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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #40: Le Cinema Du Albert Pyun

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #40: Le Cinema Du Albert PyunThe value of movies has been on my mind a lot. It's inherent in just about everything I deal with everyday, and it's implicit whenever I'm writing one of these columns about a movie. Not the monetary value, but the cultural value, what makes movies last as classics, or as cults, what lingers in the mind, what's considered worthwhile in the minds of their fans. It's easy for the makers of Oscar-nominated films filmmakers to say what they consider worthwhile or worthy, but what about the movies that… aren't? Movies don't get made unless there's a perceived demand, and that demand can give rise to lesser or B movies being made to meet that demand. That's where you get straight-to-DVD and straight-to-cable movies.

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #40: Le Cinema Du Albert PyunBack in film school, I liked to study B movies, since a lot of well-known screenwriters and directors got their start on them before showing themselves skilled and talented enough to eventually move up to the A List. The major studios produced B movies in the Fifties directed by talented writers and directors with strong styles and personal themes like Sam Fuller, Anthony Mann, Rudolph Mate, and various others. Film critic Manny Farber write an essay in 1962 called "Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" where he praised B movies and their unpretentious, termite-like ability to burrow deep into interesting themes over bloated, pretentious 'white elephant' A-List films. Roger Corman's studio had given first breaks to Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, and while a lot of the films from Corman's studios were fairly generic and sometimes crap, they tended to have moments of Termite Art. Corman produced his movies to order, stressing the need to put enough guns, violence and tits every 10 minutes, but otherwise encouraged or let his filmmakers show and say anything else they wanted, including all the social and political commentary they were in the mood to muster. I've always preferred 'interesting' to 'prestigious'.

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #40: Le Cinema Du Albert PyunOf course, by the 1980s, B movies were no longer made for the cinema but for video and cable broadcast to fill airtime slots. The quota of termite art was also going down and continues to go down. One director whose name was practically inescapable during the 90s while I was in film school was Albert Pyun. Pyun is one of those directors who will never come within spitting distance of an A-list production, but somehow never stops working. He got his start as a camera assistant on one of Akira Kurosawa's movies, and made his first movie in 1982, the fantasy movie THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, one of the slew of movies in the genre when Oliver Stone and John Milius' first CONAN THE BARBARIAN was a hit and opened up the market for the genre. I never actually saw THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, I was too young, but I'm told it has a cult following. Since that film, Pyun has worked in virtually every genre imaginable, with almost everyone non-A-list you can think of. He directed CYBORG, one of Jean-Claude Van Damme's first hits. He made a CAPTAIN AMERICA movie in 1989 that had its funding pulled before production was completed and the movie ended up looking like what little money was left went on the screen. In the 1990s, he seemed to hit the boom period for straight-to-video/cable action movies and began a prolific run of movies with everyone from Christopher Lambert to Ice-T. I've never been able to identify common themes or auteurist touches in his movies, though I suspect there might be some, and there was practically an Albert Pyun movie on Cinemax every other night in the 90s. I can't even say his movies were particularly good even by the most tolerant standards, but more often than not, they usually had at least one moment that was genuinely interesting that I hadn't seen done before. He seemed to excel and revel in pulpy madness. He made a movie called BRAINSMASHER: A LOVE STORY starring Andrew Dice-Clay during his 15 seconds of guido caricature fame and Terry Hatcher in a tale about a bouncer fighting ninja to save the world. He did make two films of note in the 90s: NEMESIS, which was one of the very few movies to capture the vibe of Cyberpunk of William Gibson's novels, even when none of the actors could act their way out of a paper bag, and it featured one of the best opening action sequences of anyLook! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #40: Le Cinema Du Albert Pyun movie; and MEAN GUNS, a virtually plotless actioner where a collection of hitmen are gathered to kill each other until the last one standing wins a huge payout. MEAN GUNS was filled with a sense of absurdity and was one of the few satirical commentaries on the over-the-top gun-fu subgenre that John Woo introduced to action movies in the 1980s an 90s. As the 1990s drew to a close and the financing for straight-to-video/cable dried up, Pyun had to deal with more dodgy producers, shaky financing, and worse scripts than ever. His biggest production was probably TICKER, a bomber actioner starring Steven Seagal, Ice-T and Dennis Hopper. He and some of his producers were accused of defaulting an $800,000 production loan from the country of Guam when they went there to make their action movie MAX HAZARD: CURSE OF THE DRAGON in 2004.

I'm not sure if I 'm writing about Albert Pyun here as a curio or an abject lesson of stubborn career survival or some kind of example of filmmakers and artists who just keep going even when almost completely under the cultural radar. Out of the movies mentioned in this column, I've only ever seen NEMESIS and MEAN GUNS, both of which I found hugely entertaining. If you look up his Pyun's movies on Amazon, especially the more recent ones he made in the 2000s, you'll find user reviews declaring they were the worst movies they'd ever seen. Yet whenever I see a Pyun movie, there's often… something there. I don't know what.

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #40: Le Cinema Du Albert PyunNow, the internet has given Pyun's career a new leash on life. He's set up his own website,  where he can blog and make announcements, and sell special edition DVDs of his new movies. He talks honestly about the production problems on his past movies and updates on the ones he's currently making. He seems genuinely passionate about filmmaking and I wish his movies were much better. His last completed movie, BULLETFACE, seems to be a gleefully skuzzy pulp thriller that goes to depraved places no mainsteam studio would dare touch. I haven't seen it because I haven't been able to rent it. Pyun is currently in post-production on a new fantasy actioner called TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE, a quasi-sequel to THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, starring ex-Hercules Kevin Sorbo, whose presence helped secure funding, and its limited theatrical release in April followed by an extras-filled DVD release in April. He's also remastering NEMESIS to add CGI effects, and remastering CYBORG as a rock opera. He's also making an unofficial sequel to Walter Hill's STREETS OF FIRE and a Lovecraftian horror flick COOL AIR, all on what looks like what's called shoestring budgets. I wonder why his recent movies, judging from the trailers and footage, all look like they were filmed through a shit-brown filter, but you gotta hand it to him to still be hanging in there.

Now, I don't even like the Sword & Sorcery genre, but I kind of want to see TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE.

I just don't want to pay extra money to see it, and I don't get Cinemax anymore.

Checking my DVD rental queue at lookitmoves at gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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