Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. My name is Rob.
Speaker 3: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
Speaker 3: we're going to be talking about the nineteen ninety two
Speaker 3: cyberpunk action film Nemesis, directed by the cyborg dream weaver
Speaker 3: Albert Pune, starring French kickboxing champion Olivier Grunaire, as well
Speaker 3: as our old acquaintance Tim Thomerson, who listeners might remember
Speaker 3: from our episodes about Trancers two we're in which the
Speaker 3: Trancer's franchise. He plays the hero of the franchise, Jack Death.
Speaker 3: I think that's just d et they leave out the A.
Speaker 3: And he was also in Metal Storm The Destruction of
Speaker 3: Jared Sin. I mentioned that right at the beginning of
Speaker 3: this episode, because did you notice that this movie today
Speaker 3: also has a Jared sin in it?
Speaker 2: We have a Jared I didn't I somehow overlook the
Speaker 2: fact that they were a Jared Sin.
Speaker 3: Well, she is named Jared, and she is a robot,
Speaker 3: a cyborg, a synthetic organism. She frequently mentions the fact
Speaker 3: that she is synthetic. So I don't know, interesting overlap. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so this is somehow our first Albert Pune movie on
Speaker 3: Weird House Cinema. Not the first time I've considered doing
Speaker 3: an Albert Pune movie, but the first time we've actually
Speaker 3: gone ahead. We've gone across the starting line with one.
Speaker 3: It will absolutely not be our last. I kind of
Speaker 3: I feel that I am at the beginning of a
Speaker 3: magnificent personal journey, which is a journey into the Pewn zone.
Speaker 3: And who knows how I will be transformed if I
Speaker 3: return from this journey, but I'm very excited to see
Speaker 3: what it holds.
Speaker 2: I too, have been hypnotized by the Albert the cinematic
Speaker 2: Albert Puniverse, if you will, and I think I currently
Speaker 2: have the next three Nemesis movies in my shopping card.
Speaker 3: See Too takes Out. I was trying to figure out
Speaker 3: what's the best disc to get, but I don't know
Speaker 3: if there is actually a good disc release of these,
Speaker 3: so we may just have to go with what we
Speaker 3: can get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Nemesis, as we'll discuss, though, Nemesis is I think
Speaker 2: widely considered the best first stop if you're getting into
Speaker 2: the works of Albert Pune. I should also mention, this
Speaker 2: is our first Albert Pune movie. We have mentioned him before.
Speaker 2: I believe in all previous mentions we have pronounced his
Speaker 2: name wrong, and we have said Albert Pyune. An easy
Speaker 2: mistake to make, especially if you're just kind of in
Speaker 2: the reading the boxes and reading IMDb and letterboxed and
Speaker 2: sort of you know, just processing it all in your head.
Speaker 3: But it is Pune, p y u n. I had
Speaker 3: always said Pyun, but I went to make sure this time,
Speaker 3: and all the interviews I found of people saying his name,
Speaker 3: they were saying Pune. I could not find a video
Speaker 3: of him saying his own name, which is what I
Speaker 3: always try, and then I couldn't find it anywhere. But anyway,
Speaker 3: to set the stage, I just want to read from
Speaker 3: the back of the VHS box, because this the description
Speaker 3: of the movie on the box both gives you some
Speaker 3: incorrect ideas about the movie, but also explains more about
Speaker 3: the movie than you will understand from watching it. So
Speaker 3: it says Los Angeles twenty twenty seven, and not that year.
Speaker 3: We're almost there, were almost there. Japan and America have
Speaker 3: merged politically and economically. Man and machine have merged as well.
Speaker 3: The scientific community has perfected cybergenics to the degree that
Speaker 3: any body part can be replaced. Nemesis is an action
Speaker 3: packed sci fi thriller where information is the ultimate power. Systems, cowboys,
Speaker 3: information terrorists, bio enhanced gangster, and cyborg outlaws all play
Speaker 3: a part in this battle of man versus machine. In
Speaker 3: the future it pays to be more than human. Is
Speaker 3: information the ultimate power in this story? I think guns, Yeah,
Speaker 3: machine guns definitely are the dominant power in the film.
Speaker 3: Sometimes rocket launcheris as well, and volcanoes can't forget so.
Speaker 3: To start off, As reviewers have noted over the years,
Speaker 3: Nemesis is, yes, in many ways, derivative of the big
Speaker 3: movies in this like tech noir or cyberpunk subgenre, whatever
Speaker 3: you call the subgenre of action movies from the eighties
Speaker 3: and nineties where people wear sunglasses and long trench coats
Speaker 3: and shoot machine guns, so it is definitely derivative. You
Speaker 3: will notice scenes and images lifted, sometimes quite blatantly, from
Speaker 3: movies like Blade Runner, Terminator, and RoboCop. That's true of
Speaker 3: most of the lower budget sci fi action movies of
Speaker 3: this early nineties era. It's certainly true here, but once
Speaker 3: you get past that I found myself really being one
Speaker 3: over by Nemesis. It started to feel fairly unique. It
Speaker 3: was absolutely entertaining. I was not bored by this movie,
Speaker 3: and in a strange, hard to describe sort of way,
Speaker 3: I even found it kind of lovable, like it charmed me. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a very similar experience with the film. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I kind of had my guards up. I've long been
Speaker 2: aware of this movie, but I've just never gotten around
Speaker 2: to seeing it. And I think for a long time
Speaker 2: I kind of thought that I was better than this
Speaker 2: movie in some way, like that it was going to
Speaker 2: be too derivative. And it's a that's a weird kind
Speaker 2: of stance to sort of subconsciously take because I love
Speaker 2: a lot of derivative films. I love a lot of
Speaker 2: trashy and less than perfect examples of cinema. So I
Speaker 2: don't know, it's just go to I would see Nemesis
Speaker 2: on the shelf, because Nemesis is definitely a video rental
Speaker 2: store superstar. If you grew up going to vhs and
Speaker 2: DVD rental stores, you're familiar with the poster or at
Speaker 2: the box art here, and yeah, I just was always like,
Speaker 2: that's not for me. I'm gonna rent Terminator instead. I'm
Speaker 2: gonna rent more of the alien movies instead, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: watch RoboCop or Escape from New York or whatever it
Speaker 2: may be. But yeah, it's like, this is an example
Speaker 2: where all of these influences have been added to the soup,
Speaker 2: but then everything has come together with some unique flavors
Speaker 2: and I think some unique takes.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, Now I'm not gonna lie. All of those
Speaker 3: movies you mentioned I think are clearly much better movies
Speaker 3: than this, But that doesn't mean Nemesis is without its
Speaker 3: own charms. So there's a lot that makes Nemesis a
Speaker 3: counterintuitively endearing film. And one of those things, again, this
Speaker 3: is gonna sound weird, but I'm gonna try to explain
Speaker 3: one of those charming things about it is how incredibly
Speaker 3: unnecessarily complicated the plot is. Yes, to watch Nemesis in
Speaker 3: real time without the aid of supplemental explanatory materials or
Speaker 3: notes is to find yourself in this constant, rolling state
Speaker 3: of who is this? What are these people talking about? Oh? Oh, okay,
Speaker 3: I guess that lady was a cyborg. But somehow it
Speaker 3: all works out like you never know what's going on,
Speaker 3: but it just comes out in the wash.
Speaker 2: And we have to stress when we watch a movie
Speaker 2: for Weird House Cinema, we're giving these films dedicated viewings,
Speaker 2: that it is not always a guarantee, you know, especially
Speaker 2: today in our very distracted mindset where if we're watching
Speaker 2: one thing, we probably have a phone in our hand
Speaker 2: or we're trying to do three other things at the
Speaker 2: same time. But yeah, we gave this film dedicated viewings
Speaker 2: and it's still it still was very hard to make
Speaker 2: sense off.
Speaker 3: Still, so I usually for Weird House, I watch the
Speaker 3: movie twice. I make notes, so like we are really
Speaker 3: diving in. But still there were things that I was
Speaker 3: really struggling with. But somehow in Nemesis, the confusingness itself,
Speaker 3: like the baffling list of political factions and the tenuously
Speaker 3: established third parties referenced in every scene, and this feeling
Speaker 3: that the movie is just rushing past you and not
Speaker 3: the least bit concerned if you have managed to get
Speaker 3: abored and get buckled in all of this becomes a
Speaker 3: hilarious and delicious texture of its own, Like it's really
Speaker 3: pleasant the way the movie trades off between these long
Speaker 3: stretches of baffling non exposition with sudden irruptions of like
Speaker 3: demented cyborg bullet mania. Another thing I was thinking about
Speaker 3: on my second viewing of the film is that it's
Speaker 3: not just hard to follow because of the writing, Like
Speaker 3: the writing is very complicated and elliptical and has this
Speaker 3: leaving you behind quality, But it's also because a lot
Speaker 3: of the expository dialogue is hard to hear or hard
Speaker 3: to understand, Like much of it is spoken by the
Speaker 3: film's star, Olivier Grenaire, who no offense to him like
Speaker 3: I greatly enjoyed him in this movie, but his delivery
Speaker 3: is quite often flat and uninflected in a way that
Speaker 3: makes it kind of hard to actually track the meaning
Speaker 3: of the sentences.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another thing that I think about the I was
Speaker 2: thinking about regarding the plot here is this is a
Speaker 2: film that could have greatly benefited narrative wise, from an
Speaker 2: outsider character who needs things explained to them, you know,
Speaker 2: Jack Burton, if you will, Who's like, who are all
Speaker 2: these guys we're fighting and then someone has to explain
Speaker 2: it to them, or or a you know, a damsel
Speaker 2: in distress, which would be, as we'll discuss, vastly out
Speaker 2: of place in in a Pune movie. But you know,
Speaker 2: someone like that, a character, a trope character like that,
Speaker 2: he needs to be told who everyone is. We don't
Speaker 2: have that. Everybody knows who everybody is. We're the ones
Speaker 2: you need answers.
Speaker 3: We're the exactly Yeah, we're the odd characters out here.
Speaker 3: But the other thing that makes this movie confusing is
Speaker 3: that multiple characters keep changing what they look like.
Speaker 2: Yes, and not only like different wigs, different outfits, but
Speaker 2: like this is a cyberpunk film. This is like a
Speaker 2: transhuman future in which you may have a different body
Speaker 2: and it can take a while to realize that.
Speaker 3: In the narrative.
Speaker 2: For me, that was the case where I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is actually that character from earlier with a different
Speaker 2: mind in their body.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, Jack Death is actually now has the
Speaker 3: brain of the lady in the blonde wig from earlier.
Speaker 3: Yeah that I didn't get that till the second time
Speaker 3: I saw it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Anyway, with this confusing rushing past you quality, it started
Speaker 3: to feel to me like Pune is having some kind
Speaker 3: of amazing in joke with himself elf, where you have
Speaker 3: these scenes where characters are arguing about the Brazil Triad
Speaker 3: and the Red Army hammerheads and talking about who's a
Speaker 3: cyborg and who's not. And then like, obviously the target
Speaker 3: audience of this film, like the VHS sci fi action
Speaker 3: movie audience, zero percent of them are following all of this.
Speaker 3: And then just in the middle of this conversation, oh,
Speaker 3: cyborgs are cutting holes in the wall with machine guns,
Speaker 3: and now it's a gunfight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, machine guns in this film can be used as
Speaker 2: demolition tools. They can be used to clear cut jungle.
Speaker 2: Everything is on the table.
Speaker 3: I also just wanted to mention you ever go on
Speaker 3: IMDb and you can look at the sort of theme
Speaker 3: or content tags for a movie that it gets sorted by,
Speaker 3: and like the themes that people are most that people
Speaker 3: most associate with a particular film. The top tags for
Speaker 3: this movie on IMDb were male, rear, nudity, nude fighting,
Speaker 3: man in a shower, man carries a woman over his shoulder,
Speaker 3: and cyborg.
Speaker 2: Those are all spot on. I think cyborgs should really
Speaker 2: go first. Yeah, but yes, those are all definitely in play.
Speaker 3: You know, we're going to talk later about the career
Speaker 3: of Albert Pune, but he if you know anything about him,
Speaker 3: you probably know that he made cyborg movies like most
Speaker 3: of his movies are about cyborgs fighting in some post
Speaker 3: apocalyptic landscape, and yet there is a quote by him
Speaker 3: that's featured at the top of his wiki page. He
Speaker 3: gave some interview years ago where he's saying, basically, I'm
Speaker 3: not really interested in cyborgs or post apocalyptic stories. It
Speaker 3: was just it was just a way that I could
Speaker 3: make movies for the budget that I had, and I
Speaker 3: don't that did not make a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 3: But also I found that I found that also like sweet.
