• Written and directed by Albert Pyun
• Starring
  • Kathy Long
  • Kris Kristofferson
  • Lance Henriksen
  • Scott Paulin
  • Gary Daniels
• Produced by Tom Karnowski

Alas, hubris.

On the messageboards at Jabootu.com not long ago, in discussion with Steve from saveyourservant.com (yes, this paragraph is going to be nothing but a link farm), I mentioned that having survived I Stand Alone — my trial by ordeal, my Orphean descent — that there is not a single film on the planet which holds any fear for me. And just to prove it, I declared in a moment of faltering judgement, I proposed to include Knights as the capstone to my Lance Henriksen Video Binge.

In my fervor to prove a point, I overlooked the simple fact that a situation need not actually engender fear to be distasteful. I’m pretty confident each time I go to the dentist that I’ll not die in the chair — and indeed, that I’ll eventually be better off for the experience. That doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt like a sonofabitch.

So here we have a movie both written and directed by Albert Pyun, the best proof of the much-vaunted “auteur theory,” in that all of his movies have a distinctiveness to them, whether he wrote the script or not. Unfortunately, that “Pyun touch” is a positively staggering amount of suckiness. I’m not sure that anyone has ever managed to identify exactly what it is that Mr. Pyun brings to the table. I have, however, heard rumors that the Pentagon was working on an Albert Pyun DVD Boxed Set as an offensive weapon but had to give up testing when, through happenstance exposures, far too many patriotic Americans in the lab had their brains eaten by the movies being mastered.

Tim Thomerson, wishing he had brought a Frito Bandito moustache.

Given that Pyun both wrote and directed this feature, you can bet your bottom dollar that the plot will concern cyborgs. And wonder of wonders, in this case the cyborgs are actually cyborgs, instead of mislabeled androids. (In case you’re keeping track, Pyun’s filmography currently contains no fewer that eight movies centering on robots of some kind or other, of which I’ve only reviewed one previously, Nemesis.) And what are the robots doing this time around? Well, let’s see if I can piece together the backstory for you:

Sometime in the future, when humanity has ruined the planet and left it looking a lot like Southern Utah (in fact, exactly like Southern Utah, as evidenced by some landmarks I’ll show you later), some deadly cyborgs arrive from… I dunno. Apparently they were part of a government assassin project, although there’s also mention of place called “Genesis,” which may or may not be off-planet. These cyborgs were built by someone called “the Creator,” now dead, who made them with finite power sources; but then a second entity came along, called “the Master Builder,” who converted the cyborgs so that they could run on human blood, extracted through hypos that the cyborgs can extend from their fingertips. Now thralls to to Master Builder, the twenty evil cyborgs roam the wasteland looking like Borged Bedouins, under the leadership of Job (Lane Henriksen), who has a huge mechanical arm and drools on himself a lot.

Now, if these cyborgs were as smart as your average VIC-20, the remnants of humanity would be in deep trouble, especially because the cataclysms that wiped out civilization, as usual, appear to have preserved only the shallow end of the gene pool, leaving the world to be repopulated by microcephalic dullards. Fortunately, the cyborgs are no smarter, just a little meaner. For example, our first scene has a troop of horseback cyborgs confronting some wandering farmer refugees in the desert, demanding their surrender in return for a painless death, and the lives of the children among them. Otherwise they’ll kill the children first in front of their parents’ eyes. Given that strategy, it would behoove the cyborgs not to let a mother hand her infant to her young daughter Nea and let them trot off to safety, in full view of the aggressors. But I guess Job is too busy exchanging sparkling dialogue with the lead farmer, to wit:

Sparks. Water. Bad.

Farmer: They say you are the devil!
Job: I am the prophet, farmer, of things to come.
Farmer: All you bring is death!
Job: Death… is the future.

I find that last comment disturbing, because I’m very interested in the future. It is, after all, where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

Ten years later (wow! it’s the future already!), Nea (Kathy Long) is living with another bunch of squatter farmers (including an inadequately-disguised and uncredited Tim Thomerson), in what looks like maybe a half-dozen tents held up with rickety, unsecured poles. Which proves convenient, because it makes them easy to knock down when — the cyborgs attack!

Actually, it’s mostly human collaborators under the direction of a single cyborg, Simon (Scott Paulin), who isn’t terribly successful in getting his men to understand that whole “Capture them alive” order. In fact, it turns out that Nea is the only survivor, thanks to getting knocked out early on in time-honored fashion. Thanks to the resulting slim pickings, Simon is just about to puncture her and fingerslurp her blood when a mysterious stranger appears on horseback. Who could it be?

Well, in close-up shots, it’s Kris Kristofferson. In action scenes (all shot from a distance, or with his back to the camera, or just with strong sunlight overhead to put his face in shadow), it’s a stunt double who appears on screen often enough to deserve a co-starring credit. In either case, the character is Gabriel, the cyborg who kills cyborgs. Seems he was the final creation of the Creator, built out of spare parts, who was never compromised by the Master Builder, and whose hardwired mission is to wipe out all of the evil cyborgs before his internal power supply runs out in a year. All clear?

The promised landmarks.

Gabriel ends up destroying Simon after some painfully “witty” dialogue (which largely mirrors the Westley/Indigo banter in The Princess Bride), and rescuing the injured Nea. Although he plans simply to leave her somewhere to heal, she wants to go with him to kick some cyborg ass, and makes him a deal. She overheard that the cyborg army with 1000 humans (and no, you’re never going to see them all on screen at one time) is on its way to Taos, a city of 10,000 inhabitants a few weeks away, to suck oodles of blood for the Master Builder . She knows a shortcut that the two of them can negotiate in order to catch up to the army, and all he has to do over the next five weeks is teach her how to kill cyborgs.

