Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 23 May 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Okay, so there's a new Uwe Boll movie coming out. Big deal, says we. Sure, we're curious about how the Teutonic uber-hack managed to get Dave Foley to star in his new film (Postal, opening in limited release today). And sure, we're even more curious about how he got Dave Foley to do a nude scene. And yes, we must admit that there is something oddly compelling about a filmmaker so universally reviled that a chewing gum manufacturer has helped sponsor a petition to get him to stop directing movies, and who is himself so adamant that he is a cinematical genius that he has challenged his critics to meet him in the boxing ring. But however rotten this German-come-lately may be -- and he's plenty rotten -- for us here at the Screengrab, there is only one true heir to the crappy moviemaking throne vacated by Ed Wood, and that man's name is Albert Pyun. The Hack From Hawaii -- who directed his first film in 1982, only four years after Ed Wood's death -- has been responsible for over forty films and direct-to-video releases, at least one of which has already turned up on movie janitor Scott Von Doviak's "Unwatchable" list. Both in his ridiculously prolific output and his utter lack of talent and shame, Albert Pyun leaves Uwe Boll in the dust. So instead of trying to find a theater willing to screen Postal this weekend, why not settle down for a film festival with our man Big Al? To help you in this terrifying endeavor, we've assembled a list of five of Pyun's best works -- and we use the word "best" in the loosest possible application to which the word has ever been put.

THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)

Albert Pyun's first screen credit -- as both director and writer -- is a real doozy that sets the tone for his innumerable too-cheap-to-be-camp movies to come. A standard-issue steel-and-spells epic ripped straight out of Albert's Friday night dorm room Dungeons & Dragons games, The Sword and the Sorcerer cost about nine dollars to make, with a script too dull for TV and special effects that would have seemed hokey in 1972. The real treat here is the cavalcade of has-beens populating the cast: there's well-past-his-prime teen idol George Maharis, his suntan decaying before our very eyes; future Murphy Brown fixture Joe Regalbuto; hulking, self-serious Night Court golem Richard Moll; coked-out Nina Van Pallandt, a million miles from The Long Goodbye; unreconstructed manimal Simon McCorkindale; and, in the lead, none other than Matt Houston star Lee Horsley! Sadly, this collection of fourth-stringers would be the hottest cast Pyun would ever work with. It would be all downhill from here.

CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990)

Oh, sure, everyone wants to see superhero movies now. But we can remember a time when the mere whiff of a mask or cowl was the kiss of death at the box office, largely because of grade-Z capesploitation movies like this. Never before have the adventures of America's living legend, super-soldier Steve Rogers, seemed so completely perfunctory; even Matt Salinger, whose career wouldn't exactly reach to the stratosphere after this dud, doesn't seem to be any happier about being Captain America than we are about having to watch him be Captain America. Still, he's at least better than nonentity Scott Paulin, hamming it up beyond belief as the supervillainous Nazi the Red Skull, while industry vets like Ronny Cox and Darren McGavin stand around sheepishly trying not to look embarrassed. Captain America rides his tricked-out motorbike around a lot, says "shucks" and "gee whiz", and the audience hits pause on the remote control to see if there are any uppers left in the medicine cabinet to get them through the longest 97 minutes of their lives.

KICKBOXER 2: THE ROAD BACK (1991)

Our own movie janitor Scott Von Doviak has already been forced to contend with one of Albert Pyun's cinematic abortions in the form of Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor. But not only is that not one of Albert Pyun's worst movies, it's arguably not even Albert Pyun's worst movie with the word "kickboxer" in the title. That dubious honor may just belong to Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, featuring hand-carved dingaling Sasha Mitchell as a man hoping to follow in his brother's footsteps in the highly lucrative career of kicking people in the face. Featuring some of the worst dialogue in the history of kickboxing films, Kickboxer 2 manages the astonishing trick of not only featuring both Peter Boyle and Brian Austin Green, but making you feel sorry for both of them. It's an agonizing wait between kickboxing scenes, but the bits of plot and dialogue are so abysmal you'll begin praying for another kickfight to break out. The movie's tagline was "Put up, shut up, or die!", but sadly, Pyun did none of those things.

