Over on Kung Pew Video, I’ve been revisiting the direct-to-video relics that raised us. This week: Albert Pyun’s Nemesis.
Synthwave: The Movie
If you were gonna try to explain synthwave to someone who didn’t grow up in the 80s and 90s, you could probably just tell them to go watch Nemesis and that would about cover it. I’m not saying Nemesis encompasses all that synthwave is, but it works as a kind of cultural avatar for what a big part of that music genre is trying to call back to. And even as I say that, I find it hard to be much more specific than to say that Nemesis just captures the vibe of a certain era that synthwave, retrowave, et al were inspired by.
There’re a few things worth mentioning. There’s that smooth Asian flute intro music. The smoky sax that comes in a little later, and a catchy repeating synth riff that is still stuck in my head days after watching the movie. It’s got Palm trees. Los Angeles. Attractive characters who wear sunglasses indoors…But like I said, that vibe is hard to explain. But watch Nemesis and you’ll get the vibe sythwave is trying to recreate.
In fact, I think you could easily re-score Nemesis with something from the back catalog of Mitch Murder or Phaserland and lose absolutely nothing in the shuffle. And just look at that poster. It could easily be the cover art for an upcoming Starcadian album.
Back of the VHS Box
That’s the spell Nemesis casts right off the bat. Whether it’s able to do more than vibe is up for debate, but we’ll get to that.
But before we dig into the meat and potatoes, let’s get the boiler plate stuff out of the way. Nemesis was produced by Imperial Entertainment on a reported budget of $2 million bucks. It began its theatrical run on December 26th, 1992 and was released in the US on January 29th, 1993, grossing around 2 million dollars. Nemesis was written by Rebecca Charles, a pseudonym for Alberty Pyun, who was also the film’s director.
The copy I reviewed was the MVD Rewind Collector’s Edition BluRay/DVD. This release comes with a few different versions of the film including a director’s cut, the Japanese cut, and a high def BluRay version. The BluRay version is by far the best-looking version in the set. I took a look at the Japanese version and the Director’s Cut, but the Japanese version is so grainy it just doesn’t do the film justice, and the Director’s Cut includes some very unfortunate CGI updates. If you want to call em that.
The BluRay looks very good, aside from some weird transfer artifacts that most people probably wouldn’t notice. The color grading, which I’ll talk about in a bit, looks great on this version.
I generally like what MVD puts out. I also have their release of Split Second with Rutger Hauer and one other that slips my mind at the moment, and they all come with 9×11 versions of the movie poster, which I digl. The extras include interviews and commentary with Pyun, producer Eric Carson, and Olivier Gruner, the film’s star, and some making-of stuff. It’s all worth it if you are into that sort of thing.
High Tech in a Low Tech World
In one interview, Pyun talks about how a lack of money influenced his vision for the world of Nemesis. He explains that one of the benefits of working with smaller budgets is that it afforded him the opportunity to explore ideas and styles that would have been unavailable to him on a more mainstream production.
Pyun made a lot of movies. Most of them were low-budget genre pictures produced quickly for the home-video market, and it’s easy to dismiss his work outright if you come at it with mainstream expectations. But Pyun was an artist who understood his medium.
Arguably Pyun’s most well-known film, Cyborg, remains a wildly entertaining action sci-fi movie that managed to create a whole fictional dystopian world on a budget of around $500,000 dollars. That movie went on to gross $10 million dollars at the box office, but more importantly it showcased Pyun’s ability to turn budget limitations into a creative superpower.
Pyun describes the world of Nemesis as high-tech in a low-tech world. That choice was stylistic but it was also necessary. He couldn’t have made the world look like that of Blade Runner if he’d wanted. Though that movie was a huge influence on Pyun, those constraints forced him to create something different and interesting in its own way rather than a clone of an existing world.
Style Over Substance
As a result, Nemesis is one of the best-looking B-movies you’re gonna see. The casting is excellent. Everyone is attractive, athletic, and styled to the nines. Wardrobe, hair, sunglasses, weapons. This movie has style, man. One might even say it has pizazz, if one used such words. I never would.
The cinematography, shot by George Mooradian, punches way above the film’s weight class. Though most of Mooradian’s work as a DP was on low-budget movies (and most of that on Pyun’s films), some of the shots in Nemesis look like the work of a more prestigious DP. Carefully framed, thoughtfully staged, Nemesis looks far more elegant than most direct-to-video genre films of this era. Pyun and Mooradian lean heavily on real locations, and that decision gives the movie a grounded quality that many higher-budget sci-fi films shot on sound stages lack.
A Good-Looking B Movie
The color grading is especially strong and, more importantly, intentional. Nemesis opens on an orange-soaked future Los Angeles, a blasted landscape ravaged by environmental collapse and unchecked crime. When the story shifts to Rio de Janeiro, the palette cools into deep blues, and the movie takes on a smoky neo-noir flavor that feels confident and controlled. Later, when the action moves to Hawaii (as a stand-in for the fictional Shang-Loo) the look changes again. The world becomes greener, more natural, almost Edenic.
