Action Packed Flashback – Albert Pyun’s Cyborg

Largely dismissed in the filmography of action star Jean-Claude Van Damme is 1989′s Cyborg, a film seemingly forgotten to today’s action fans. While it has the dubious honor of being sandwiched in between two widely praised and regarded Van Damme films – 1988′s Bloodsport and 1989′s Kickboxer – the film has been in the news lately (here) due to some footage long thought lost being rediscovered by the film’s director, Albert Pyun.

Killer Film looks back at Cyborg in another edition of Action Packed Flashback with director Albert Pyun.

“We were fully cast and five weeks away from shooting Masters [of the Universe] 2,” Albert Pyun recalls. “So yeah, there was a shooting script and we were building costumes, props, and sets.” Before production got started on Cyborg, Cannon Films initially wanted to make a sequel to the Dolph Lundgren 1987 hit, Masters of the Universe. With production nearing a start date, the studio had dumped nearly $2 million on the aforementioned sets, props, and costumes, before their rights to the Mattel franchise was lost due to their growing financial issues.

Wanting to recoup the lost production costs on the now dead sequel, Albert Pyun came to them with a proposed storyline which would include these sets. His draft, done in a weekend, followed Gibson Rickenbacker, an underdog street fighter who battles The Pirates, in a post-apocalyptic setting. Pyun was already a vet in the world of low budget B-movies with fan favorites like 1982′s The Sword and the Sorcerer and 1988′s Alien from L.A. Armed with a small budget of $500,000 and a production time table of 24 days, the film needed to have a star and be shot quickly.

Having just released the hugely successful Bloodsport, Cannon Films and producer Menahem Golan wanted the rising, yet still unknown Jean-Claude Van Damme. Pyun wanted Chuck Norris. “When I pitched the idea of a post-apocalyptic martial arts movie, it was with Chuck in mind from the start. I had met Chuck and had worked with his brother Aaron (Norris), so I had insight into what Chuck could be and wanted to be. I knew he was under contract to Cannon and they had to find projects for him. I thought it would be a perfect match. But Menahem was hooked on Van Damme, and said I could make the movie only if I used JCVD. So there was no arguing it.”

Shooting Cyborg was anything but easy. “I just felt like I couldn’t make the movie I wanted to make with Van Damme,” Pyun explains. “Everything was designed around Chuck Norris and America. So it was a huge re-imagining of the film. Different story, characters, etc. JCVD’s accent was a challenge back then.” It also didn’t help that Jackson “Rock” Pinckney, who played one of the Pirates, lost his eye during a scene where he had to fight Van Damme. The sequence was an accident, as Van Damme punctured his eye with a prop knife. Even though it was an accident, Pinckney sued Van Damme and won (here).

And then, Cannon Films ordered the film to be cut, eliminating possible gore and violence that might have secured an X rating at the time. These scenes were rumored to have Van Damme input, since he too, didn’t like the added gore. “I don’t know anything about whether JCVD liked or disliked the gore. I never heard that before,” Pyun says. Still, back then the scenes weren’t kept for DVD extras, and were thought to be lost. “But for years I’ve dreamed of getting my cut out there but could never find it. Finally in February, my long time composer Tony Riparetti found two VHS copies of my cut. One cut was a little later than the other. So this was very exciting for me since I’ve been having to live with the open wound that my version and vision had never been seen.”

To find out more and to order this new cut of Albert Pyun’s Cyborg, click here. The film went on to gross about $10 million at the box office, despite getting negative reviews at the time. While it was the last film Cannon would release theatrically, it also went on to spawn two unrelated sequels, one of which starred an unknown actress named Angelina Jolie (Cyborg 2 1993), as well as being a source of inspiration to Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man. On his hit song “Judgment Day” from the 1999 album, Tical 2000 , Meth quotes (here and here)  Fender Tremolo (played by actor Vincent Klyn, Warchild in Point Break) from the film:

“First there was the collapse of civilization: anarchy, genocide, starvation. Then when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, we got the plague. The Living Death, quickly closing its fist over the entire planet. Then we heard the rumors: that the last scientists were working on a cure that would end the plague and restore the world. Restore it? Why? I like the death! I like the misery! I like this world!”

Until the next flashback…

Jon Peters

I love film. That is all.

More Posts