‘Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe’ (1991) Review

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Over on Kung Pew Video, I’ve been revisiting the direct-to-video relics that raised us. This week: Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe.

---

If you’ve been following Kung Pew Video for any length of time, you probably know I can usually find something to appreciate about the movies I review. Whether it’s the practical effects, clever use of shooting locations, or just a vibe—no matter how bad the movie or how tiny the budget, there’s usually something that makes them worth spending 90 minutes with on a Saturday night.

But then I watched Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe. And it said… “Hold my beer.”

And believe me–I wanted to like this movie. I mean, look at that cover art. You’ve got Jesse Ventura shooting a laser out of his eye and Sven-Ole Thorsen…well, it’s hard to tell if Sven is taking a painful crap or maybe this is a scene from a much racier movie, if you catch my drift. 

Either way, it’s hard to get more bad ass than this. And at the very least, it promises to be one of those so-bad-it’s-good movies. 

Instead it’s just…so-bad-it’s-bad. 

Now it would be easy to blame the quality of movies like this on the lack of budget. But that just isn’t the problem here. Because while Abraxas was blowing 2 and a half million bucks on shots of Jesse Ventura and Sven Ole Thorsen shooting at each other with LaserTag guns in the snowy Canadian backcountry, movies like Nemesis and Circuitry Man were creating whole believable worlds on a fraction of that budget.

The problem with Abraxas isn’t a lack of money. It’s a lack of talent. It’s a lack of vision. 

So come along with me and let’s talk about Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe.

The Back of the VHS

And not that it matters much in this case, but I always do the back-of-the-VHS synopsis, so let’s talk about what Abraxas is about. 

Jesse Ventura plays Abraxas, an intergalactic cop tracking his former partner, Secundus, to Earth. Secundus (played by the ever-present Sven-Ole Thorsen) has fathered the co-mater, a child who possesses a mysterious power to…I’m not really sure. And the movie never really makes it clear, but what is clear is that Abraxas must stop him before something really bad happens. 

It’s a weird mash-up of Firestarter and I Come in Peace, but set in a rural Canadian mountain town. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry. The movie doesn’t clear it up.

It’s Not the Money

Everyone assumes bad B-movies are bad because they’re made on the cheap. But that’s an easy argument to debunk. All you gotta do is look at the budgets of movies like The Terminator or The Road Warrior to recognize it doesn’t always come down to money. 

But those are once-in-a-generation movies, so maybe it’s an unfair comparison. Let’s look at a more apple-to-apples comparison. 

Albert Pyun’s Nemesis cost around two million dollars and was made around the same time as Abraxas. And while it’s far from a perfect movie, every frame is bursting with style. The neon-soaked visuals, the synth score, the grimy industrial shooting locations, the action, the artfully framed shots…Nemesis is an exercise in stretching every dollar and not sacrificing an ounce of originality or a single drop of entertainment value in the process.

That’s craft.

It’s the same reason movies like Circuitry Man, Crime Zone, and Nemesis are still watched to this day. They don’t use their limitations as excuses. They use them to their advantage.

EDIT: I reviewed Moon 44 after reviewing this movie, and I would be doing that movie a disservice if I didn’t mention it. Roland Emmerich also had a budget of $2.5 million for that movie, and it looks like it belongs in the pantheon of movies like Outland, the Alien franchise, and Blade Runner.

But Where Did the Money Go?

So if Abraxas and Nemesis (and Moon 44I) cost around the same to make, you gotta wonder what Abraxas spent its money on. 

But since it’s difficult to prove what a 35-year-old obscure sci-fi B-movie literally spent its money on, it might be easier to tell you what it didn’t spend it on. 

It didn’t spend it on the script. It didn’t spend it on shooting locations. It didn’t spend it on costumes, and it didn’t spend it on special effects and props. It definitely didn’t spend it on music or cinematography, and it 100% did not spend it on fight choreography or stunts. 

Abraxas looks cheap. The lighting is flat, the photography is uninspired, the acting is appalling, the action scenes and set pieces are absolutely unredeemable, and maybe its worst sin of all is that the whole affair is just a mind-numbing bore. 

The script is filled with dialogue that sounds cribbed from a handful of Star Trek episodes, and to make matters worse, it’s all delivered by amateur actors in the most un-dynamic, un-dramatic ways. 