At first, I was bummed to see Nemesis move away from the bold color choices that characterized the first third of the movie, but the more I sat with it, the more I think this was a conscious decision. There’s an existential throughline in the film that has the main character attempting to reclaim his humanity. It makes sense that the world around him would shift from claustrophobic, smog-choked dystopia toward something cleaner and more untouched by technology and pollution. Whether the script fully earns this theme is debatable, but visually, the idea is sound filmmaking logic.
The Proto-Matrix
Within minutes of pressing play, I was struck by another realization.
I don’t know if others have made this connection, but Nemesis feels like a kind of proto-Matrix. From the wardrobe to the sunglasses to the way action is staged against urban architecture, the DNA is unmistakably the same. A character even says something about a Matrix chip at one point. I’m not suggesting the Wachowskis ripped Pyun off, but the lineage is hard to ignore. Nemesis fits firmly in that same paranoid pre-Y2K cyberpunk vibe, heavily influenced by Blade Runner and WIlliam Gibson’s Neuromancer. Whatever the case, the look of the film (in the broadest sense) is one of Nemesis’s strongest selling points.
A Murderer’s Row of Genre Players
And the cast is another.
Olivier Gruner as the main character, detective Alex Rain (a Rick Deckard-type character), isn’t a great actor, and he doesn’t have Van Damme’s raw screen presence, but he’s no worse than Don “The Dragon” Wilson and probably disguises some of his woodenness with his French accent. He looks great, does most of his own stunts, and is a legitimately skilled martial artist.
I really enjoyed him in the 1990 film Angel Town, directed by Eric Karson (who was also a producer on Nemesis). Based on his work in that movie, I was really hoping to see more hand-to-hand fight scenes in this, but apparently Imperial Entertainment was trying to expand his marketability as an action star. Gruner is a black belt in Shotokan, the same martial art that Van Damme studied, and was the silver medalist in the 1985 WAKO World Kickboxing Championship. He was also a Green Beret in the French Navy and reportedly spent most of the time fighting pirates. Sounds pretty bad ass to me.
And the whole supporting cast is stacked with genre regulars and fan pleasers.
Familiar Faces
Actor/Comedian and B movie veteran Tim Thomerson, known for his roles in Dollman and Trancers, brings a cool confidence to his character Chief Farnsworth that elevates every scene he’s in.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa shows up in the second half as the leader of a rebel group called the Red Army Hammerheads and immediately steals the show. I have a rule: if Tagawa is in it, I’ll watch it. The guy is so versatile and just oozes screen presence and charisma. Pyun noted in the extras that when he asked if Tagawa h’ed ever heard Hawaiian pidgin spoken, he just started riffing in pidgin with no prep and no practice, winning him the role. All of the players hold their own well enough for a movie like this, but Tagawa and Thomerson are just operating on a whole other level.
Brion James (who played a replicant in Blade Runner and is always fun to see in these old genre movies) and Nicholas Guest (Christopher Guest’s less successful younger brother) are the main bad guy’s henchmen and they seem to have been cast to chew all the scenery. Which they do. I guess craft services aren’t great on these low budget movies.
Small Budget, Big Names
Thomas Jane aka The Punisher and Jackie Earle Haley aka Rorschach appear briefly but it’s fun to see them in these early roles. Vincent Klyn (the bad guy from Cyborg, plays a cyborg here but has very little screen time unfortunately.) Marjorie Monaghan (known for her run on Babylon 5) plays Jared, a rogue cyborg and Alex’s former handler and lover.
Yuji Okumoto from Karate Kid 2 and Cobra Kai plays one of Tagawa’s lieutenants. I really enjoyed seeing him in Cobra Kai, and it was a welcome surprise when he popped up here. Former beauty queen and Body Double star Deborah Shelton shows up as Julian, a cyborg fighting on the side of humanity. Her scenes are pretty wild.
One scene involves a fight with Tom Jane while both actors are fully nude. According to producer Eric Karson, the two went so hard on that fight scene that Thomas Jane ended up bloody as a result and apparently was such a pro about it he insisted on using it for the scene. What a Chad. The other bokers scene involving Shelton is one of the film’s most violent shoot-out scenes, with Shelton’s character being literally shot in two. I forget who said this in the DVD extras, but apparently they cast a double amputee to sell the scene of Julian dragging her cybernetic guts across the floor to try to reach a gun. It’s pretty gruesome.