Speaker 3: I just love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Nemesis eff for my money. Several things really
Speaker 2: impressed me with it. For starters, I think the film
Speaker 2: looks great, especially with the you know, the remastered version
Speaker 2: that is widely available now. It makes tremendous use of
Speaker 2: like cool, ruinous locations, and especially some great locations from Tucson, Arizona,
Speaker 2: and the Big Island in Hawaii, including the other worldly
Speaker 2: locations in Volcano National Park, one of the most amazing
Speaker 2: places I've ever traveled to. And I can't think of
Speaker 2: another film off the top of my head that actually
Speaker 2: utilized these landscapes. But it looks great here.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, the outdoor locations featured in the film are excellent.
Speaker 3: They are well chosen for the scenes that take place
Speaker 3: in them, and they look beautiful. I know, I think
Speaker 3: Pune was from Hawaii, wasn't he?
Speaker 2: He was Hawaii born for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so I started wondering if Hawaii is just
Speaker 3: like a common setting in his films. I don't know,
Speaker 3: but it feels I don't know what the term is.
Speaker 3: It's just like very well integrated with the narrative here,
Speaker 3: even though it's not actually set in Hawaii. It's supposed
Speaker 3: to be supposed to be taking place somewhere in the
Speaker 3: island of Java, but the Hawaii locations just feel very
Speaker 3: lived in from a creative point of view.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. And on top of those locations, you just
Speaker 2: have cool atmospheric lighting in general cinematography via George Mohradian,
Speaker 2: and all this helps to bring this cyberpunk dream to life.
Speaker 2: And on the whole, the film achieves what it sets
Speaker 2: out to do with its special effects, which is no
Speaker 2: small feet. It almost never reaches beyond its grasp, which
Speaker 2: is saying something for a nineties low budget me movie.
Speaker 2: We've seen plenty of examples of some of films, even
Speaker 2: high budget films, where you're like, yep, you try to
Speaker 2: look for something you really couldn't quite achieve yet, either
Speaker 2: from a technological standpoint or a budgetary standpoint. But I
Speaker 2: feel like most of the effects in this film are like, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they nailed it. I bought that. That totally worked.
Speaker 3: Yeah. By contrast, you've got these nineties high budget movies
Speaker 3: in the same genre that you see GI that now
Speaker 3: looks like, oh, get that out of my eyes. But
Speaker 3: this movie looks way better than its budget. The special effects,
Speaker 3: by and large, I thought were excellent.
Speaker 2: Yeah and yeah. I would also say that if Put
Speaker 2: definitely creates a cyberpunk dystopia that is certainly confusing, but
Speaker 2: it feels rich and fully formed, Like even though I
Speaker 2: don't understand everything that's going on, I trust that he
Speaker 2: understood what was going on here. Yeah, yeah, and it
Speaker 2: Yeah again, it doesn't feel too derivative in the long run,
Speaker 2: like everything comes out fresh, the vision feels pure. And
Speaker 2: on top of that, this is an action movie and
Speaker 2: there are just absolute badasses everywhere. Yes, like everybody's a
Speaker 2: badass and generally convincingly so.
Speaker 3: Yes, the exact format of the badasses is it varies
Speaker 3: and in all the different ways that it has made
Speaker 3: manifest here. It's pleasing in each way. So some of
Speaker 3: them are like comical in the way that movies from
Speaker 3: this era off and are with these like big beefy
Speaker 3: cyborg guys wearing sunglasses in suits going down you know,
Speaker 3: hallways with gigantic guns that just looks so funny. And
Speaker 3: then on the other hand, you've got you've got like
Speaker 3: kerri Hiroyuki Tagawa in this movie, who is just I
Speaker 3: don't know exactly what he's doing with the accent he
Speaker 3: puts on in the movie, but he bring he brings
Speaker 3: that like amazing villain turning hero sneer in it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: awesome screen presence as always.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you know, this is something else that surprised me
Speaker 2: about the film. So again it's it's cyberpunk. Cyberpunk brings
Speaker 2: in a lot of noir elements. And as we've discussed
Speaker 2: before in the show, if you're if you're doing doing noir, uh,
Speaker 2: and then if you're doing cyberpunk in various forms, you
Speaker 2: know you're gonna bring in a lot of like grittiness.
Speaker 2: So we're talking about genres here that often come with
Speaker 2: a great deal of baked in sexism, exploitation, and even
Speaker 2: a meanness at times. And yes, Nemesis is a super
Speaker 2: violent tale with ample nudity, and it's set in a
Speaker 2: cyberpunk dystopia, but I found it like refreshingly kind of
Speaker 2: neutral on gender and sexuality. I'm not saying it really
Speaker 2: does anything with the with this neutrality, but but the
Speaker 2: male and female form seem equally fetishized by the camera.
Speaker 2: Character names seem somewhat randomly assigned, regardless of any gendered
Speaker 2: weight that the name itself might have. Pretty much again,
Speaker 2: everybody gets to be a badass, and even when with
Speaker 2: a we even have a fair amount of body jumping
Speaker 2: as well. That kind of blurs the like the gender
Speaker 2: line here as well. So again not arguing that Nemesis
Speaker 2: is exactly progressive or anything, but it feels refreshingly free
Speaker 2: of some of the shackles you might expect it to have.
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly what this play is oriented toward,
Speaker 3: but it does feel intentionally playful with the gender themes.
Speaker 3: That the majority of the named characters have a name
Speaker 3: that is more often applied to the opposite gender, or
Speaker 3: have a gender neutral name, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker 3: You have like dudes named Marion and women named Jared
Speaker 3: and and like yeah, and characters are like body hopping
Speaker 3: between different cyborg bodies of different genders and stuff. I
Speaker 3: don't really know exactly what, if anything, Pewan was trying
Speaker 3: to say or do with that, but it at least
Speaker 3: does feel kind of liberated and playful in that regard.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seem everything seems to play out on an
Speaker 2: assumption that in this future gender just doesn't matter anymore,
Speaker 2: you know, And then but nothing's really like, you don't
Speaker 2: we don't really dwell on that per se, but that
Speaker 2: seems to be the case, all right, elevator pitch for
Speaker 2: this movie, Joe, how would you sum this up?
Speaker 3: It's a it's a magical tale of cyborgs yelling at
Speaker 3: cyborgs about cyborgs. There are so many conversations of one
Speaker 3: character accusing another character of being a cyborg, but then
Speaker 3: you later find out that the accusing character is also
Speaker 3: a cyborg, and the other character already knew that.
Speaker 2: So I don't know, I think maybe three characters are
Speaker 2: not cyborgs.
Speaker 3: Almost everybody is a cyborg. Everybody, every character, you're either
Speaker 3: going to get a revelation that, oh, turns out they
Speaker 3: were a Cyborg or you're going to get a revelation
Speaker 3: that they were secretly a member of the Red Army hammerheads.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, right, Well, if you would like to watch
Speaker 2: or rewatch Nemesis before proceeding here, it is widely available
Speaker 2: for home viewing, as it's pretty much always been the
Speaker 2: current remastered version, you'll find streaming or for digital rental
Speaker 2: most places. Looks really good. I ended up streaming this time.
Speaker 2: I believe the MVS Rewind Blu Ray, which came out
Speaker 2: in twenty nineteen, is the prime physical media choice. And
Speaker 2: this company also put out its sequels Nemesis two, three,
Speaker 2: and four on a single release that again, I have
Speaker 2: to admit it's calling to me after this viewing experience.
Speaker 2: Currently hanging out in my shopping cart.
Speaker 3: I am currently having to resist the urge to bolt
Speaker 3: physically away from the microphone to go click purchase on
Speaker 3: the two, three and four set. So we may be
Speaker 3: coming back to the Nemesis first.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially since it's my understanding. We'll touch on this later,
Speaker 2: but two, three and four are radically different, so they're
Speaker 2: basically different movies. We'll definitely come back connect more about
Speaker 2: that here in a minute. But yeah, let's talk about
Speaker 2: Albert Pune a bit more, the director and the rider here.
Speaker 2: He lived nineteen fifty three through twenty twenty two, Hawaiian
Speaker 2: born American filmmaker, best remembered for his various action packed
Speaker 2: and often dystopian, cyborg themed B movies, many of which
Speaker 2: have become cult classics, and a number of them were
Speaker 2: commercial hits in their own ride like this is the guy,
Speaker 2: I think is people have really begun to widely realize
Speaker 2: like this guy had kind of, you know, almost Roger
Speaker 2: Corman energy when it came to, you know, a scrappiness
Speaker 2: when it came to putting together low budget films and
Speaker 2: making them work.
Speaker 3: Though, can I make a point of contrast love Roger
Speaker 3: No shade to Roger Corman here, but Pune Pune's movies
Speaker 3: to me feel a little bit less business oriented than
Speaker 3: Corman's productions. I mean, clearly there was some love of
Speaker 3: cinema with Roger Corman as well, but Corman was very
Speaker 3: concerned with with you know, cranking them out and having
Speaker 3: a mind toward the budget and being on schedule and
Speaker 3: all that sort of thing. The Pune movies I've seen
Speaker 3: feel to me more driven by a pure and unadulterated
Speaker 3: love of cinema, an infectious joy and desire to make movies.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I know enough about Pute's biography
Speaker 3: to be sure of that, but that's how the movies.
Speaker 2: Feel, absolutely yeah. So let's talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: his filmography here. His first film, first credited film, was
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty two is the Sword and the Sorcerer, starring
Speaker 2: Lee Horsley and Richard Lynch. This became a huge hit
Speaker 2: at the time on a very small budget, so that
Speaker 2: you know, kind of like, you know, punch the card
Speaker 2: moving forward. After this, he took on his first of
Speaker 2: many trips to the dystopia with eighty four's Radioactive Dreams.
Speaker 2: I've heard good things about that one. His output after
Speaker 2: this was pretty steady for decades, with him averaging at
Speaker 2: least two films a year. Some for a while anyway,
Speaker 2: And some of the highlights from this period from the
Speaker 2: period on and the run up to Nemesis included eighty
Speaker 2: six is Vicious Lips, eighty eight's Alien from La MST
Speaker 2: three K fans may be familiar with that one. That's
Speaker 2: when i'd had seen Ages Ago in MST three K
Speaker 2: form eighty nine Cyborg, Joe, you're familiar.
Speaker 3: With that one. I've seen that one. That is a
Speaker 3: movie about Cyborg's in a future dystopia. Sound familiar, but
Speaker 3: it stars Jean Claude van Dam. I think as a
Speaker 3: non cyborg, he's just a human martial artist. That movie
Speaker 3: is notable for several things. One is, I remember when
Speaker 3: I was growing up, my dad is a big fan
Speaker 3: of that one, so like, I think we rented that
Speaker 3: and watched it. It has a character. It has an
Speaker 3: actor who appears in multiple Albert pun movies named Vincent Klein,
Speaker 3: who is He's in this movie too, as like a
Speaker 3: Hinchman later who shows up in the second act. But
Speaker 3: in Cyborg he is the main villain and he plays.
Speaker 3: In fact, all the characters in Cyborg are named after
Speaker 3: guitar are guitar brands or guitar techniques. So the villain
Speaker 3: of Cyborg is named Fender Tremolo and he plays that.
Speaker 3: The hero also is named Gibson Rickenbacker.
Speaker 2: I was about to say, it's like there's got to
Speaker 2: be a Gibson in here.
Speaker 3: There's a Gibson Ricken. That's John Claude van Dam. But
Speaker 3: the villain is Fender Tremolo, and he plays a pirate
Speaker 3: who wanders around the future wasteland just talking about how
Speaker 3: he enjoys the misery. So at one point they capture
Speaker 3: a cyborg who's like, I've got a cure for the
Speaker 3: plague that destroyed the world. I can stop all this
Speaker 3: death and disease, and Vincent kleines as but I like
Speaker 3: the death and disease.
Speaker 2: Awesome. Yeah, I've never seen that. This one that that
Speaker 2: has I've long been aware of. Now I have seen
Speaker 2: the next one. I'm gonna mention nineteen nineties Captain America.