There are so many scenes in this movie of uninteresting actors talking to each other about the most nonsensical, boring crap in the dullest and uninspired settings. I’m not joking when I say this: it took me nearly 5 hours to watch this movie. I kept getting bored and distracted. I’d get up and do something more interesting, like fold clothes or cut my toenails. Eventually, I’d realize I was watching a movie and come back to it. But only begrudgingly. I had to force myself not to fast-forward through agonizingly long sections of insufferably boring people talking to each other in the most dreary settings. 

But I made it through it.

$2.5 Million for a Skullet and Rat Tail?

Now I said I had no way of knowing what the movie spent its budget on, and I have no way of verifying this, but IMDB says Jesse Ventura took home 250 thousand dollars for his role in this movie. 

And if that’s true, that money was absolutely wasted. 

Ventura barely manages to rise above the unknown players in this. The charismatic, comic book-sized character that we see in The Predator and The Running Man is nowhere to be found here. And to make matters worse, our galaxy-hopping space alien hero is sporting a skullet, complete with a braided rat tail. 

Ventura’s hairdo aside, if that payday is accurate, I think it only reinforces the idea that the people making this picture had no idea what they were doing or where to spend their money. But even if the IMDB information is wrong, it’s undeniable that the 2 and a half million is nowhere to be seen on screen. 

And that’s a damn shame. 

The Soundtrack

After I recorded this, I started pulling clips from the movie, and I realized I needed to correct something I said here about the music. I basically crapped on it, and I actually don’t think that’s entirely fair. 

The synth music played over the opening title sequence is actually pretty catchy and fits this genre of movie perfectly. It reminds me a little of something you might hear on a Phaserland album or something. 

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie uses a sultry saxophone track that would’ve been more at home in a 90s Skinamax movie starring Shannon Tweed and Eric Estrada. It’s not a bad piece of music, but it’s totally out of place here, especially in tense fight scenes or scenes involving the young boy that Secundus is trying to track down. 

But none of it is bad music per se. And I never want to punch down at these movies. And I always want to be fair and call a spade a spade. So the music isn’t bad. Most of it just is out of place in Abraxas.  

All That Money for Boredom

Because 2 and a half million dollars was more than enough to produce a competent, entertaining B sci-fi movie. Whether you look at Cyborg, Future Kick, Circuitry Man, or even Nemesis, none of those movies are perfect. But every one of them has something that Abraxas doesn’t. They have personality. They have imagination. They have filmmakers finding creative ways to work around their limitations instead of being defeated by them.

That’s what makes Abraxas so disappointing.

It’s not an ambitious movie that reached for the stars and fell short. It isn’t one of those so-bad-it’s-good train wrecks you invite your buddies over to watch over a few dozen beers.

It’s just…inert. 

It had more money than a lot of its contemporaries, a recognizable action star, an interesting premise, and it was made in an era when direct-to-video sci-fi was booming. 

And somehow it managed to completely shit the bed.

Money Can’t Buy Creativity

One of the reasons I started Kung Pew Video was because I wanted to highlight movies that people dismiss as cheap or worthless. And after watching more of these forgotten action and sci-fi films than I can even remember, I’ve realized budget is almost never the thing separating the good ones from the bad ones. 

Passion is what matters. Imagination. Craft. 

Give me an Albert Pyun with half a million dollars and a head full of crazy ideas over someone with five times the budget and no vision any day of the week.

If you compare Abraxas to Cyborg, Circuitry Man, Future Kick, or even Nemesis, the difference isn’t the money. It’s the people working on the picture. Those filmmakers knew how to squeeze every ounce of entertainment out of every dollar they had. The people behind Abraxas simply didn’t.

And maybe that’s the biggest takeaway here. Money can’t buy creativity. It can’t buy passion. And it certainly can’t conjure up talent or imagination where none exists. 

Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe didn’t convince me that B-movies deserve their bad reputation. If anything, it revealed just how well-made even the least respected movies out there are. And honestly…that makes me appreciate movies like Cyborg, Circuitry Man, and Future Kick…even more than I did before.

The Verdict?

Needless to say, I am not recommending Abraxas. And that’s kinda crazy to me to even say, because I have watched some real dog crap in my time. But this movie is just boring. And that’s where I draw the line. At a bare minimum, I’ve got to find some entertainment value in these to want to recommend them to others. For those of you out there who watch all of these kinds of movies for no other reason than curiosity, be my guest. I think the movie is streaming on Fawesome right now. I watched my DVD copy of the movie, but neither is a great option, to be honest. They both look terrible.

So be forewarned! Watch Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe at your own risk. But if you do, you gotta come back and tell me what you think.