• Directed by Albert Pyun
• Written by Rebecca Charles
• Starring
  • Olivier Gruner
  • Tim Thomerson
  • Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
  • Merle Kennedy

My wife walked into the laundry room last night and found me with my lips wrapped around the spout of the bleach bottle.

“Nathan, stop!” she screamed, knocking the jug from my hands.

“But, honey,” I pleaded, Clorox dribbling down my chin, “it’s the only way I can get the foul aftertaste of the movie I just watched out of my mouth!”

“You watch bad movies all the time,” she said. “You should be used to it.”

“But most of them are bad in a fun way. This one, Nemesis, was bad in a way that made you want to go back in time and kill your own grandfather so you would never be born to see it. And really, I can’t blame anyone but myself — I knew going in that it was directed by Albert Pyun, the worst working director in Hollywood, and I still paid good money — forty-nine cents! — to rent it.”

“Albert Pyun?” she said. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“Thank everything you deem holy,” I said. “I have. I’ve even sat through several of his movies before — The Sword and the Sorcerer, Dollman, Captain America, and Knights. Dear god, Knights…” I grabbed for the jug again, but she shoved it away from me.

“So why did you watch it, then?”

“The Internet Movie Database,” I blubbered. “It actually had a user rating of 6.7, and some comments and reviews said it was a pretty good movie. And it led to three sequels. How was I to know?”

“Come on,” she said. “It couldn’t be that bad.”

“Oh, it was bad,” I said. “It was a meandering, plotless, paceless piece of flotsam. It felt like a fever dream, with nothing making sense or meaning anything. It was supposed to be about an LAPD cop, Olivier Gruner, who gets shot up and rebuilt as a cyborg and then sent on a dangerous mission to find a dangerous renegade android — only every time they meant android, they said cyborg, as if they didn’t know what the difference was. Gruner was an cyborg, but they didn’t call him one.”

“Sounds like a simple plot,” she said. “How could they screw that up?”

“How?” I cried, my voice dangerously near the edge of hysteria. “By not having anything make sense! Why is there a pointless narration all the way through? How does the first fight start in a hotel room, then immediately proceed to a demolition site obviously far from any habitable building — which looked, incidentally, like the demolition site Pyun used as two separate locations in Dollman? Why did the LAPD go to all the trouble to give Gruner the Six-Million-Dollar-Man treatment to then let him languish in Baja six months later as part of his “treatment”? How does he then meet the terrorist who originally shot him up in the bar there and kill her? Why is such a big deal made of out his puppy that he has for the six months that an android then pointlessly shoots and he doesn’t care? Why does the LAPD then let him vanish into Rio de Janeiro as a data smuggler for a year? What’s with the time spans, anyway — hasn’t Pyun ever heard of the Aristotelian Unities? Then when the LAPD wants him back, why do they shoot him just to install a bomb in his heart to make him work for them — shouldn’t they have done that when they were originally building him? And they said he was a lousy smuggler and couldn’t do anything right — so why do they want him back? What’s with all this misplaced cyberpunk babble anyway — someone wants ’safe passage through the electronic web’? Why are the LAPD commissioner’s (Tim Thomerson) two sidekicks (one of whom is Brion James) speaking with German accents? Why does a trained operative like Gruner talk to himself in a hotel room that he should suspect of being bugged? If he’s so good, why does he keep getting hit so much? Why would the evil androids want to replace all people with androids if they act just like the people they replaced? Why –”

She gently put her hand over my mouth. “You’re frothing.”

“That’s the bleach,” I said.

“Wasn’t there anything good about this movie?”

“Well,” I said, thinking hard, “there was one scene where Gruner escapes by shooting through the floor of a crummy hotel — he does that through about four stories. That was cool.”

“So it wasn’t a complete waste, right?”

“And I got to see a lot of b-movie actors. There was Gruner, of course — who looks a lot like your brother-in-law Dave; and Tim Thomerson and Brion James, and there was Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and Yuji Okumoto, and Deborah Shelton… Oh heavens, the waste of good b-movie talent!”

“You seem calmer now,” she said. “Do you feel better?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. I’m fine now. Give me back my bleach.”