Speaker 3: I saw this a long time ago, and we've talked
Speaker 3: about doing this on the show. It may happen not
Speaker 3: too far in the future.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's the Salinger one with Red Skull. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yes, let's see.
Speaker 2: We also have ninety ones Kicks, Kickboxer two, ninety one's
Speaker 2: doll Man, that's Tim Thomerson as we'll come back to,
Speaker 2: and then of course Nemesis. Following Nemesis, some of the
Speaker 2: key highlights include ninety threes Nights as in Knights the
Speaker 2: Roundtable with Lance Hendrickson and Chris Christofferson. I was having
Speaker 2: a look at this one more dystopia here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's got Chris Christop's I think cyborgs wandering around
Speaker 3: one desert of wandering around in the desert in Utah.
Speaker 3: Maybe it has cyborg martial artist monks. I think in
Speaker 3: the future dystopian desert.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cool, unless see Another one is ninety three's Arcade.
Speaker 2: This is one you've been batting around for a while
Speaker 2: as the potential weird house selection.
Speaker 3: I greatly enjoyed this one as well, except for it
Speaker 3: has an incredibly distasteful element in it later on, but
Speaker 3: we we may just have to get over that and
Speaker 3: do it. I think it's going to be a Christmas
Speaker 3: movie for us, Yeah, because it's ours a young Peter
Speaker 3: Billingsley from the movie A Christmas Story. It's not actually
Speaker 3: said at Christmas, but it's a movie about an arcade
Speaker 3: game that comes alive and kills people. It's Christmas enough,
Speaker 3: Christmas enough, all right.
Speaker 2: And then Nemesis two in ninety five, so this was
Speaker 2: the first to feature bodybuilder Sue Price as the new
Speaker 2: cyborg character Alex Sinclair, so different last name, different Alex,
Speaker 2: but still an Alex and still very much a cyborg
Speaker 2: and definitely a roll crafted around it. Like an impressive
Speaker 2: physical specimen. Then came Nemesis three and four in ninety six,
Speaker 2: Omega Doom in ninety six as well, starring Rutger Hower,
Speaker 2: and Pune remained active, but I believe several projects didn't
Speaker 2: see completion late in his life due to declining health.
Speaker 2: So Nemesis had a long gestation period apparently, and Pune
Speaker 2: was apparently at one point intending Alex Rain our main
Speaker 2: character to be played by thirteen year old girl. But
Speaker 2: the producers, the Shaw brothers, this is saj h not
Speaker 2: the sahaw Hong Kong Shaw brothers. They were the producers
Speaker 2: on this, and they're like, we love what you have
Speaker 2: in mind here, we love the vision, but we have
Speaker 2: a secret weapon that we're about to unleash, or you
Speaker 2: have already unleashed on an unsuspecting box office. We have
Speaker 2: this thirty year old male kickboxer and want we want
Speaker 2: him to play the main character. So just make make
Speaker 2: adaptions adaptations here as needed. But shoehorned him in and
Speaker 2: we're good to go.
Speaker 3: Perfect. Wait, so was the thirteen year old girl in
Speaker 3: the original draft going to be an lap d east
Speaker 3: Rite commando?
Speaker 2: Like this guy is pretty much I think she was
Speaker 2: going to be, like I mean, okay, possibly a cyborg,
Speaker 2: very strong possibility, so it might not have been a
Speaker 2: thirteen year old mind in the body. And I think
Speaker 2: she was going to be like an infiltrator, so kind
Speaker 2: of like the like the street Urchins of Sherlock Holmes,
Speaker 2: but imagine that they work for an LAPD that is
Speaker 2: discussed as actually an international paramilitary force, and she would
Speaker 2: have been like reconnaissance or something.
Speaker 3: Okay, there you go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so again, additional Nemesis movies have a cure have occurred,
Speaker 2: but Pune only directed the first four, but again, plenty
Speaker 2: of other cyborg films from Pune, two, three, and four
Speaker 2: All star Sue Price a little information about the sequels,
Speaker 2: just so I've written in case Smione was curious. Nemesis
Speaker 2: two is going to take place seventy three years in
Speaker 2: the future and it's a desert chase movie. Nemesis three
Speaker 2: is a time travel movie that takes place in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety eight, made at least partially with leftover footage from two,
Speaker 2: and then allegedly I've read that Nemesis four was kind
Speaker 2: of an fu to Bob Weinstein when Pune was sent
Speaker 2: back to Slovakia to do reshoots on a film titled
Speaker 2: Adrenaline Fear the Rush. This had Christoph Lamber and Natasha
Speaker 2: Heinstridge chasing a ghoule in some sort of a dilapidated
Speaker 2: set or location, and he was He just went ahead
Speaker 2: and shot a fourth Nemesis movie while he was there,
Speaker 2: and it's generally considered his most naked film.
Speaker 3: Wait. Sorry, I just had to look something up because
Speaker 3: I wanted to make sure I was remembering this right.
Speaker 3: I remember, this is not the only Albert pun movie
Speaker 3: starring Christoph Lambert. He also did an action movie starring
Speaker 3: Can you believe this this duo? Could you even imagine
Speaker 3: the power of Christoph Lambert and Iced Tea? Oh god,
Speaker 3: it's like a buddy action movie with those two. That's perfect.
Speaker 2: I mean it had to be.
Speaker 3: Called Mean Guns nineteen ninety seven. I haven't seen it,
Speaker 3: so I can't vouch, but I mean, what could it be?
Speaker 3: A bit amazing?
Speaker 2: I think it has a following. I was looking around
Speaker 2: at different threads for people were recommending Pean films and
Speaker 2: some were naming that film. So yeah, again, I'm kind
Speaker 2: of excited about watching or Nemesis films I'm at the
Speaker 2: you know, I'm at that point where I have to
Speaker 2: ask a real existential question, like how many more movie
Speaker 2: viewings do I have left in my life? Do three
Speaker 2: of them really need to be Nemesis movies? I don't
Speaker 2: know hard to answer.
Speaker 3: You got at least three left, and I think I
Speaker 3: think we know what those three are gonna be. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: So you know how to describe what's going on with
Speaker 3: Albert Pune. I loved a Nemesis and I have and
Speaker 3: it has this cheery, in just deeply kind of goofy
Speaker 3: enjoyable quality. I have seen some people online comparing Pune
Speaker 3: to more famous directors of just notably failed movies, like
Speaker 3: comparing him to ed Wood, and I can see the
Speaker 3: comparison in the sense of making low budget B movies
Speaker 3: with an infectious sense of joy and excitement. But I
Speaker 3: do not see that comparison in in terms of the
Speaker 3: level of competence in making the films. I think the
Speaker 3: Pune movies I've seen, and especially Nemesis, are definitely several
Speaker 3: steps above what you're getting with Edwood movies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, with ed Wood, I feel like there was there
Speaker 2: was definitely passion there. There were also you know, various
Speaker 2: problems going on for him, he had his demons, but
Speaker 2: there was also a sense of like, my passion has
Speaker 2: been realized as cinema and so now we're good to go.
Speaker 2: It doesn't matter how good that cinema is, but it
Speaker 2: has been cemented where you know, with Pune, like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I feel like, especially with Nemesis, here there does seem
Speaker 2: to be a real passion and determination to make it
Speaker 2: look good and make it entertaining.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like Nemesis is funny, but it also has genuine virtues.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so I think you it seems to me
Speaker 2: you see more sort of historic Pune dismissal. And since
Speaker 2: his passing, I think there has been a critical reevaluation
Speaker 2: of his work, certainly in the circles of film fans,
Speaker 2: where people you know, admire BAT movies and find things
Speaker 2: to love about BT movies. Certainly that the world that
Speaker 2: we occupy, And so I've seen him singled out for
Speaker 2: his visual style. He's resourceful and even guerrilla style production sensibilities,
Speaker 2: his serious treatment of cyberpunk themes even when embedded in
Speaker 2: just delirious crazy action, and the strong use of female leads,
Speaker 2: which you know certainly can be found in multiple productions
Speaker 2: of his.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the place in the outline where I
Speaker 3: actually took down that quote of his about cyborgs. So
Speaker 3: what he said was, I have really no interest in
Speaker 3: cyborg's and I've never really had any interest in post
Speaker 3: apocalyptic stories or settings. It just seemed that those situations
Speaker 3: presented a way for me to make movies with very
Speaker 3: little money and to explore ideas that I really wanted
Speaker 3: to explore. And you know what, I believe him. Obviously
Speaker 3: he made lots of cyborg movies, post to apocalyptic movies,
Speaker 3: but it's clear that at some level he just wanted
Speaker 3: to tell stories and hash out something about conflicts about
Speaker 3: identity within a character or maybe like fear of loss
Speaker 3: of humanity or something, and the cyborg setting was a
Speaker 3: way that you could do that with, you know, maybe
Speaker 3: a way that you could do that in a way
Speaker 3: that you could secure funding to make a movie that
Speaker 3: touched on those kinds of themes. So I don't know,
Speaker 3: hats off to Albert Pune. I am loving what I'm
Speaker 3: seeing so far.
Speaker 2: All Right, Well, let's get into the cast here, and
Speaker 2: I'm going to try and lay things out based on faction,
Speaker 2: which might be might be a mistake, but hopefully this
Speaker 2: will make things a little easier to follow.
Speaker 3: Well, well, hold on, before we do that, can I
Speaker 3: just say I think this is a good idea because
Speaker 3: it'll make more sense to talk about the movie this way.
Speaker 3: But I do just want to flag before we lay
Speaker 3: things out by faction that I fear by doing that
Speaker 3: and by talking about the plot the way we normally do,
Speaker 3: like explaining all the details and organizing the characters into
Speaker 3: their factions, we might give the wrong idea about the
Speaker 3: feeling created when you're watching this movie for the first time,
Speaker 3: which is again, you're watching and it's like a for me,
Speaker 3: a thoroughly entertaining, enjoyable experience. But also I have no
Speaker 3: idea what's going on. I don't know who's working for who.
Speaker 3: I don't know who these characters are, or or like
Speaker 3: who's a Cyborgan why?
Speaker 2: Or who indeed is the villains the I mean we exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I really it's a tough question to answer for sure.
Speaker 3: So anyway, just please listeners keep that in mind. We're
Speaker 3: going to be presenting the story to you in a
Speaker 3: way that I think is maybe artificially well organized and clear.
Speaker 3: Just try to imagine if you're watching the movie, this
Speaker 3: information is coming at you in random order in a
Speaker 3: way that like you will be baffled by. Yes.
Speaker 2: And also nobody stays in their faction pretty much.
Speaker 3: There. It's a lot of faction jumping. But sorry, you
Speaker 3: wanted to start with the LAPD faction.
Speaker 2: Yes, And really that's where our main character, I guess,
Speaker 2: sort of starts off. Like he's essentially kind of like
Speaker 2: a freelancer for them for the majority of the picture,
Speaker 2: sort of. This is the character Alex Rain, played by
Speaker 2: Olivier Greunaire born nineteen sixty French martial artist and kickboxer
Speaker 2: turned actor. This was only his second film role, following
Speaker 2: his starring role in the nineteen ninety martial arts film
Speaker 2: Angel Town, and he followed Nemesis up with a long
Speaker 2: and ongoing career of action roles, a little fight choreography
Speaker 2: here and there, and I'm not familiar with the vast
Speaker 2: majority of it. I say this with love, but I
Speaker 2: think a lot of it gets into that realm of
Speaker 2: pure action shlock that is generally not my thing. A
Speaker 2: lot of people love it, and there's some pure action
Speaker 2: shlock that I love. This guy went on to be
Speaker 2: like a major force, I would say, in the home
Speaker 2: video action schwock.
Speaker 3: World, Yeah, the body oil centric action film. Yeah. I
Speaker 3: was watching a bit of behind the scenes documentary footage
Speaker 3: and there's a snippet of Grenaire reflecting on his experience
Speaker 3: making this film. I genuinely can't tell if he's talking
Speaker 3: about his acting performance in the movie or his personal
Speaker 3: behavior on set, but he says something like, I'm sure
Speaker 3: I was acting very strange, but that is unavoidable when
Speaker 3: you're at four percent body fat.
Speaker 2: Well, he's definitely keeping it very tight in this film,
Speaker 2: as are most of the actors. I get the impression
Speaker 2: that's kind of a pune standard at least a fair
Speaker 2: number of actors in like tip top physical shape.