Which, despite his protestations and the cyborg reputation, is pretty darned easy. The cyborgs have this reputation for being unkillable, but Gabriel reveals that a direct strike to the “kill zone” in the center of the forehead will “take their systems offline” (and often cause their heads to smoke and melt) with a sound like the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive giving up the ghost. Let’s see — a poke with a pointy object right between the eyes is the secret Achilles’ Heel of the supposedly unbeatable enemy? I’d file that under “Helluva Design Flaw.”

So in what amounts to two parallel montages, the cyborg army marches, twenty extras at a time, while Gabriel trains Nea and makes her run behind the horse. It’s here that you’ll probably notice that Albert Pyun likes colored lens filters. Really, really likes them. Red ones, blue ones, green ones, yellow ones, it’s all good. One of his favorite tricks is putting a filter only on the upper half of the lens when shooting landscapes and panoramas, which gives the impression of lowering skies. Or would, if it were used competently; on the other hand, when a mounted figure rides into the frame, his head high enough that the filter turns him black against the dark green sky, then it just gives the impression that there’s something dark on the upper half of the lens. And just to give the right atmosphere to it all, the musical soundtrack is sharply divided between the generic staccato action that has besieged action cinema ever since Predator, and a peppy, upbeat keyboard melody that sounds like it was rejected as theme music for the Special Olympics.

Killing time in unheard-of amounts, Gabriel feeds Nea (and us) bits of that whole Creator/Master Builder backstory that I gave you at the beginning — just enough to be annoying instead of intriguing. They also talk about being human, dreaming, and other subjects that humans and robots just have to explore whenever stuck together. Eventually, though, a team of cyborgs trailing them catches up, blows Gabriel in half, and leaves Nea with a slaver. But since she’s studied asskicking so well, she escapes and infiltrates the cyborg army camp the day before the attack on Taos.

Then there’s the footage on the outtakes reel, where Kathy Long got this itch on her nose and…

Well, of course! You didn’t think they’d have the budget to show an actual town, did you? No, we get to see a matte painting from a fair distance, but the day before the attack, Job proclaims some gladiatorial combat with prisoners as a morale-builder, and Nea eagerly steps up, defeats the champion, and then proceeds to decimate the entire army as they attack her in twos and threes.

Come to think of it, an attack by the army on Taos would have been something to see. Given that this formidable army, and the combined might of the remaining cyborgs, is unable to stop a single girl armed with whatever pointy sticks are close at hand, it would have been the height of comedy to see them attempt to attack a fortified city which outnumbered them ten-to-one. And the cyborgs go down so easily it’s embarrassing, as if their foreheads are made of Silly Putty. It’s sort of like watching one of the later Hammer Dracula films, where anytime a vampire stumbled over a chair, you just knew that it would break apart in such a way that a flesh-piercing wooden stake would conveniently be sticking straight up.

Oh, and there’s also a stupid subplot about Nea wondering where her baby brother is (remember, the infant she carried away in the prolog?), after she left him at a village which was soon torched by the cyborgs. I only mention it because she finally meets up with him by pure dumb luck, only to have him carted off by the Master Builder himself — a guy in a mechanical skull mask who shows up only long enough to grab the tyke and escape by hang glider. Just to make sure this is as anticlimactic as humanly possible, this unknown skullguy isn’t even identified as the Master Builder until he’s gone. “Oh, that was him — you just missed him!”

Given that there entire ending is left open with the Master Builder stuff, we have no choice but to end up at a supposed cliffhanger, where Nea’s voiceover proclaims that their pursuit of the Master Builder would eventually take them to the “Cyborg City,” to Genesis (again — where or what that is, we don’t know), and even to the edge of the universe (none of which is easily filmable in the environs of Moab, Utah). I say “supposed” because Pyun must have known that there’s no way in God’s green earth he’d ever get the budget to continue this series with more than a handful of low-rent Borg running around the buttes; instead, it seems more the ending of desperation, as he realized that his story really had no ending. (If he’d realized that it also had no beginning or middle, we could have been spared the entire sorry spectacle.)

“Who the hell uses the corkscrew attachment anymore?”

Kathy Long, according to the back of the box, is a “five-time kickboxing champion” (she was also Michelle Pfeiffer’s fight double in Batman Returns, so that must count for something). Just as I rarely expect Oscar-winning actors to be martial-arts experts, so it would be unfair for me to rag on Long’s thespian shortcomings, knowing that she was hired solely for her taut buttocks. With everyone else, though, it seems like a criminal case of under-direction (yes, I will lay this too at Pyun’s feet). Kristofferson squints into the sun and drawlss his lines in that emotive style which I refer to as “reading the Taco Bell menu.” Henriksen, in extreme contrast, puts his heart into it and comes across as the Dirty Old Cyborg, constantly growling, rasping, mugging, and of course drooling. While watching the staged combats, he sits in his pavilion, rocking back and forth as he makes little growling noises in his throat; he seems to be, um, enjoying himself so much that I was grateful the camera doesn’t show what he’s doing with his hand. (Or his hook.)

Not that anyone could do anything with his script. Most of it is in such leaden pretentious tones that even James Earl Jones would sound embarrassed, punctuated by brief moments of “wit” that sound like they were made up on the set once heatstroke had set in. Brief, vague messianic allusions blend with imtimations that “there’s something profound about all of this, but we’re not going to let you in on it.” All of it proof that Albert Pyun is as dangerous behind a keyboard as he is behind a camera.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count (including the cyborgs, as they’re not significantly less lifelike than the rest of the cast): 77
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 3
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  Nicholas Guest (the outspoken farmer) was the dying cadet in Star Trek 2