86.5% is still human

1993 was a good year for Olivier Gruner and director Albert Pyun. Basically because it would never get this good for them ever again. They made a little B-movie sci-fi film that successfully synthesized every Cyberpunk story ever written far better than 'real' movies like the cinematization of Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic in 1995 with 'real' actors like Keanu Reeves, Dina Meyer (the female lead starship trooper who dies in Starship Troopers) Dolph Lundgren and Takeshi Kitano. Nemesis, for all its many, many faults, seemed to be the only movie in 1993 paying attention to science fiction written after 1965. It went on to enough success it bankrolled a pair of sequals: the laughable bad Nemesis 2 notable for its bizarrely mesomorphic casting choice of Sue Price as a gynoid freedom fighter. And the agaonizingly unwatchable Nemesis 3. Thankfully by the time I'd finished watching Nemesis 3 I had micro-lesions on my frontal lobe that rendered me physically incapable of even aknowledging he made Nemesis 4.

Pictured above: bodybuilder Sue Price carries the entire movie in Nemesis 2: electric boogaloo

Nemesis 2: Nebula (actual irrelevance of title to movie 86.5%) essentially had nothing whatsoever to do with the first movie and was in no way connected to cyberpunk, instead it was a kindof deathmatch between a heroine pumped to ridiculous proportions with roids and breast augmentation vs some guy in a rubber suit recycled from The Guyver.

Nemesis 3: massive cerebral hemorrhage waiting to happen was an exciting look at what would happen if the main character spent an entire movie slowly dying while crawling around naked in the same ruined square block of some bombed out east-bloc city and fucked gross strangers in cars. Sortof like a load tolerance stress test for the audience to see how long it took them to figure out it was Albert Pyun, some guy with a camera and about 400$ US getting passersby in Bratislava to adlib lines. I'm pretty sure the guns weren't props, just the personal firearms of local citizens conned into posing in front of the camera. News flash for Pyun, you are not Goddard. Also, nobody actually likes Goddard, they just pretend to in front of other film buffs like guys suck in their guts around women.

All this to say, you're looking at the pinnacle of the art form when you watch the original Nemesis. Sure the crew couldn't record sound for shit and all the lines had to be dubbed later on, but Gruner, in his prime, was as close to a meat-machine as you could hope for, displaying an athleticism that convinces you he's mostly cyborg; and Pyun, when he was trying (or before he got coked out and lost his mind) put more effort into conveying menace and tension with a single shot of bad guys hurrying down a hallway then he did during the entirety of the next sequel. Watch this clip of the first ten minutes.


You know this movie is about to rack up a serious body count when the good guy savagely decapitates a blonde hottie instead of sleeping with her. Not content with shooting her in the face all mafia stylz so her mama can't have an open-casket funeral her shoots her in that spot that makes her whole head erupt so all that's left is her lower jaw and a spanking animatronic tongue. And this happens before the title credits have finished. Pyun films the opening chase and fight scene with a tactile caress that is almost pornographic (and we're talking about how you rewatched at 7:05 to get the full effect of the upskirt on the babe in the minidress emptying an H&K MP5 bullethose).

He shoots the entire choreography from 2 or sometimes 3 angles, just to give him room to edit back and forth as they unleash a thousand rounds of ammo in just over five minutes. In five minutes and five seconds there are 161 edits with a minimum of 10 cuts for each exchange of gunfire. I particularly like the cuts at 6:35 to 6:41 where he cuts to an extreme long shot of all sorts of hell being unleashed so he can get the rapid-fire exchange of bullets and the reports of the bullets hitting in frame together then cuts again to the leader of the bad guys unshipping the folding stock of her monster gun while the same gun battle echoes in the distance.

Now for the bad news. I hoped you liked those ten minutes because most of the rest of the film is, hmmm, shall we say a letdown. We're talking last episode of Seinfeld letdown. No, scratch that, we're talking TV writer strike letdown.

So, here, in no particular order, are the top 6 sucktastic moments of Nemesis:

1. Bryon James trying to do a german accent. After a career-making role as Leon, the homicidal android forklift driver in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Bryon James went on to portray other villains, and bounced around in a lot of B-grade sci-fi (see both him and fellow b-grade staple Tim Thomerson in Cherry 2000). As a viewer of this movie, I was desperate to draw similarities between Nemesis and the cult hit Blade Runner (the movie that mostly inspired the cyberpunk movement) just so the whole thing make a kindof perfect circle of postmodern self-reference. I was overjoyed to see James as one of the heavies in this flick. Until, that is, he opened his mouth. He has what linguists refer to as perhaps the worst german accent to ever be uttered by a human being. It's like he'd never even heard a german speak before. It's like he'd never even heard of Germany before. Seriously, how fucking hard would it have been for him to flip channels to an old Hogan's Heroes rerun before showing up to the film set. The legend of how astoundingly bad his german accent is in this movie has given rise to the myth that James' character wasn't supposed to be german at all and he was simply unable to resist making fun of Gruner's acting.

2. The climactic fight scene pits Gruner against one of the animated skeletons from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. In a film shot without much to speak of for a budget and with most of that money already spent on ammunition, blood squibs and that awesome headless corpse in the opening credits, a big climax fight scene was bound to be a crapshoot. And by that I mean about as good as monkeys flinging shit at you. This scene called for the bad guy's entire flesh exterior is blown off and a savage beat-down as he starts opening whoop-ass like the terminator at the end of The Terminator, and actually rips the top of Gruner's head off. About now a normal director (read: only mildly coked-out instead of coked out like Charlie Sheen) would maybe unlock the writer from his bamboo cage and get him to change the ending. But not Pyun. Rewrite? Never! Instead they dusted off some of Ray Harryhausen stop-motion animation that was cutting edge in say, 1933, when he dazzled audiences with an aerial dogfight between biplanes and King Kong on top of the Empire State building. It's so jarring the entire film derails and any shred of suspension of disbelief remaining gets flung at the screen along with whatever heavy object you can reach.