Speaker 3: Yeah sos. We get scenes of him shirtless, just exercising,
Speaker 3: running in the sand dunes, and a lot of I
Speaker 3: don't know, accentuation of the of the muscled form, like
Speaker 3: it's it's all there. But you know what, Actually, there's
Speaker 3: a there's a lingering on all sorts of body types
Speaker 3: in the movie, because it's not just muscleman. We also
Speaker 3: get the camera has a protracted love affair with Thomas James,
Speaker 3: but later on and yeah, so there's just all kinds
Speaker 3: of stuff going on with bodies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I say that the camera is kind of
Speaker 2: pan sexual in this film. That's what I got from it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all right, moving on through the LAPD again, not the LAPD,
Speaker 2: you know, but a future LAPD that may go on
Speaker 2: random missions to Indonesia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, international as I think you said, international paramilitary organization. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: with like a strike force. And only one scene as
Speaker 3: far as I know, takes place in LA which is
Speaker 3: the opening scene.
Speaker 2: All right. The leader, I guess, of this faction, or
Speaker 2: at least for the purposes of our plot. The main
Speaker 2: LAPD figure is Commissioner Farnsworth, and he was played by
Speaker 2: Tim Thomerson born nineteen forty six. Yeah, this is Jack Death.
Speaker 2: Thomason started out, as we've discussed discussed before on the
Speaker 2: show as a stand up comic, but then did a
Speaker 2: whole lot of TV and film work, during which he
Speaker 2: became a frequent player in Charles Band films. This is
Speaker 2: our third Thomerson movie. We've covered eighty three's Metal Storm,
Speaker 2: we've covered ninety one's Transfers two, and I'm sure we'll
Speaker 2: cover more of his films in the future. As His
Speaker 2: filmography includes the likes of eighty five Zone Troopers, eighty
Speaker 2: seven's Cherry two thousand, that's one that I fondly remember,
Speaker 2: ninety one's doll Man, ninety two's Bad Channels, and of
Speaker 2: course the other Transfers movies.
Speaker 3: I think Dollman is also a Pune film, is it? Yeah,
Speaker 3: where Thomerson plays like a dirty, hairy alien cop who
Speaker 3: is only a foot tall.
Speaker 2: But he's not the titular doll.
Speaker 3: Man I think he is. He's like a foot tall, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Okay, but he's not a hairy alien. He's
Speaker 2: battling a hairy alien.
Speaker 3: No, he's playing Sorry, he's like a dirty hairy style,
Speaker 3: dirty tough, dirty Harry, like a tough talking, no nonsense,
Speaker 3: brutal cop. Okay, but he's an alien who's only the
Speaker 3: foot tall.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, gotcha? Uh? In this he is an lapd
Speaker 2: guy wearing a suit, sunglasses, generally has a machine gun,
Speaker 2: and it's just a I think, generally a great villain here.
Speaker 2: We've seen him with natural hero swagger in the Transfers films.
Speaker 2: He's great in those those movies, just a real joy,
Speaker 2: but here effortlessly eases into the role of a silver
Speaker 2: hair at authority villain.
Speaker 3: There is something beautiful about the way that Tim Thomerson
Speaker 3: simultaneously has no idea what's going on in this movie,
Speaker 3: much like the audience, but also is on fire in
Speaker 3: this role. It's kind of captured. And again, I was
Speaker 3: looking at some behind the scenes interviews and they're talking
Speaker 3: to him. He says something like, I'm playing the villain
Speaker 3: of this film. Basically I'm some kind of robot. But
Speaker 3: in his scenes he brings this like the smoldering Skynet
Speaker 3: eyes intensity. So I don't know, that's like a really
Speaker 3: wonderful combination. It's obviously over his head, but also he's
Speaker 3: all in. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, obviously his character has some underlings. One of the
Speaker 2: underlings is Germaine. Germaine is played by Nicholas Guests born
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty one and Guest, I think without a doubt
Speaker 2: is best known to moviegoers for his role as Todd
Speaker 2: of Todd and Margo, the much traumatized neighbors of Clark
Speaker 2: Griswold in nineteen eighty nine's Christmas Vacation.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, I didn't make this connection that it was
Speaker 3: the same guy. Yeah, So he plays a I guess
Speaker 3: he's supposed to be aind of pitiable but also not
Speaker 3: very sympathetic character in that movie. In this movie, he's
Speaker 3: just a slimy creep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's slimy. This actor had a bit part
Speaker 2: in Wrath Khan and it's also notable that he's the
Speaker 2: younger brother of Christopher Guest.
Speaker 3: Okay, in this movie, his character's name is Germane and
Speaker 3: he has a German accent. I don't know if they
Speaker 3: ever explained like his nationality being German and if that
Speaker 3: has any significance in the film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's not the only German member of the LAPD though,
Speaker 2: because we also have the character what Merits played.
Speaker 3: By Brian James Blade runner y Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Most well known for playing the replicant Leon and eighty
Speaker 2: two's Blade Runner. He lived forty five through nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 2: but he also had a million other tough guy, heavy
Speaker 2: and weirdo roles throughout his career. Played a general in
Speaker 2: ninety seven's The Fifth Element. He's also in Cherry two thousand,
Speaker 2: did a lot of sequels, a lot of TV's, a
Speaker 2: lot of TV shows. So here though, solid goon performance
Speaker 2: but with a weird phony German accent for some reason.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he just stands around saying like we have him
Speaker 3: in our sights now. He comes off like he feels
Speaker 3: like a like a Nazi dentist from an old movie.
Speaker 2: Yes, we also have a cyborg villain. I think this
Speaker 2: guy's lapd but maybe not. Again, maybe it doesn't even matter.
Speaker 2: Maybe he's Marion Mary.
Speaker 3: I don't know who this guy is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's he has a thing where his face opens
Speaker 2: up and there's a blaster and then we get that
Speaker 2: he's in that awesome slide battle late in the movie.
Speaker 3: I love that part. He's one of the characters who, oh,
Speaker 3: guess he was a cyborg because he's got a gun
Speaker 3: inside his face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I don't know who he works for, but
Speaker 2: he is opposed to our hero, so he is.
Speaker 3: I think he's he's described as a systems cowboy.
Speaker 2: Okay, whatever that is. He's one of those. He's played
Speaker 2: by Tom Matthews born nineteen fifty eight. Who is this guy? Well,
Speaker 2: American actor whose other credits include eighty five is the
Speaker 2: Return of the Living Dead and eighty six is Friday
Speaker 2: the Thirteenth Jason Lives.
Speaker 3: That's Friday Part six. The first one with a zombie.
Speaker 3: Jason in Oh Nice, Yeah he plays he plays what's
Speaker 3: his name, Tommy Jarvis in that one the hero, but yeah,
Speaker 3: also love him in Return of the Living Dead, where
Speaker 3: he is the unfortunate new employee of the storage unit
Speaker 3: where they find the zombie.
Speaker 2: The toxin gotcha, all right, So that's LAPD. Then we
Speaker 2: have this other faction that we've already referred to, the
Speaker 2: Red Army Hammerheads. This is a militant anti cyborg rebel
Speaker 2: group and they also seem multinational.
Speaker 3: Yes, I did not figure out what was going on
Speaker 3: with them until towards the end of my first viewing
Speaker 3: of the movie, but they are actually a major player
Speaker 3: in the plot. And yeah, their politics are they are
Speaker 3: anti cyborg in some way.
Speaker 2: So these characters made the only characters we can we
Speaker 2: can give like a ninety five percent guarantee that they're
Speaker 2: not cyborgs, but no more than ninety five. I think
Speaker 2: ninety five is the cap for any Albert pun movie,
Speaker 2: regardless of genre.
Speaker 3: Exactly because they The thing is with most of the
Speaker 3: Red Army Cyborg the Red Army Hammerhead characters, they dress
Speaker 3: like cyborgs, so like some of them show up in
Speaker 3: the all black or with the trench coat and the sunglasses,
Speaker 3: which is how the cyborgs are signaled when we see them.
Speaker 3: So I don't know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're using a lot of the tech, but it's
Speaker 2: like somebody at some point comes along and says, that's
Speaker 2: a cool remote you got. Wouldn't it be better if
Speaker 2: it were like integrated with your body? And they're like, nope,
Speaker 2: I draw the line right there, but I'll still use
Speaker 2: the remote. So the leader of this group again at
Speaker 2: least for the purposes of our plot, is this character
Speaker 2: ang You Live, played by Carrie Hirooki Takawa, who lived
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty through twenty twenty five. So we we previously
Speaker 2: talked about Takawa in our episode on ninety five's Mortal Kombat,
Speaker 2: in which you of course played the villain sh Con,
Speaker 2: and sadly the actor passed away late last year. So
Speaker 2: in general, I would say go back and listen to
Speaker 2: our Mortal Kombat episode if you if you want to
Speaker 2: hear more about him, more about his other film roles.
Speaker 2: But yeah, this is a guy, a guy who always
Speaker 2: had great villain swagger, great in large roles, great in
Speaker 2: small roles. Yeah, he'll be missed, but he's pretty pretty
Speaker 2: great here, and he is surprisingly not really the villain.
Speaker 2: He's the leader of the good guy faction to the
Speaker 2: extent that you can trust any faction in this film.
Speaker 3: He seems like a villain when we first meet him,
Speaker 3: but I get well, actually, this may be kind of
Speaker 3: a grim dark, post apocalyptic world in which the factions
Speaker 3: are morally gray. Even the relatively good faction is pretty ruthless.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so he's the leader of them. We don't
Speaker 3: realize he's the leader when we first meet him, but
Speaker 3: as with his roles in the other movies we've watched,
Speaker 3: as within Mortal Kombat, he just owns the screen in
Speaker 3: every scene he's in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, even with that weird accident. Yeah, okay. Another
Speaker 2: member of the Hammerheads is Max Impact. Max Impact pops
Speaker 2: up late in the movie, and she is played by
Speaker 2: Merle Kennedy born nineteen sixty seven. This is our scrappy
Speaker 2: tour guide and rebel in Java. She previously appeared in
Speaker 2: ninety one's Dollar Man and was active on screen tool
Speaker 2: around in two thousand and two, with lots of appearances
Speaker 2: in TV shows and such genre pictures as ninety four's
Speaker 2: Night of the Demons. Two ninety five's Leprechaun three and
Speaker 2: the two thousand and two film May.
Speaker 3: I don't want to be unkind, but I'm gonna say
Speaker 3: some curious, curious acting choices with this character here especially,
Speaker 3: it really comes out in the scenes that are just
Speaker 3: Olivier Grenier and Max Impact talking to each other where
Speaker 3: You're just like, what is happening here? Yeah?
Speaker 2: These are not the heavy lifters when it comes to
Speaker 2: dialogue in this movie. They're both in tremendous physical shape though,
Speaker 2: so there's at least halfway there.
Speaker 3: Well, you know what, though I loved her scenes, like
Speaker 3: the line deliveries were very bizarrely formed, and so the
Speaker 3: character brings an incredibly strange energy. But I was never
Speaker 3: bored while I was watching them, Like their scenes were
Speaker 3: highly entertaining.
Speaker 2: She felt to me like a combination of Peter Pan
Speaker 2: and tinker Bell, but with a rocket launcher.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, like highly violent martial arts Peter Pan tinker Bell. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I agree, all right.
Speaker 2: And then another member of the Hammerheads we have the
Speaker 2: character Yoshirohan, played by Yuji Okamoto born nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 2: American actor with credits going back to eighty four. He
Speaker 2: even pops up in eighty six is The Karate Kid
Speaker 2: Part two. Other credits, often small or background roles, include
Speaker 2: ninety three's Robot Wars, ninety seven's Contact, two thousand's Fortress two,
Speaker 2: two thousand and six is Big Mama's House two, and
Speaker 2: twenty ten's Inception. Still Active also produces all right, okay,
Speaker 2: freelance cyborgs and associates. This is kind of this isn't
Speaker 2: really a faction. This is kind of I guess the
Speaker 2: rest and I think all.
Speaker 3: The Lost and Found bucket of gay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're all cyborgs. So we have this character, Jared,
Speaker 2: who's going to be important later on. Played by Marjorie
Speaker 2: Monahan born nineteen sixty four American actress, active from nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety through about two thousand and five, mostly on TV,
Speaker 2: but with small supporting roles in such films as nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: The Bonfire, The Vanities, and ninety ones. Regarding Henry, she
Speaker 2: did seven episodes of Babylon five, and she was also
Speaker 2: in a mid ninety sci fi series called Space Rangers.
