Cyborg

• Directed by Albert Pyun
• April 7, 1989

A mercenary fights a group of murderous marauders along the East coast of the United States in a disease ravaged future.

Cyborg is a train wreck from start to finish. The pacing is weird. The dialogue is bad. Characters make odd choices. The lack of real production values shows making it look like it was done in somebody’s backyard. And I swear at least one character was inserted into the narrative after this movie was finished as they are and are not in scenes depending.

Albert Pyun, probably one of the greatest B-movie directors, ever give us something that is a guilty pleasure to watch. It shouldn’t be enjoyable but it is. It exceeds the sum of its parts and manages to be something you will revisit even if you feel ashamed by the time the credits roll. It is essentially the cinematic equivalent of a frozen burrito after a night of drinking.

You know you’re going to be in trouble with a movie when your best actor is Jean-Claude Van Damme. He’s not terrible but he certainly is not a quality actor. Everybody in this movie is just bad. Their dialogue delivery has all the inflection of reading a cereal box and they have the expression as well as the emotional range of Mark Ruffalo or early Kristen Stewart making Van Damme appear almost as a gifted thespian.

Anyway there’s a disease that ravaged the entire planet and Gibson Rickenbacker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) is hired by Pearl Prophet (Dayle Haddon) a woman from the CDC who is traveling back to the CDC with information that can lead to a cure. In order to carry this information she has been converted into a cyborg. Her upgrades are not an attempt to better make the trip rather to carry the information. I think even in 1989 when this movie came out it could’ve been put on a floppy disk or three. But the bigger question is what exactly is Rickenbacker being paid in? What were the terms? It just kinda happens.

Despite Pearl Prophet being the most important person in the story, she spends very little time on the screen. A character named Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter) gets way more screen time because she starts following Rickenbacker for reasons. I know it was stated but beyond that brief moment I have no idea why she is around. It never comes up again. In the narrative she is there to look pretty and be the damsel in distress. She really is the eye candy for the screen and not much more. I’m hard-pressed to name one defining characteristic of her character. 

Vincent Klyn as Fender Tremolo is hammy and over the top. Tremolo likes the world in chaos and seems like to commit evil because. That is his motivation and at one point he crossed Rickenbacker and now Rickenbacker is getting revenge. It is that sophisticated.

There is a lot of shouting in Cyborg along with primal screaming. Characters let out a war cry and do whatever they’re going to do which is usually enter into combat. Announcing your surprise attack is always the best move.

The story kind of stumbles around like a drunkard walking to their car after the company Christmas party. Eventually it gets to the end but you’re not sure how it gets there even after you watch the whole thing. And truth be told I’m not sure how it got there and I have watched it more than once. Events do not even badly progress from one to the next. And I cannot even say my usual bit about them hitting their runtime and needing to wrap it up. Yet it feels like a proper end. Such is the magic of Pyun.

With clunky dialogue and bad acting and direction Cyborg should be unwatchable but because of the hand of Albert Pyun it becomes something to actually enjoy. I shouldn’t recommend this but I do. Somehow I do.