MonsterHunter

I realize that most of you are expecting to read something marginally amusing about how rotten this movie is. You want to hear me run the Muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme, down for his penchant for staring dumbly about, like a little girl lost in a department store and about to wet her pants. You desire the expected cheap shot about how V.D. croaks out his meager lines like he’s had half his tongue removed while the remaining half is swelled up.

And you’re pleading for me to lay out director Albert Pyun’s credits as some sort of indictment of just how remarkably uninteresting this apocalypse that took place on the old sets of Year Of The Dragon and in rural North Carolina was. As if the fact that Al had helmed films that starred such action luminaries as Rutger Hauer, Christopher Lambert, and Steven Seagal could make me forget the unbridled joy he delivered when he brought the Red Skull to life in the hideously spectacular Captain America. I mean, it starred J.D. Salinger’s son for crying out loud!

No, there’s no need for me to try and slather on the damning adjectives, all carefully arranged to appear too cool and too smart for such gunk like this thing. You see, as every Slinger knows (Slingers are apparently the good guys in this movie, though there wasn’t any explanation as to why they were called that or what they did, only that they fought the Pirates and that V.D. was a Slinger), sooner or later someone is going to ride into town who’s faster on the draw than you. Someone who’ll outclass you every step of the way. Someone that you’ve just to got admit is a better man. Heck, all I can do is to lay it all out there and if it’s good enough most nights, great. And if it ain’t, you shake hands with your betters and walk away.

So it is then that I bow down to a superior commentary already written about this film. Its ability to strip this movie down and lay out all that ails it is breathtaking. Structurally superior, this piece recounts Al’s influences in making the movie and reveals the hilariously inflated opinion that Al has of his work, somehow making claims that range from how the film was going to be something along the lines of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West, but you know, with a cyborg, all the way to alleging that he worked with Akira Kurosawa (sorry Al, but I couldn’t locate that on the Internet Movie Database, but those four Nemesis movies you directed while scripting three of them is probably a close second to working for Kurosawa as far as your film cred goes). This write-up is so unrelentingly mean that it even hauls out the silly notion that compares V.D.’s character to the characters in The Seven Samurai (uh, well, they’re all human, I guess)!

Okay, so the liner notes that came with the DVD were especially tough! Really, was it necessary for them to bring up the fact that the movie actually rented dirt for their swamp set instead of buying it because it was cheaper to have the dirt company come and retrieve it once they were finished shooting scenes that invariably involved V.D. grimacing and screaming gutturally while throwing kicks in slow motion? After the beating Cyborg suffered from the guys that put out the DVD, I felt like sticking up for it a little bit. I thought that having the bad guy growl out the opening narration that describes a world in ruin and beset with plague and having him scream about how much he likes this new world was just the sort of thing that Kurosawa might have tried if he ever made a movie that opened up with a below average matte painting of a wrecked city. Or am I thinking of Sergio Leone?

As is the case with most of these post-apocalyptic cheapies from the eighties that feature guys and gals dressed up like they were trying out for KISS’s “Lick It Up” video, it isn’t enough that the world as we know it has ended. We aren’t really interested in how any regular folks are trying to survive on a day to day basis. Except for the times when they try to survive whenever the big, ugly, roided up mutant and his gang slash, burn, and rape them.

Nope, the reason we’ve been transported to this potential future (I keep waking up wondering if when I take out the garbage they’ll be some seven foot goon dressed in fury shoulder pads, chain mail shirt, and albino contacts running over my elderly neighbor in his souped-up armor plated dune buggy while screaming something like “I love chaos!”) is so we can follow our hero on one of those dopey escort missions. Once the world ends, escort missions are pretty much the only form of employment a good guy can get. It usually involves our boy having to get some chick (most likely the last hope for some type of vague salvation that isn’t ever really followed up on) to some place for some reason. This requires running a gauntlet of bad guys through various rubble strewn sets, abandoned warehouses, and sewers. If he isn’t working on an escort mission, he’ll most likely be cajoled into a rescue mission. It’s basically the same set up as the escort gig, but instead of dragging her along somewhere, he’s go to go and get her, then drag her somewhere.

V.D. gets himself mixed up in an escort mission when he helps out a gal who finds herself attacked by a bunch of Pirates led by the evil Fender. Fender is a jacked up bald dude with bad teeth and white eyes. He’s a fan of the plague that’s running rampant across the world and when he finds out that this girl is trying to get to Atlanta to give some scientists some data that can stop the plague, he decides that he’s always wanted to see Atlanta and kidnaps her, leaving V.D. all knocked out in an alley. Now, in spite of what you may believe after watching V.D., Fender, and the various women in the film try to act, the girl that Fender kidnaps is the only actual cyborg in the movie.