Speaker 2: I would say, cool presence, very cool voice. She's going
Speaker 2: to not have a body for a large Porsche of
Speaker 2: the picture. She's going to be in a essentially in
Speaker 2: an iPhone.
Speaker 3: Did you get the sense that this character they were
Speaker 3: trying to create a Meg Foster like presence with her.
Speaker 3: That's the feeling I got, and I think she mostly
Speaker 3: gets there.
Speaker 2: I think so, yeah, yeah, but this was Yeah, you
Speaker 2: could easily imagine Meg Foster doing this role. All right,
Speaker 2: Another cyborg character we have, Sam, Sam is going to
Speaker 2: be very important? Is Sam kind of the leader of
Speaker 2: this group or the second and hard to say?
Speaker 3: Hard to say. Sam is a character who does not
Speaker 3: seem important at all when you actually meet her, but
Speaker 3: then many scenes later, characters are talking about her and
Speaker 3: making you realize, like, oh, I really should have paid
Speaker 3: attention to who that was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, I guess she's the main villain now
Speaker 2: you've realized later in the film, But.
Speaker 3: You never see her again in the form she took
Speaker 3: when you've originally met her. You only see her in
Speaker 3: an altered body later on. Yes.
Speaker 2: So Sam is played by Margene Holden born nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 2: and we have another Mortal Kombat connection because she played
Speaker 2: Shiva the fore Armed Warrior in ninety seven's Annihilation. She
Speaker 2: also had parts in eighty nine Strip to Kill Two
Speaker 2: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure eighty nine's Doctor Caligari, and
Speaker 2: two John Carpenter films, Vampires and Ghost of Mars. All right,
Speaker 2: so some fun flicks in there. Okay, we also have Julian.
Speaker 2: Julian is definitely a cyborg and has some great scenes.
Speaker 2: Played by Deborah Shelton born nineteen forty eight. She was
Speaker 2: Miss USA nineteen seventy. She was a nineteen seventy four
Speaker 2: Playboy cover girl. I had to look this up. This
Speaker 2: episode of this edition rather of Playboy that she's in,
Speaker 2: also featured a spread on Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling
Speaker 2: about the movie Zardas, and featured fiction by Joyce Carol Oates.
Speaker 3: Wow. Yeah, what does that issue your sell for on eBay?
Speaker 2: I don't know some of these I think you can
Speaker 2: pick them. They publish so many copies of these things.
Speaker 2: You can probably get them reasonably cheap if you don't
Speaker 2: care about quality.
Speaker 3: Does Playboy still published literary fiction? That would be hilarious
Speaker 3: if it still did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know that bit. I mean, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Playboy reachers right in and let us know. But certainly
Speaker 2: back in the day they did other credits for Shelton
Speaker 2: include eighty two's Blood Tide that has let's say we've
Speaker 2: looked at that one before. That's like a sea creature movie.
Speaker 2: She's also in Brian de Palmer's Body Double from eighty four.
Speaker 2: I think she plays a pretty major character in that
Speaker 2: and has high billing. Certainly, I think brings the body
Speaker 2: to that picture circuitry Man two and ninety four in
Speaker 2: three seasons of TV's Dallas's.
Speaker 3: She is confident and commanding in this movie. She plays
Speaker 3: a cyborg who has to set our hero right when
Speaker 3: our hero is at one of his lowest points and
Speaker 3: get him, like launch him on his true mission after
Speaker 3: he has been set astray on a false mission. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and she does so with great confidence and verve. And
Speaker 3: then she gets shot like ten thousand times by other
Speaker 3: cyborgs and exploded. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's a commanding presence here, and she seems all in
Speaker 2: on the performance. Yeah, all right. We also have Rosaria.
Speaker 2: This is like a minor Cyde Work character played by
Speaker 2: Jennifer She's not a cyborg. She was I thought she
Speaker 2: was a cyborg at first. She's one of the anti
Speaker 2: cyborg people. Oh see, sometimes you gets hard to tell
Speaker 2: in this future. She's played by Jennifer Gotti born nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty eight, American actress of TV and film who started
Speaker 2: out with a whole bunch of episodes of the soap
Speaker 2: Search for Tomorrow in eighty three, and she'd go on
Speaker 2: to do two different tracks, two different CSI's, and a
Speaker 2: supporting cast member on TV's Vice Principles from twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: through twenty seventeen. All right, Thomas Jane is in this Yes,
Speaker 2: plays a character named Billy Moon born nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 2: the star of nineteen ninety nine's Deep Blue Sea, which
Speaker 2: we previously covered Jane. You know, go back and listen
Speaker 2: to that if you want to hear more about Thomas Jane.
Speaker 2: And his character is kind of a bit roll here,
Speaker 2: and he stays naked for the entire duration of his
Speaker 2: screen time.
Speaker 3: His entire arc in this movie, never puts his clothes on,
Speaker 3: never leaves the room where we meet him.
Speaker 2: That's right, And as IMDb points out, ye ample shots
Speaker 2: at his butt much younger here though that I'm used
Speaker 2: to seeing him, so Honestly, if I didn't know it
Speaker 2: was him, I'm not sure I would have recognized Thomas Jane. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this was pretty early in his filmography.
Speaker 3: I you know, mainly now I associate him with his
Speaker 3: role in The Expanse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Certainly some strong cyberpunk elements to that role as well.
Speaker 2: And he yeah, I think Thomas Jane's terrific, But this
Speaker 2: was very early, good, early days for him.
Speaker 3: He is a great actor, but he has almost nothing
Speaker 3: to do in this movie. He just stands there naked
Speaker 3: looking out a window for several scenes smoking a cigarette,
Speaker 3: and then the bad guy from Cyborg the movie Cyborg
Speaker 3: just comes into the room and kill him.
Speaker 2: Let's see. Jackie Earle Haley could say the same thing
Speaker 2: about him, who plays the character Einstein in this who's
Speaker 2: like basically what a cyborg tech dude, cyborg doctor.
Speaker 3: I think he is affiliated with the Red Army hammerheads. Okay,
Speaker 3: we only meet him at the very end of the movie.
Speaker 3: He's the guy there to do some cyborg patch up
Speaker 3: and be a tech wizard at the end who unleashes
Speaker 3: the data chip on the to do whatever it's supposed
Speaker 3: to do. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But of course, Haley, as an American child actor
Speaker 2: turned grown up character actor, always had a knack for
Speaker 2: weirdos credits. Going back to seventy two. His films include
Speaker 2: ninety one's Dollar Man, ninety two's Maniac Cop three, two
Speaker 2: thousand and nine's Watchman, Shutter Island in twenty ten, A
Speaker 2: Nightmare on Elm Street in twenty ten, which he of
Speaker 2: course plays Freddy Krueger, twenty twelves Lincoln, and much more
Speaker 2: so small role. And again I don't know if I
Speaker 2: would have recognized him or even had time to recognize
Speaker 2: him if I didn't know he going to.
Speaker 3: Be in it. What a strange and interesting and varied career.
Speaker 3: So he's in these Albert Pewan movies in the early nineties,
Speaker 3: doing doll Man and doing Nemesis. Then he's in Watchman,
Speaker 3: he plays Rorshak.
Speaker 2: He does yeah so may it major a character?
Speaker 3: And then he's also in Lincoln. That's Steven Spielberg Lincoln.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I forget who he plays in Lincoln, but yeah.
Speaker 3: I think he plays he plays one of the Confederate leaders.
Speaker 3: He's Jefferson Davis or somebody.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, And and Freddy Krueger, and on the whole.
Speaker 2: The two bousand ten's Nightmare on Elm Street. I know
Speaker 2: people are very divided on it, or maybe they're not
Speaker 2: even divided. Most people don't like it, but I enjoyed
Speaker 2: it at the time, and I kind of liked his
Speaker 2: his Freddy, but you know, it was a different, different Freddy.
Speaker 2: It was mostly a no jokes Freddy, all right. And
Speaker 2: then finally, the composer is Michael Rubini born nineteen forty two.
Speaker 2: We've talked about him before because he did the score
Speaker 2: for eighty Three's The Hunger, and he also did the
Speaker 2: score for eighty six is Man Hunter. He was a
Speaker 2: prolific Sessions musician, piano fighter, if you will, a member
Speaker 2: of the Wrecking Crew, a Sessions musician collective that was
Speaker 2: active in the sixties and seventies. I'd say the score
Speaker 2: here is fine. It maybe a little cheesy at times.
Speaker 2: Maybe it should be a little cheesy at times. But
Speaker 2: there were a couple of stretches in the film where
Speaker 2: I was thinking to myself, man, everything that's happening visually
Speaker 2: on the screen is just so impressive. The score feels
Speaker 2: like it should be like a step or two higher
Speaker 2: in quality to really meet what I'm seeing on the screen.
Speaker 2: But again, this is highly subjective.
Speaker 3: I know what you like, I know what you want.
Speaker 3: You want that sense.
Speaker 2: Score if it had been a little sentier, Yes, I
Speaker 2: think it would have. It would have tickled me more,
Speaker 2: but again that's just me.
Speaker 3: You know. Yeah, it's it didn't really stand out much
Speaker 3: to me, but there were some good elements. But it
Speaker 3: also had the kind of thing where, you know, it's
Speaker 3: the sort of movie where a character, two characters start
Speaker 3: kissing and then there's a saxophone lick comes in. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they gotta love that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Okay, you're ready to talk about the plot?
Speaker 3: I think so.
Speaker 2: I think we've set the pieces on the table on
Speaker 2: the game board, and now it's time to get out
Speaker 2: the five hundred page rule book to determine how to
Speaker 2: play it.
Speaker 3: Perfect amazing. Yeah, we're about to begin a game of
Speaker 3: Warhammer and it's ten pm and we're starting. Okay, So,
Speaker 3: as we said earlier, you will somewhat get the wrong
Speaker 3: idea of the feeling of the movie from the level
Speaker 3: which we're about to explain it, because this is with
Speaker 3: the aid of a second viewing and notes, So we're
Speaker 3: bringing some organization here that it doesn't feel like when
Speaker 3: you watch the movie. So just imagine being more kind
Speaker 3: of lost and bathing in the vibes, bathe wallowing in
Speaker 3: the cyborg pools as you will. One thing I did
Speaker 3: want to flag at the beginning of the movie is
Speaker 3: that the production company, Imperial Entertainment, has two different logos
Speaker 3: and they both play before the movie. The first one
Speaker 3: looks like it should be on a beer bottle. Did
Speaker 3: you notice this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it does remind me a little bit of what
Speaker 2: am I thinking of? A sing high? Is that the one?
Speaker 3: I make the name wrong, But I don't know what
Speaker 3: It reminds me.
Speaker 2: The beer that you get at Thai restaurants.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's what I get anyway. Yeah, so it's got
Speaker 3: like a like a lion griffin type thing. It looks
Speaker 3: like it should be like Imperial genuine draft. But then anyway,
Speaker 3: The film begins with mysterious flute music and a fade
Speaker 3: in on a man's head staring off to the side, expressionless, unmoving.
Speaker 3: He is wearing these double rimmed sunglasses that rob would
Speaker 3: you say that these are borgie sunglasses?
Speaker 2: They're a little borgie. Yeah, you get the sense there
Speaker 2: might not be humanized behind those glasses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so opening my, you'll have to imagine this. I
Speaker 3: can't pretend to do the accent or the delivery perfectly,
Speaker 3: but think of this with a very uninflected, flat delivery
Speaker 3: with a heavy French accent. When the uplink came through
Speaker 3: with the work orders, I had a strange feeling everything
Speaker 3: was about to change for me. Maybe it just had
Speaker 3: something to do with the way the world is today,
Speaker 3: bio enhanced gangsters, information terrorists, cyborg outlaws. And then we
Speaker 3: fade in on a shot of the Los Angeles City skyline,
Speaker 3: which we see behind this translucent orange haze. I think
Speaker 3: this is supposed to show how polluted the future is, Like,
Speaker 3: oh no, they're putting all this orange in the air.