BRAIN SMASHER...A LOVE STORY (1994)

By the time this movie rolled around, Albert Pyun had truly found his metier: cheap, exploitative direct-to-video releases timed to take the slightest possible advantage of the flavor of the moment. Or, in this case, the flavor of many, many moments ago. It's a testament to Pyun's impenetrable thickness as an auteur that he decided the moment was right to write and direct an action movie built around the antics of faux-goombah Andrew Dice Clay some three years after the Dice-Man's star had already begun quite seriously to wane. Plodding along in a nebulous phantom zone between sincerity and irony, this half-joking action flick was clearly made by someone who understood neither sincerity nor irony, and the result is an enervating mess that isn't even gleefully offensive, the one quality Dice Clay's standup had going for it; it's just dull. Still, you have to give it up: as much as you might hate this movie -- and you'll hate it, a lot -- you gotta love that title.

URBAN MENACE (1999)

The staggeringly bad Urban Menace was not the first abysmal hip-hop action/horror flick that Albert Pyun would make. It was also not the last. But it was, without question, the absolute worst. The closest thing in Pyun's bloated catalog, in both technique and spirit, to the godawful films of Ed Wood, Urban Menace stars Snoop Doggy Dogg's highly unconvincing stunt double in a movie that knows how bad it sucks and simply doesn't give a shit. The majority of its running time features the stars running around aimlessly in an abandonded warehouse; the script probably took less time to write than the movie takes to watch; and the best thing you can say about the acting is that, in the case of rapper Fat Joe, at least his lines are delivered with such mush-mouthed incompetence that it spares you from having to hear any more of the terrible dialogue. (The film, amazingly, claims four different scriptwriters. Which one of the four will own up to "We got a whole army of motherfuckers and we can still get punished by this skinny guy psycho?")

Unwatchable #98: “Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

I’ll admit to being at something of a disadvantage when it comes to reviewing Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor. You see, while Kickboxer 1-3 were sweeping the nation, I was serving time in a Turkish prison for a youthful indiscretion. (Okay, they caught me attempting to transport bootleg copies of The Turkish Wizard of Oz out of the country. This was before YouTube, people!) Luckily for me, the makers of Kickboxer 4 were kind enough to pad out the first ten minutes of their movie with extensive clips from the previous installments, so while some of the nuances of the story arc may be lost on me, I think I got the gist.

As Kickboxer 4 opens, our hero Sloan (played by a block of wood with a Vanilla Ice haircut named Sasha Mitchell) is in jail, having been framed for a crime by the villainous Tong Po. As we learn through flashbacks, Po killed Sloan’s brother, who was avenged by Jean Claude Van Damme in a loincloth. I think it’s safe to assume this happened in the first Kickboxer movie. Now Po has kidnapped and raped Sloan’s wife, and Sloan is thirsty for vengeance.

His quest is aided by the DEA, who offer him a deal: they will spring him from prison if he will travel to Po’s Mexican headquarters under an assumed identity, enter his Day of the Dead tournament and, well, kill him. Sloan accepts, and in his foolproof disguise of a pair of sunglasses and a slightly more gravelly voice, he makes his way to Mexico to compete in the tournament, rescue his wife and take down the villainous – and strangely drag-queenish – Po.

Of course, this story is only the most threadbare clothesline possible on which to hang as many sessions of roundhouse kicking, neck-snapping and nut-crunching as possible. If you put 100 monkeys in a room with 100 typewriters and asked them all to write a kickboxing movie, 99 of them would come up with this one. But let’s be honest – anyone who watches Kickboxer 4 on purpose is expecting and hoping for only one thing: lots of people getting kicked in the face. On that score it delivers, but to my untrained eye, the fights are rote and unimaginative. There is an unexpected softcore ménage a trois that managed to hold my attention, but the most interesting aspect of Kickboxer 4 is the resume of its writer/director Albert Pyun. He directed Kickboxer 2: The Road Back, but not Kickboxer 3: The Art of War. Among his other works: Adrenalin: Fear the Rush, Nemesis 4: Death Angel, Bulletface and Brain Smasher: A Love Story. Folks, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing Mr. Pyun again before this is over with.

Previously on Unwatchable:

99. The Honeymooners
100. Devil Fish

The Screengrab : brain smasher: a love story

Take Five: Crime and Pyunishment

Unwatchable #98: “Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor”