one that (like Jared) has discovered her
humanity.
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