Speaker 3: And what year is it? The screen tells us we
Speaker 3: mentioned this earlier. It's twenty twenty seven, baby. So I
Speaker 3: was thinking at this point, like, damn, should we have
Speaker 3: waited one more year to cover Nemesis? But I couldn't wait.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, the vault will be timely, so it'll work
Speaker 2: here you go.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah. So the monologue goes on. He continues saying
Speaker 3: everything's so congested with high tech overload that you start
Speaker 3: to feel a little numb. There's an old saying in
Speaker 3: my business, it pays to be more than human. I'm
Speaker 3: not so sure anymore.
Speaker 2: I think we're on track. I think we think things
Speaker 2: are gonna match up. This feels like the twenty twenty
Speaker 2: seven we're moving towards.
Speaker 3: Yeah future correctly predicted. Good job, Albert Pume. But one
Speaker 3: thing I wanted to know, so we've said that there
Speaker 3: are things like this. Again, the setting is funny in
Speaker 3: a lot of ways, but every now and then I'm like,
Speaker 3: that's kind of interesting. And the interesting thing here at
Speaker 3: the beginning is that we're getting this inversion of expectations
Speaker 3: with the idea that in this world, the age old
Speaker 3: conventional wisdom is it's good to become a cyborg. That
Speaker 3: pays off, it's a good thing. But as of late,
Speaker 3: our protagonist has a dawning awareness that possibly it is
Speaker 3: bad to become a side.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that again, I think a lot of us
Speaker 2: can relate to that when we, you know, we don't
Speaker 2: actually have metal parts. Well, some of us the metal
Speaker 2: parts in our bodies, but we are not cyborgs in
Speaker 2: the sense that this movie sees cyborgs. But there is
Speaker 2: a certain amount of technological integration with the average person's
Speaker 2: life today that I think a lot of us are
Speaker 2: like sort of halfway through the transformation and we're realizing,
Speaker 2: you know, some of these augments were not a good
Speaker 2: idea exactly right.
Speaker 3: So I think this is actually interesting and clever. Where
Speaker 3: we're halfway through the transformation, as you say, we're already
Speaker 3: becoming part machine. And it's just standard conventional wisdom that
Speaker 3: this is the correct way to optimize yourself, to become
Speaker 3: more valuable, to increase your opportunities. You have to integrate
Speaker 3: with the new technology to become a better human. But
Speaker 3: at some point you start wondering, wait, was this a
Speaker 3: bad idea? Anyway, the action begins. You've got Olivier Greunair
Speaker 3: here playing this cop named Alex Rain. He busts into
Speaker 3: a hotel room with a woman. They're making out, rolling
Speaker 3: on the walls and panting, and the room is also
Speaker 3: orange inside too, so like the air quality alert is
Speaker 3: it got the inside air too? It's not good. Then
Speaker 3: suddenly the woman grabs Alex Rain by the throat and
Speaker 3: starts choking him with one hand, and she says, move
Speaker 3: and I'll crush your throat, and she frisks him for weapons,
Speaker 3: And while she's frisking him, the hubb a hubb a
Speaker 3: saxophone riff plays and eventually she seems satisfied. I guess
Speaker 3: that he doesn't have any weapons, and she lets off
Speaker 3: the pressure on his throat and she says, you can't
Speaker 3: be too careful these days, there's undercover police everywhere. So
Speaker 3: then she starts getting sexy again, but out of nowhere,
Speaker 3: Alex Rain pulls out a handgun.
Speaker 2: I think it's her handgun, right, I think he pulls
Speaker 2: her okay, like a holster at the small of her back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's got a gun tucked into her skirt. He
Speaker 3: pulls out her handgun shoots her and I was like,
Speaker 3: oh no, But then sparks fly everywhere and she turns
Speaker 3: back to him, revealing a big hole in her head
Speaker 3: with wires and circuit boards dangling out everywhere. So, oh,
Speaker 3: I guess she was a cyborg or a robot. Many
Speaker 3: such moments to come like this in the film. So
Speaker 3: she curses at him and says he's a cop, and
Speaker 3: he curses at her and calls her a terrorist, and
Speaker 3: then we get the title screen looks kind of like
Speaker 3: the Transformer's logo. Do you notice that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, Nemesis. Not sure what the title really means.
Speaker 2: Who is the Nemesis? Who is it? Where we're talking
Speaker 2: about Nemesis in the Greek sense, or are we talking
Speaker 2: about it in the sense of just bad guys, and
Speaker 2: of which we seem to have plenty.
Speaker 3: I don't know, you know, I'm ashamed to say this.
Speaker 3: I feel like I would need to refresh myself on
Speaker 3: the myth to understand if the myth has much connection
Speaker 3: with the film.
Speaker 2: If I remember correctly, and I could be wrong. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the mythic origin of Nemesis is it is it's divine
Speaker 2: retribution against like abusers of.
Speaker 3: Power and tyrants and so forth.
Speaker 2: So I don't know that's the kind of thing that
Speaker 2: could fit into a cyborg dystopian cyberpunk world, but I'm
Speaker 2: not sure if we really see that here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So anyway, the scene resumes and the robot Lady's
Speaker 3: body is lying on the floor with its head blown off,
Speaker 3: and it's got the little servos worrying and a rubber
Speaker 3: tongue flicking back and forth. Alex Rain is strapping up
Speaker 3: for an action scene, so we see him like packing
Speaker 3: a bunch of guns under his duster coat and taking
Speaker 3: drags of a cigarette. Some cool electric guitar music lets
Speaker 3: us know that things are about to get super sick,
Speaker 3: and before he leaves the hotel room, he stops to
Speaker 3: get some one liners in on the dead robot. It's
Speaker 3: like the laying there still shooting sparks on the bed,
Speaker 3: and he says, again, imagine that French accent flat delivery.
Speaker 3: He says, you see, laundering data can be dangerous. And
Speaker 3: then it's like maybe that one didn't work, so he
Speaker 3: does another one liner. He says, you break the law,
Speaker 3: you go to hell.
Speaker 2: Well, now's the time to workshop some one liners, you know,
Speaker 2: because it's a captive audience that's not gonna they can't
Speaker 2: really criticize you too much.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Alex Rain leaves the hotel room and he
Speaker 3: heads down the hall. On the way to the elevator,
Speaker 3: he passes a group of four people, two men, two women,
Speaker 3: all wearing sunglasses indoors. He's also wearing sunglasses indoors. These
Speaker 3: four seem like bad news, like maybe they're gangsters or something,
Speaker 3: and Alex Rain escapes down the employee elevator. The gangsters
Speaker 3: here find the mutilated robot or cyborg or whatever it
Speaker 3: is who they call their courier, and they figure out
Speaker 3: that the guy they passed in the hall was an
Speaker 3: lapd agent and that he I think he took something
Speaker 3: from the machine lady, though it's never very clear what that.
Speaker 2: Was, and maybe a drive something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So they chase him out of the hotel and
Speaker 3: into an abandoned and dust real park that is full
Speaker 3: of these crumbling, half collapsed factory buildings where they are
Speaker 3: going to have an extended gunfight that I'm not going
Speaker 3: to narrate blow by blow, but I do want to
Speaker 3: note some interesting and funny things about it, many of
Speaker 3: which are true of the other action scenes that will
Speaker 3: come later in the movie. So interesting, good and funny
Speaker 3: things about it. One thing that's good about it is
Speaker 3: this action scene has beats. Yeah, long time long time
Speaker 3: listeners will have heard me complaining before about gunfight scenes
Speaker 3: in action movies, which at least half the time I
Speaker 3: think are actually quite boring because usually the reason is
Speaker 3: they don't have any drama in them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just one side shoots, the other side shoots,
Speaker 2: people are talking and seeking cover or they're getting hit,
Speaker 2: but that's about all there is to it. Yeah, these
Speaker 2: action sequences tell a story, like there is a language
Speaker 2: of action here that just absolutely works. But it is also,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of impossible to to summarize for the podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. So. The normal action scene that I get
Speaker 3: bored by is is when where there are no interesting
Speaker 3: developments or exchanges of power. It's like you said, it's
Speaker 3: just close up of one person shooting, then close up
Speaker 3: of another person shooting, until somebody gets shot. They don't
Speaker 3: feel unpredictable or like anything changes. Not the case with Nemesis.
Speaker 3: In one sense, the action scenes are usually funny because
Speaker 3: of how much overkill there is in the amount of gunfire.
Speaker 3: Like it's not just too much shooting, it is beyond
Speaker 3: too much shooting. Yes, it has these like Lady Terminator
Speaker 3: levels of gunplay, which is in once it's that's so
Speaker 3: over the top it becomes funny. But the action scenes
Speaker 3: also have this level of drama in that they're interesting
Speaker 3: and unpredictable. They're kind of playful with this whimsical fantasy
Speaker 3: logic at work. Lots of things happen in them that
Speaker 3: you could not do in reality. So, for example, Alex
Speaker 3: Rain is running into this industrial park and he's got
Speaker 3: a shotgun in his hands, and he's got to run.
Speaker 3: There's like a chain link fence in front of him,
Speaker 3: and he just shoots the chain link fence with his shotgun,
Speaker 3: and the fence pops open. There's like a hole in
Speaker 3: it for him to go through. I'm no shotgun expert.
Speaker 3: I don't think that would work. I don't think you
Speaker 3: can do that. But yeah, so he like does that.
Speaker 3: But it works as just a cartoony, dramatic beat in
Speaker 3: this story that makes it continually interesting because things like
Speaker 3: that keep happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's almost like there's almost like an anime level
Speaker 2: of action to this film. Things that don't really make
Speaker 2: sense in the real world, but they make sense within
Speaker 2: the action economy of the action language of the picture.
Speaker 2: Here it is just how their world.
Speaker 3: Works, unnatural extensions of things where like like he will
Speaker 3: be like fall down on his back and slide down
Speaker 3: something on his back while shooting and fighting someone, and
Speaker 3: there's this time dilation effect where while he's sliding down
Speaker 3: the hill, all these different things happen while you can
Speaker 3: be fighting somebody that would like there's no way all
Speaker 3: of that could be fit into the time it would
Speaker 3: take to slide down the hill, but they do it.
Speaker 3: It's got that fantasy extension of time and I love it, yea.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, you've got like these really
Speaker 3: funny things, like the way everybody is dressed. So Alex
Speaker 3: Rain is wearing a suit and a skinny tie under
Speaker 3: a long, heavy trench coat, and it looks hot outside,
Speaker 3: and you can see that the material of this coat
Speaker 3: is very thick. Of course, everybody's got these cool cyber sunglasses.
Speaker 3: And then in this scene you see the first four
Speaker 3: henchmen that come after him are like three huge dudes
Speaker 3: in sunglasses, blazers and suit jackets with guns, and also
Speaker 3: one lady in this extremely short party dress with a
Speaker 3: duffel bag full of weapons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the weapons are all you know. I don't
Speaker 2: have a great eye for guns. Some people love to
Speaker 2: like identify what guns are being used, what's been done
Speaker 2: to them, what sort of little additions have been like
Speaker 2: say put on an old World War two era pistol
Speaker 2: to make it a Star Wars pistol. But to my eye,
Speaker 2: at any rate, these guns are gussied up in a
Speaker 2: fun way where they take on these like additional cyberpunk
Speaker 2: dimensions where I don't know, there are different extra tubes,
Speaker 2: extra rocket launchers, extra components.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're more like there're things like Decord's gun and
Speaker 3: blade run or like Robocops gun. They're like not really
Speaker 3: existing types of things, sort of sci fi. Also, eventually
Speaker 3: in this gunfight, another gangster shows up. It's this woman
Speaker 3: named Rosaria who is dressed like a like a cyborg
Speaker 3: elf who works for Captain Hook. She's got the tech
Speaker 3: noir sunglasses, a black pirate coat with an upturned Dracula collar,
Speaker 3: black gloves, tight brown pants, thigh high black boots that
Speaker 3: have almost a Santa's Workshop kind of feeling to them.
Speaker 3: And then she's holding this enormous long gun with like
Speaker 3: four supplemental scopes on it.
Speaker 2: And you're telling me, though, this lady not a cyborg.
Speaker 3: Not that's the crazy thing I'm watching. I'm like, okay,
Speaker 3: so he's fighting cyborgs. She's obviously a cyborg, but if
Speaker 3: you listen to their dialogue later, she's very anti cyborg.
Speaker 3: So she could be a cyborg who's anti cyborg. But
Speaker 3: we never see wires pop out of her when she
Speaker 3: gets hurt like we do with the other cyborgs. We
Speaker 3: do meet other cyborgs who are anti cyborg, Like Jared
Speaker 3: turns out to be anti cyborg even though she's a cyborg.