The cyborg’s name is Pearl and we learn in flashbacks (the movie is rife with flashbacks and sometimes the flashbacks even get repeated!) that she volunteered to give up her humanity so that she could be transformed into a cyborg capable of carrying the data that the scientists in Atlanta need. I’ve got three words for these so-called scientists: removable hard drive. Shoot, depending on how much data they have, they might be able to fit it on CD or a DVD-R or something. But then we wouldn’t have those embarrassing effects of the cyborg’s eye telescoping out of its head then, would we?

After Pearl gets taken prisoner by Fender, V.D. gets some help from another gal named Nady. Nady thinks that V.D. ought to go after Fender and save Pearl because it’s the right thing to do. V.D. is a brooding, haunted sort who is prone to staring sullenly into space while director Albert Pyun vainly attempts to add depth to things by showing us V.D.’s tragic past.

While the flashbacks involving Pearl the Cyborg are few and dole out only the most rudimentary of information needed to set up the backstory driving this movie, V.D.’s flashbacks are frequent, boring, and filled with dialogue delivered by his then girlfriend like she was in some sort of numbed stupor. More egregious than that though was V.D.’s hair. In the flashbacks, he has all this long, unkempt hair that he almost manages to tie back, but still has a stringy mess of it laying at all angles on his forehead. Who would have guessed that the first casualties of the collapse of civilization would be brushes and combs?

As we learn over and over and over in these flashbacks, V.D. gets hooked up with this woman and her children and decides to live a peaceful life with them. We even get see him put his weapons under a bunch of dirty quilts in an old chest as a sign of how he’s given up his past life as a Slinger - twice! Then Fender and his gang appear and tie up V.D., his old lady, and her son with a bunch of barb wire and suspends them over a well. Fender makes the daughter hold onto the barb wire so that if she lets go, V.D. and company go splat down at the bottom of the well! Guess who’s the only one that climbs out of the well all oiled up and shirtless; hairless pecs glistening in the sun while he rages against the injustice of it all? So even though V.D. isn’t much for doing anything for anyone else, he’s got a reason to go after Fender, though he predictably doesn’t want Nady tagging along with him.

There isn’t much more to the movie than a series of scenes where V.D. goes after Fender, finds Fender’s gang, fights them in periodic slow motion, and escapes without the cyborg. Rinse. Repeat. V.D. even manages to get himself captured and crucified for his troubles half way through things! Watching his struggle on the cross while drawing strength from his flashbacks really left an impact on me and I find myself looking at my WWJCVDD bracelet for guidance whenever I’m confronted by some question of morality. Usually, I find that the answer alternates between throwing a roundhouse kick or punching a guy in the crotch.

Things are wrapped as you expect with a big kick fight between Fender and V.D. Fender does play a little dirty pool by repeatedly slamming a car door on V.D.’s head, but that’s pretty much like flipping V.D.’s switch because it doesn’t take long for V.D. to kick through a car window to get to Fender, set a guy a fire somehow in the driving rain, and to stab Fender a couple of times before Albert hits the eighty minute mark and calls it a wrap. For you V.D. completists out there, you do get his signature move where he does the splits between two walls while bad guy stands cluelessly below. V.D. may not our most versatile actor, but he certainly is our most limber.

Cyborg is a pretty painless little bomb that you’ll get a few laughs out of, what with its haunted hero cliches and Albert’s bizarre fixation on the film tricks he think he cribbed from Once Upon A Time In The West. (In a movie that’s barely eighty minutes long that’s nothing more than a couple of extended fight scenes stitched together with flashbacks, is slow motion really accomplishing anything beyond padding out the film?)

You also get quite a bit of guys just standing around posing dramatically, as well as that interminable scene on the cross. V.D. doesn’t add much of anything to the movie and I don’t think you would have lost anything if someone else played his part. With virtually no cyborg-related stuff going on, you’re left with some less than expertly shot fight scenes you could probably get in any number of kickboxer movies from the era.

For cruddy movies about the end of the world where big dumb guys in leather are the order of the day that have a little life in the them, your best bet is to hit those masters of cataclysmic crud, the Italians. Movies such as 2019: After The Fall Of New York, Bronx Warriors and Bronx Executioner are all much better at delivering the poor acting decked out in metal studs and drenched in the gory violence you know you want.

© 2008 MonsterHunter