3. Gruner's mullet wig. In an effort to show how Gruner's character keeps getting blown up and rebuilt over and over again the special makeup effects people pull out all the stops with a series of descendingly atrocious wigs. Bad wig days seemed to be the general rule for this shoot, including the super-back-combed mass on the love interest in the second act - what was considered totally Hawt at the time - and today just seems like her hair product didn't agree with the Javanese humidity.
I'm the real Olivier Gruner! Look at my chiseled jaw and boss haircut.NO, I am the real Olivier Gruner! Bet you couldn't tell while my entire image is redone with the simple addition of a 1.99$ joke shop wig.

NO, I alone am Olivier Gru-- oh screw this. I'm sitting here wondering if my pay cheque is going to clear while they put this Guns'n'Roses Slash wig on me and Bryon James makes fun of my accent. Where the fuck did I go wrong?

4. The big finish is shot in exciting, tropical - where the fuck? No one knows where the hell Java actually is or knows who lives there except java is also a word for coffee so I assume it has something to do with growing coffee beans. I think the script originally called for a shoot in a 'Japanese hotel' and when the budget turned out to be essentially pizza money and pocket lint they did a quick correction to 'Javanese hotel' with some whiteout and ball-point pen. So instead of a bunch of yakuza heavies that show up in the third act to keep the brain-damaged, wandering plot on track we get polynesian surfer yakuza dudes in Hawaiian shirts, with such spot-on gangster dialogue such as 'chill out, brah, you live longer'.
In the grand film noir tradition of Johnny LaRue's gritty detective movie, Polynesiatown, Pyun sicks the Javanese surfer yakuza dudes on the bad guys. At least LaRue's movie had that crane shot.

6. Little old ladies packing heat. For some unknown reason eurotrash cyborgs start harassing local citizens on the street looking for the good guy. After one asshole starts hassling a little old lady for kicks she then produces a .45 auto and wastes the fucker, palsied hand or no. The premise of this scene, as dumb as it is, isn't the terrible part. To the contrary it's fucking awesome. What's terrible is the logic behind how easily cyborgs die. Two scenes earlier it takes a pair of 50 cal machineguns continually firing for at least 30 seconds just to knock a cyborg down. Then another guy has to empty a clip into her spine just to cut her legs off. And she still isn't dead. Nor does she die after Tim Thomerson gouges out her eyes and skullfucks her memory interface. He has to empty another clip into her forehead at point blank range to do the job. And yet here's granny smith who gets off a couple 45 slugs into a cyborg's kidneys and he goes down like a prom date, begging for his mechanical life like a pussy while she plugs him five or six times. WTF?

Where Pyun got it right.
Despite it all there's a certain operatic quality to Nemesis. Like his hero, Sergio Leone, Pyun sets up his scenes with a kindof lazy machismo, allowing characters to stand around looking menacing and vulnerable in perfectly framed establishing shots. Moving between extreme long shots and closups that wring all the emotion possible from the slab of frozen beef, Gruner. Nemesis tends to slide into staging shots that look like a western, in ghost towns and jails from a century ago, with dust blowing in the background. There's a keen eye for light and colour that is easy to miss while you're laughing at the terrible acting or raging against the cheap special effects. Los angeles is a sepiatone reminiscent of Chinatown. The main character's descent into despair and drug addiction is marked with deep blue filters.

Where Pyun excels is a flair for staging the kinetic ballet of violence choreography. The worst thing you can say about the action as that he blew his wad too soon, packing so much in the opening ten minutes there wasn't much room left to go except downhill. despite that he never stoops to using the same shot twice, and each fight is a treat of inventive genius. Sometimes these perfectly staged shots are borrowed from other (better) pictures like a slow-motion gunfight that erupts through a triptych of floor-to-ceiling glass windows taken straight from the iconic Jesse James escape through the plate-glass storefront in the Long Riders. Other times Pyun invents something so utterly kick-ass it gets pirated years later like his escape from a java hotel by shooting a hole in the floor around his feet that was redone almost shot for shot in Underworld.

Check out this clip at 7:05 to see where Underworld got the idea.

Pyun's greatest strength is his ability to go balls-out, ape-shit over the top whenever the fuck he feels like it. Where other directors swim back to shore at the sign that says 'Danger' he swims out into the undertow past the sign that says 'Beware telekinetic shark-pirhana men with laser-guided anal-probe harpoons'. Maybe it's Pyun's training on the set with Kurosawa (I shit you not) that cemented his unflinching ability to say 'in this scene he fucks her through an artificial vagina implanted in her belly button with his mechanical eye-ball cock'; certainly there's a hint of later japanese shock-cinema in his work.

Check out this cyborg nutshot that caps all the action in the movie. After jumping out of no less than five buildings, killing untold men, women and cyborgs, having his arms legs and scalp blown off and put back on twice, doing a quadruple backflip high dive off a frickin cliff while shooting a rocket propelled grenade and finally dropping the evil mastermind out the bottom of a harrier jump-jet and into an active volcano with a time bomb fuck-you bon voyage present by severing his own left arm, director Pyun somehow decided not enough cyborgs had their balls blown off. Watch at 1:35 to see a 9mm cyber-gonad castration.