Speaker 3: But I don't know, I guess case may be partially open,
Speaker 3: but I'm like ninety five percent sure that's as high
Speaker 3: as we can go on the Pewan scale. Ninety five
Speaker 3: percent sure that Rosaria here is not a cyborg. She's
Speaker 3: flesh and blood. So in this fight, Alex Rain gets
Speaker 3: chased off the roof of this half collapsed building by
Speaker 3: two remaining gangsters or terrors whatever they are. It's the
Speaker 3: two women who are left, and he hides in a
Speaker 3: nearby building while they shoot bullets and rockets at him.
Speaker 3: At one point they blow him up pretty good and
Speaker 3: we see sparks and metal coming out of his leg
Speaker 3: and he says arc that knee was brand new, So, oh, okay,
Speaker 3: here's where we find out. I guess our protagonist is
Speaker 3: a cyborg too, or at least he had a robot knee.
Speaker 3: And this is the part where I'm wondering, like, wait
Speaker 3: a minute, are the people he's fighting cyborgs? I thought
Speaker 3: they were.
Speaker 2: But luckily the movies, the movie moves so quickly you
Speaker 2: don't have too much time to worry about these things
Speaker 2: because then something else is going to explode.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Also, Alex Rain finds a terribly cute puppy in
Speaker 3: this exploding abandoned factory that's on fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, completely extra but absolutely adorable.
Speaker 3: Fuzzy puppy in there, and he's like, I must protect puppy.
Speaker 3: So he protects the puppy by hiding it in a
Speaker 3: metal locker. And then, despite his injury, ra Alex Rain
Speaker 3: continues to fight. He kills one of the two other fighters,
Speaker 3: and then the only one left is Rosaria, the pirate elf.
Speaker 3: And oh we also see on her hand she has
Speaker 3: a little tattoo in the shape of a hammerhead shark.
Speaker 3: So Alex gets incapacitated by an explosion and then Rosaria
Speaker 3: comes to confront him and she stands over his mangled body,
Speaker 3: and then these two exchange some acting. This is funny
Speaker 3: because Olivier here he continues that the uninflected delivery, while
Speaker 3: the actress playing Rosaria positively just spits every line at him.
Speaker 3: She says, cops are animals. You don't know who that
Speaker 3: woman was back in the room. You don't know who
Speaker 3: I am. And he says, you're a terrorist, and she says,
Speaker 3: you're confused. We're trying to save humankind and you you
Speaker 3: protect the machines. Well, no, wonder you protect them, and
Speaker 3: then she looks down at the wiggling metal parts that
Speaker 3: are blown out of his leg. She says, you are
Speaker 3: mostly machine. You're not really human anymore, are you, And
Speaker 3: he counters he's got a good comeback. He says, eighty
Speaker 3: six point five percent is still human, and then she sneers,
Speaker 3: and she says, none of you is human, never was,
Speaker 3: and then she starts shooting him in the machine parts.
Speaker 3: It's sort of a gun torture scene resembling the death
Speaker 3: of Alex Murphy and RoboCop. But before she finishes him off,
Speaker 3: she has to get in some more insults. She tells
Speaker 3: him he has no idea what's going on. She says
Speaker 3: he's just stupid, and when she's done with him, there's
Speaker 3: no way that they'll be able to put him back together.
Speaker 3: But Alex Rain the thirteen point five percent cyborg has
Speaker 3: some tricks up his sleeve. So while she's leaning over
Speaker 3: him heaping on all of the scorn, he thrusts his
Speaker 3: knee up at her and one of the exposed metal
Speaker 3: parts from his knee stabs her in the side, so
Speaker 3: he got her, and then a hovering police drone shows up.
Speaker 3: Rosari crawls away. The cute puppy comes out of the
Speaker 3: locker and begins to lick Alex's wounds, And I was
Speaker 3: just thinking, I hope that puppy does not cut its
Speaker 3: tongue on the robot parts. That's a complication. You didn't
Speaker 3: think about it.
Speaker 2: I didn't think about that.
Speaker 3: After this, we get a copy of the sequence in
Speaker 3: RoboCop where we see from Alex Murphy's perspective as his
Speaker 3: body is being reassembled by the scientists and modified with
Speaker 3: the machine parts, and it's got all the things from
Speaker 3: that scene are playing through, so it's complete with the
Speaker 3: traumatic echoing memory of a woman saying something emotionally painful. Now,
Speaker 3: in the case of RoboCop, it's Murphy remembering something something
Speaker 3: sharp that his wife said. In the case of Nemesis,
Speaker 3: it is Alex Rain remembering things that the terrorist Rosaria
Speaker 3: said to him directly before she shot him. So we
Speaker 3: get the you're not really human? Are you not really human?
Speaker 3: Not really human echoing in his mind, and presumably after
Speaker 3: all this he is actually now less than eighty six
Speaker 3: point five percent human, though I don't remember if they
Speaker 3: state what percent human he's down to after each modification.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should have had like a running percentile on
Speaker 2: the corner of the screen. That would have been helpful.
Speaker 3: So next we cut to sometime in the future. A
Speaker 3: text legend tells us that this is a place called Baja,
Speaker 3: New America. I'm guessing this is Baja and what is
Speaker 3: now Mexico. And we see a man running shirtless, barefoot
Speaker 3: in the desert, crunching over the tops of sand dunes,
Speaker 3: and he has a dog running with him. It's a
Speaker 3: big husky that looks like it's probably not enjoying the
Speaker 3: hot weather.
Speaker 2: It's the puppy from earlier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, the puppy grew up. And Alex says in voiceover,
Speaker 3: it took them six months to put me back together,
Speaker 3: synthetic flesh, bioengineered organs. It always scared me that they
Speaker 3: might take out my soul and replace it with some
Speaker 3: goddamn matrix chip. Is that a thing that can happen
Speaker 3: in this world? We don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't know, yeah, being is he being ridiculous here,
Speaker 2: or is that just like straight up matrix chips will
Speaker 2: replace your soul?
Speaker 3: Don't know? He says, I ended up in this god
Speaker 3: forsaken place on the edge of existence, the kind of
Speaker 3: place where people on the run go to be forgotten.
Speaker 3: I was there to recuperate. And we see Alex rain
Speaker 3: now in better shape than ever. So he's lean, muscle
Speaker 3: bound with a new haircut. In the earlier scenes his
Speaker 3: hair was short but still kind of shaggy. Here it
Speaker 3: is a military fade, so he looks like he's peak peak,
Speaker 3: you know, condition uh, and he he injects himself in
Speaker 3: the neck with some kind of capsule. There will be
Speaker 3: much made of this later. I think it is some
Speaker 3: kind of painkiller. It's unclear to what extent this drug
Speaker 3: use is legal or illegal, but they call this behavior
Speaker 3: speed loading.
Speaker 2: So the way, there's certainly a character judgment involved when
Speaker 2: someone is accused of being a speedloader.
Speaker 3: So there's a scene where Alex goes to a bar
Speaker 3: which looks like it looks like a movie set. It
Speaker 3: looks like a built western town movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This feels like something straight out of a Fallout
Speaker 2: video game, where yes, you're out in the in the
Speaker 2: midst of the wilds and you need to stop in
Speaker 2: and spit a few caps on some water, and I'm
Speaker 2: like a lizard on a stick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, howdy, partner, I'll sell you some rat away. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So he goes to a bar. He's still barefoot, by
Speaker 3: the way, He's wearing bored shorts and a T shirt.
Speaker 3: He sits down, he orders a beer, and he sits
Speaker 3: there wearing sunglasses across from a man and a woman
Speaker 3: also wearing sunglasses. And the lady comes up to him
Speaker 3: and introduces herself as Rosaria, and Alex sees a hammerhead
Speaker 3: tattoo on her hand, and he says he's here to
Speaker 3: get even. He calls her a terrorist, and then she
Speaker 3: and the other dude in the bar they freak out.
Speaker 3: The other dude tries to draw a gun and Alex
Speaker 3: shoots them both, saying remember la. So the implication is
Speaker 3: that this is the same woman who blew him up
Speaker 3: in the opening scene, the elf Pirate lady, but she
Speaker 3: looks different here. Also, she doesn't recognize him now. That
Speaker 3: could be because he is further borged. He's more borged
Speaker 3: than he was in the opening scene. Andy's got a
Speaker 3: new marine recruit haircut. Andy's down to four percent body fat,
Speaker 3: I guess, so that could throw anybody off. But I
Speaker 3: don't know why. She looks different than she did before.
Speaker 3: But I don't know again, never established one hundred percent
Speaker 3: whether these two were cyborgs, but I think they probably
Speaker 3: were not because it seems their politics are anti cyborg.
Speaker 3: So Alex, in his voiceover, says, I wanted to tell
Speaker 3: this terrorist that I had given a lot of thought
Speaker 3: to what she said back in La about whether I
Speaker 3: was more machine than human. I wanted to tell her
Speaker 3: she started me thinking, I really wanted to tell her
Speaker 3: all this as usual, to tell her you could have
Speaker 3: handled that a little differently, then.
Speaker 2: You should have told her yes.
Speaker 3: So he sits there drinking his beer while he listens
Speaker 3: to what he says are the sound of jet engines approaching,
Speaker 3: the kind of jet engines that LAPD used in their vehicles.
Speaker 3: Now we're going to meet two new characters. Two women
Speaker 3: are suddenly standing over his table at the bar. They're
Speaker 3: hitting poses like fashion models. They are both wearing skirt
Speaker 3: suits and wigs, one blonde wig, one a brunette wig.
Speaker 3: One of them in a long green trench coat, the
Speaker 3: other wearing black leather gloves. And again must emphasize the
Speaker 3: first time I saw this scene no idea who these
Speaker 3: characters are, and did not understand the conversation that followed.
Speaker 3: But these two women are Sam and Jared. Sam is
Speaker 3: the one in the blonde wig, and she starts caressing
Speaker 3: Alex's body and she's like, hmm, the cyber transplants have
Speaker 3: really taken to you. You'll be all machine soon. And
Speaker 3: I guess she likes that she wants him to be
Speaker 3: all machine. And the other woman, Jared, says shut up,
Speaker 3: Sam and sends her away, and then Jared, the other woman,
Speaker 3: tells Alex that somebody named Farnsworth needs him back online.
Speaker 3: Alex refuses, explaining that he is addicted to drugs, and
Speaker 3: he says, quote, nothing has been mine since I met you, Jared.
Speaker 3: And then she goes on a monologue and ends up
Speaker 3: saying you can't handle the job. You've lost the edge,
Speaker 3: become too emotional. And then he says, I can't feel
Speaker 3: anything anymore. You turned me into an efing machine. I
Speaker 3: don't know what's right or wrong. So but at the
Speaker 3: same time, like they're in this deep conversation, but I'm
Speaker 3: just like, who is who's the boss here? Who are they?
Speaker 2: I guess they used to like no what Jared is
Speaker 2: a former lover of his right yeah, and Sam and
Speaker 2: Jared both currently work for Farnsworth at the lapd and right,
Speaker 2: I think, because aren't they Yeah, I mean I could
Speaker 2: be wrong here, but I think they are. They arrived
Speaker 2: with the sound of the jets, like the lapd uses,
Speaker 2: and then they're saying, hey, Farnsworth wants you back, and
Speaker 2: he's like, I can't do it because drugs. Yeah, that's
Speaker 2: that's my best.
Speaker 3: Path, Alex says to Jared. He says, I cared about
Speaker 3: you once, which is like, huh, you know, the scene
Speaker 3: didn't feel like that up until there. And then Jared says,
Speaker 3: I'm synthetic, so oh, I guess she's a cyborg. And
Speaker 3: then Alex says, and I thought you were real, and
Speaker 3: then Jared says, I never said I wasn't.
Speaker 2: It's a little confusing, but there they also seem to
Speaker 2: be getting it, Like, you know, it's something a little
Speaker 2: deeper here about authenticity and being in this world where
Speaker 2: everything can be changed.
Speaker 3: Sure, but I feel like there is a rapidly shifting
Speaker 3: valance of what it means to be a cyborg. Does
Speaker 3: being a cyborg mean that you can no longer feel
Speaker 3: and you no longer know right from wrong? Because multiple
Speaker 3: characters have already said that at this point, or does
Speaker 3: it mean that you're the same as a human and
Speaker 3: you can still know right from wrong and you can
Speaker 3: still feel hm. I I don't know if the movie
Speaker 3: answers that. Also, while this conversation is going on, Sam,
Speaker 3: the lady in the blonde wig, is just pacing around
Speaker 3: in the background, like pretending to examine props in this
Speaker 3: dusty bar. But Jared says that her motives are pure.
