CYBORG (1989)
1989’s CYBORG holds two personal distinctions: It is my favourite of the oeuvre of the Muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme, as well as my favourite film from the recently departed (and generally beloved) Albert Pyun (at the still too young age of 69). Pyun was a man who loved genre films, so much each frame practically screamed at you from the screen to embrace the genre and its trappings. Admittedly, I probably haven’t seen enough of Pyun’s work to make such a blanket proclamation—but if you will indulge me, his love of genre films is never more apparent than it is in all of CYBORG’s 80+ minutes. Here are just a handful of the highlights of sequences from this sci-fi actioner.
CYBORG opens with a voiceover from Fender Tremolo, the film’s big bad played by Vincent Klyn, as the Cannon logo fills the screen. Klyn’s baritone exposition dump gives the audience a brief what’s what for the movie as we behold a matte painting of a dilapidated NYC in the purposely vague future. Like many films before it, CYBORG predicts a wasteland brought on by some unnamed calamity that has befallen the world. This is a place beset by anarchy and genocide, exacerbated by a plague referred to as “The Living Death,” which further ravaged the planet and its human (and non-human) inhabitants. Tremolo espouses there is, of course, a glimmer of hope (without it, dystopian nightmares like CYBORG don’t work). There are scientists in search of a cure for the disease that could offer the world a future, something that Tremolo resists. Post-apocalyptic scenarios are perfect for a man like Fender Tremolo, one who rules the world as a pirate king, using power and brute force to enforce his reign.
Wisely CYBORG and Pyun don’t just tell us about the ruin of humanity that the collapse wrought. Everywhere is some evidence of the toll this extinction level event has taken on the eastern seaboard of a not-too-distant future. The background is littered with excellent art direction of hollowed out buildings that have fallen into disrepair, every surface seemingly tagged with graffiti. The barbarism of this new age further evidenced by the countless decapitated skulls littering everything, an unspoken warning against traveling certain paths, or in standing up for what’s right in a world that’s gone so horribly wrong. Roads are either non-existent or buried under rubble brought on by the collapse. Empty oil barrels are scattered on the highways, smoke from burned out cars clog the air. In short, nothing feels safe, every road and nook and cranny of this horrible world teems with peril.
Like any good Cannon film of the eighties, CYBORG is not without its striking imagery, action set pieces, and memorable kills. There is the scene of Van Damme’s crucifixion. JCVD’s Gibson Rickenbacker has been worn out after a thorough battle with Tremolo’s seemingly unending stream of henchman. After the fierce and valiant battle, a weakened and beaten Rickenbacker is stood up and then pitilessly beaten by the untested Tremolo, who simply observed from a distance (and with maniacal glee, of course) Rickenbacker’s defeat at his henchmen’s hands. After delivering the knockout blow—a head butt delivered in POV to Van Damme—Tremolo and his remaining battalion leave the conquered Rickenbacker crucified to the sail posts of an abandoned ship.
Another wonderfully composed scene contains one of my favourite shots in any action film. Rickenbacker and Nady Simmons (Deborah Richter) descend into the sewers as a means of escaping Tremolo and his pirate horde. They are stalked into the sewers by Tremolo’s most imposing henchman, Brick Bardo (Ralph Moeller). Realizing running is futile, Van Danme performs a painful and precarious split between two walls in the labyrinth of underground sewers, while Bardo approaches through the dimly lit catacombs. The lackey walks unwittingly into the trap as Rickenbacker leans forward and plunges a hunting knife into his head. It’s a beautifully horrific scene that Pyun wisely spares the audience from too much of the horror of the kill while remaining a wonderfully executed sequence by the filmmaker. Truly an indelible image in the careers of both filmmaker and actor.
What sets CYBORG’s hero off on his quest is not for a cure to the plague, unlike the titular character—the cybernetic organism with the alliterative and on-the-nose name of Pearl Prophet, played by stoically by Dayle Haddon. No, Van Damme’s Rickenbacker is driven by the far less altruistic notion of vengeance. In flashbacks set before the world went entirely to hell, we see a long-haired Rickenbacker already in the role of a “Slinger,” a navigator tasked by the eldest daughter of a trio of orphans (Mary, played by Terrie Batson) to lead them away from another nameless fallen city. In a series of flashbacks throughout the film, we witness Van Damme warming to the younger children. Unfortunately for Rickenbacker and the orphans, Tremolo and his gang of pirates stumble upon Rickenbacker, Mary, and her younger siblings, living a life of leisure in their new homestead.
It’s against Tremolo’s nature to abide such frivolity and so, sadist that he is, wraps two of the orphans and Rickenbacker in a nest of barbed wire over the hole at the top of the family’s well. Tremolo begins a cruel initiation into his gang of pirates by telling Haley (the youngest of the orphans) that if she can hold the trio up, they will live instead of being seemingly lowered to their deaths in the barbed wire trap. Of course, being a child, she lacks the strength to keep the trio hovering above, and so she and the audience watch in horror as they are lowered to an almost certain demise. Van Damme manages to free himself from the predicament, while Haley’s remaining family is shown dead at the bottom of the well. It’s this display of horrific barbarism that sets Gibson Rickenbacker on his quest for revenge.
While I may not be the most well-versed Pyun or Van Damme scholar, I urge you to seek out this B-movie masterpiece; it is the best example of what makes both filmmaker and actor so beloved to genre aficionados. I sincerely believe that CYBORG remains both these titans’ masterpieces.