Freshmen & Genre Veterans
Alex’s third act sidekick Max Impact (yeah, you heard that right) is played by newcomer Merle Kennedy. Despite no previous acting work, Kennedy does a surprisingly good job, rendering a character that is quirky and sympathetic, grounding the film’s final act in some much-needed humanity. Pyun says in the commentary that Kennedy was a Dead Head prior to being cast as Max. I didn’t know that was a career. Conan the Barbarian alum Sven Ole-Thoreson shows up as a henchman (was he a henchman in all of these movies?) and gets wasted by an old lady in one of the movie’s rare comedic moments.
Genre veteran Thom Mathews from The Return of the Living Dead and the Friday the 13th franchise plays a cyborg who has a cool fight scene with Gruner where they slide down a huge cement slide and fight over a gun. It’s just one more insane set piece in a movie full of insane set pieces. And finally, Branscome Richmond (most famous for his role as Bobby Sixkiller in the television show Renegade) shows up in the film’s opening battle in a blink-and-you-will-miss-him role.
Losing the Plot
And yet, for all of these check marks in Nemesis’s plus column, sadly, the movie is narratively kind of a mess.
I watched Nemesis last night, and even now I’m struggling to remember what exactly it was about. The broad strokes are there for sure. Near-future Los Angeles, 2027. Alex Rain is a police detective tasked with retiring rogue cyborgs. After the film’s big opening action set piece, Alex is revealed to be partially synthetic, the result of injuries sustained in the line of duty. Forced into one final job involving stolen data, a rogue operative, and a shadowy conspiracy to replace humans with cyborg duplicates, Alex is not only fighting to save the world, but his own humanity.
That’s the version that makes sense on paper.
Too Much Action, Not Enough Drama
In practice, Nemesis’s plot is pretty murky. Relationships are underdeveloped, emotional beats are rushed or implied rather than dramatized, and narrative tension is traded for all the action.
This is where Nemesis both shines and sabotages itself. The action is often excellent. Pyun stages fights and chases with energy and imagination, and Gruner sells the physicality of it all. It’s worth mentioning the scene in the Shang-Loo hotel where Gruner literally shoots his way through several floors of the building, falling all the way to the basement and escaping Farnsworth and his henchmen. This scene alone is worth watching this movie for. It’s inventive in the way it is staged as a practical effect and in the way it is set up from a technical perspective, and it calls to mind the scene in The Matrix when Neo and the gang are hiding in the walls and have to drop several storeys to escape the Agents. Truly memorable stuff.
The problem is that Nemesis becomes too enamored with these set pieces. The action keeps escalating, layering spectacle on top of spectacle, until it starts to feel numbing rather than exhilarating. Momentum eventually gives way to fatigue.
A Ferrari with Bull Horns
And by the time it reaches its climax, the whole thing goes completely off the rails.
There’s a stop-motion endoskeleton that might have been fine if used sparingly. Afterall, Gene Warren Jr. was the effects supervisor on Nemesis and he’s only the guy who worked on two Terminator movies and won an Oscar for it. But then there’s a sequence involving a futuristic jet taking off from a volcano where the endoskeleton hangs from it, and the whole thing looks like it belongs in an entirely different movie. It’s as if someone took To Live and Die in L.A. and grafted parts of Hell Comes to Frogtown onto it. That’s how jarring it is.
And it almost ruins the movie. Not because it erases the good work that came before, but because it so violently clashes with the tone Nemesis had spent ninety minutes establishing. It’s like putting a camper shell and bull horns on the front of a brand-new Ferrari. You just scratch your head and wonder Why’d they do that?
Straight Talk
There’s a temptation, especially in our current era of hot takes, to overstate Nemesis’s importance. It isn’t better than Cyborg. It’s not secretly a masterpiece. And Pyun’s not the secret genius behind The Matrix. But as a late ’80s, early ’90s cyberpunk artifact, it’s absolutely a worthy entry in the canon. Its influence is real, its aesthetic confidence undeniable, and its ambition admirable even when it collapses under the weight of its own excesses.
Is it deep? No. But I think it kinda wanted to be. Whether that failure stems from Pyun’s limitations as a writer or interference in the editing room is hard to say, and the Blu-ray extras muddy the waters more than they clarify them. Pyun implies jealousy led producer Karson to sabotage the film. But he also freely admits his original version had Alex as a 13 year old girl working undercover for LAPD. Karson, on the other hand, is a consummate gentleman and has only glowing things to say about Pyun. So it’s hard to know who is to blame for Nemesis’s shortcomings.
What is clear is that Nemesis is a movie worth watching. It’s fun. It looks great and, for the most part, it’s got great action, although I would have liked to have seen a few more kicks from Gruner. But if you care about cyberpunk, if you love low budget genre filmmaking from this era, if you need to explain what synthwave is to someone who is clueless about it, or if you are a fan of The Matrix–Nemesis is required viewing.
Kung Pew Video is where I dig into the neon-drenched, straight-to-VHS corner of film history. New episodes weekly. Be kind. Subscribe. See ya in the VHS wasteland.