Speaker 3: She says she is just part of the group that
Speaker 3: part of a group of people trying to make the
Speaker 3: world better. And then Alex says to her, what do
Speaker 3: you care about a better world? You're a cyborg but
Speaker 3: he's a cyborg. Yeah, And then he leaves the bar,
Speaker 3: but she gets the last word. At an empty table,
Speaker 3: she says, I live here too, okay, talking about the world,
Speaker 3: I guess. And then after Alex leaves Sam, Alex's dog
Speaker 3: is there, the husky, and Sam holds a hand out
Speaker 3: to Alex's dog. The dog bites her finger off arks
Speaker 3: shoot out of her hand. So I guess Sam's a
Speaker 3: cyborg too, and then off screen she shoots the dog. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, cute puppy did get to grow up, but now it's.
Speaker 3: A Jared says, you're too excessive, Sam, and I love
Speaker 3: the modifier too in that sentence, Like without it, the
Speaker 3: implication might be that she's the correct amount of excessive.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you're expected to be excessive. It's an excessive world,
Speaker 2: but don't be too excessive.
Speaker 3: Con there After, this is a moody shot of Alex
Speaker 3: and silhouette. He's standing against this pink orange sunset. He's
Speaker 3: at four percent body fat. He's digging a grave for
Speaker 3: his dog, and then he holds up across in the
Speaker 3: shadow as the grave marker. So is Alex Rain a
Speaker 3: Christian cyborg or maybe just culturally a Christian cyborg?
Speaker 2: He is a potential savior, a potential martyr. I don't know,
Speaker 2: but it feels aut you know, we're talking about what
Speaker 2: episode could we do to follow up the last Temptation
Speaker 2: of Christ. Clearly it is ordained that said this was
Speaker 2: the correct thing.
Speaker 3: I think it was Destiny. So later we cut to
Speaker 3: a shot of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio
Speaker 3: tells us we're now in Rio and it's one year later,
Speaker 3: and we panned down to the steamy industrial area with
Speaker 3: a bunch of smashed machinery all over the place, venting
Speaker 3: fog into the air, and Alex's voiceover says the next
Speaker 3: year was as grim as it gets. I slipped into
Speaker 3: the black market network that thrived in the new Rio Grid.
Speaker 3: I wanted to try my hand at smuggling, but I
Speaker 3: guess I didn't really have the knack for it. My deals,
Speaker 3: when I could get one, usually ended up with somebody
Speaker 3: getting dead. Not a good thing for staying in business.
Speaker 3: And then he goes on to say, just when I
Speaker 3: was about to give up on Brazil, I got word
Speaker 3: this morning that some hot shot Systems cowboy wanted to
Speaker 3: see me. So here we get a look at Alex,
Speaker 3: and once again he's different. He looks different. So he's
Speaker 3: got the trench coats unglasses, but trench coat and sunglasses,
Speaker 3: but now he has long hair, like glam rock hair like.
Speaker 3: He looks like he could be a drummer in a
Speaker 3: new wave band.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know. I This is another way that this
Speaker 2: film is kind of like feels like a video game experience,
Speaker 2: and the way that your player character may rapidly change
Speaker 2: their looks in between different chapters just because you're messing
Speaker 2: around with how they look and you're just spicing it up.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Also, it's kind of like a video game where you
Speaker 2: skip all the cutscenes so you know what's going on
Speaker 2: at times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you skip it so you don't So people are
Speaker 3: referencing characters where you literally you don't know if you're
Speaker 3: supposed to know who they are already or not. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sorry I held X on that one.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Alex has a meeting here with a guy
Speaker 3: named Marian, and this is Tom Matthews, the guy from
Speaker 3: a Return of the Living Dead. Didn't recognize him initially
Speaker 3: here because he's got long, stringy hair. His energy in
Speaker 3: this scene is Gary Busey with blackened teeth, and the
Speaker 3: conversation is also hard to follow, but I'll try to summarize.
Speaker 3: Marian tells Alex that he's getting a bad reputation with
Speaker 3: the Brazil triad. You really don't want that. And then
Speaker 3: Alex gets nervous and he pulls a gun and he says,
Speaker 3: where's the Japanese tech with the chip? And then Marion
Speaker 3: reassures him and talks him down, but then gets Alex
Speaker 3: with the old cyborg face ambush where Marian's face opens
Speaker 3: up and a laser gun pokes out from a crack
Speaker 3: between his nose and his eye and then blasts Alex.
Speaker 3: So I guess this guy was a cyborg too. Yeah.
Speaker 2: This effect is one of the ones that I was
Speaker 2: talking about where I felt like it looks really good,
Speaker 2: like they knew exactly what they could accomplish and it
Speaker 2: looks great.
Speaker 3: Yeah it is. It is funny when it happens because
Speaker 3: of the situation, but the effect looks really great. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Alex is lying on the ground damaged, and then
Speaker 3: Marian comes up to him and he's like, you know,
Speaker 3: no worries. LAPD wants you for an assignment, so they're
Speaker 3: going to patch you up. Goods new even better, so
Speaker 3: that human percentage decreasing everyone more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the same thing that happened earlier has now happened again.
Speaker 2: Somebody's gotten the better of him, shot him all up,
Speaker 2: and now he gets more cyborg parts.
Speaker 3: So Alex gets handed over to LAPD and he wakes
Speaker 3: up in a sort of outdoor dungeon cell in the
Speaker 3: desert somewhere, and he looks like Rambo. Now he's got
Speaker 3: Sylvester stallone hair from First Blood Part two, and we
Speaker 3: meet three new characters that we meet. Farnsworth played by
Speaker 3: Tim Thomerson. Here's Jack Death in a business suit and
Speaker 3: a long coat, a very square jaw. We meet Jermaine
Speaker 3: played by Nicholas Guest in a business suit in sunglasses
Speaker 3: German accent. We meet Merritt's played by Brian James in
Speaker 3: a business suit in sunglasses German accent. Farnsworth comes and
Speaker 3: looks in at Alex through the bars and he says
Speaker 3: he used to be one of my best hops. And
Speaker 3: the gist of the scene that follows is Farnsworth needs
Speaker 3: Alex to do one last job for him, just one
Speaker 3: more job, and he explains that what happened is Jared,
Speaker 3: Remember Jared and the Brune wig from the bar scene.
Speaker 3: Jared has stolen a data chip containing crucial information about
Speaker 3: an approaching summit between the President of the United States
Speaker 3: and the Prime Minister of Japan, who we learned from
Speaker 3: the back of the box. Now the United States and
Speaker 3: Japan are merged into one political and economic body. I
Speaker 3: don't think they say that in the movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't ask too many questions about how this actually works. Ye.
Speaker 3: For some reason, Jared is going to leak the leak
Speaker 3: data about this summit to a terrorist group known as
Speaker 3: the Red Army Hammerheads. Alex needs to find Jared within
Speaker 3: the next three days before she meets with the leader
Speaker 3: of the Red Army Hammerheads. And by the way, Alex,
Speaker 3: we have surgically implanted a bomb in your heart and
Speaker 3: it will explode if you don't succeed in your mission
Speaker 3: or if you try to defy us in any way.
Speaker 3: So he's going to have to fly to a city
Speaker 3: on the island of Java. The city is known as
Speaker 3: shang Lu with a So he's gonna have to go
Speaker 3: and go with the bomb in his heart and get
Speaker 3: things done.
Speaker 2: So obvious shades of Escape from New York here, But
Speaker 2: I like the way they did. And they have the
Speaker 2: little like the little lights on his flesh that show
Speaker 2: like how long he has until the bomb and in
Speaker 2: his heart goes off.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that's after the character the other Julian
Speaker 3: later decrypts the bomb.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she has a little patch that she gives him,
Speaker 2: the little tech patch that helps him out with this.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So both Merrits and Jermaine are these nasty Weasley characters.
Speaker 3: They're always acting suspicious and superior. Merits has I was saying,
Speaker 3: he has an accent like Doctor Strangelove. And Jermaine just
Speaker 3: makes non stop threats against Alex and also totally random
Speaker 3: racist comments about Japanese people, for which Alex calls him
Speaker 3: racist and then knocks him out cold. So alexid intolerating that,
Speaker 3: and then Farnsworth simply comments, you haven't lost your edge, Alex,
Speaker 3: so yeah, But then Alex tries to refuse the mission,
Speaker 3: but Farnsworth calls out, remember the bomb in your heart, Alex,
Speaker 3: and Alex is like, oh, yeah, the bomb in my heart.
Speaker 3: So I guess he's gonna go, and there are three
Speaker 3: days until his heart explodes, so Alex leaves in a helicopter.
Speaker 3: But then when he's not present, we see Farnsworth scheming
Speaker 3: with Germaine and we learn it's a double cross. They
Speaker 3: fed Alex a fake story about what happened with Jared,
Speaker 3: about what they want and why he's going. The truth
Speaker 3: is they need to find Jared and they think that
Speaker 3: he's the only one she trusts, so she'll come out
Speaker 3: of hiding when she sees him show up in town.
Speaker 3: So he heads off to Java with the tip that
Speaker 3: he's supposed to meet up with somebody named Julian, who
Speaker 3: can I don't know, I don't remember what the idea is. Anyway,
Speaker 3: here we transition to Shanglu and in this part of
Speaker 3: the movie it starts to have a feeling like Yo jimbo,
Speaker 3: or like a fistful of dollars, where a guy comes
Speaker 3: into a small town where the streets are empty. Violence
Speaker 3: is ready to erupt, and everybody sits around inside peeking
Speaker 3: out the windows at the new guy while he walks
Speaker 3: around in the streets.
Speaker 2: And these streets are everything in Shanglo is definitely Big Island,
Speaker 2: and the street you know, everything's lid and shot for
Speaker 2: effect here and to look cyberpunky. But yeah, these are
Speaker 2: just like the streets still look like this in various
Speaker 2: towns on the Big Island, and yeah, these are great locations.
Speaker 3: Once again, Olivia Grenaire has a different look. You've got
Speaker 3: a different haircut, different clothes here. While walking around on
Speaker 3: the streets, he is repeatedly attacked by gangs of big
Speaker 3: men who I'm sorry to stereotype, but they do not
Speaker 3: look dressed for crime or for the tropical climate. It's
Speaker 3: like he's being jumped by a bunch of guys who
Speaker 3: work for the Rand Corporation. They're all just like or
Speaker 3: pleated khakis and tucked in shirts with belts, but also
Speaker 3: black leather gloves, and so they attack him, but Alex
Speaker 3: easily beats them up, and after he knocks them all out,
Speaker 3: he says to no One in particular undercover, and then
Speaker 3: Alex walks away, and then all of the guys stand
Speaker 3: up at the same time without comment or expression. So
Speaker 3: I think these guys might be cyborgs. And one of
Speaker 3: them is Finoli Thorson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think we even mentioned him
Speaker 2: in our cast. But of course this is longtime co
Speaker 2: star of Arnold. Pops up in a number of Arnold
Speaker 2: films and sometimes in some very very fun roles, sometimes
Speaker 2: very forgettable little roles like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's in like the Conan movies and stuff, and
Speaker 3: he he.
Speaker 2: Has a memorable he's one of the underlings of Thulsa
Speaker 2: Doom I think so.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But he also has a memorable turn as the
Speaker 3: main villain of a very funny B movie called Abraxas
Speaker 3: starring Jesse Ventura. Yeah you have seen this. Yeah, he
Speaker 3: plays the villain named Secundas, who is often referenced by
Speaker 3: Jesse Ventura in sudden lines where he just turns to
Speaker 3: someone and says, I must locate secundas. But anyway, in
Speaker 3: this segment of the movie, we also see a character
Speaker 3: who will become major in the second half of the movie.
Speaker 3: This is Max Impact. Max spends a long time just
Speaker 3: tailing Alex around town and keeping an eye on him.
Speaker 3: She has a weird, nervous bird like energy, often cocking
Speaker 3: and bobbing her head like a chicken. Yeah yeah. And also,
Speaker 3: we're gonna just keep meeting new characters. They're just piling
Speaker 3: the characters on. We meet Julian played by Deborah Shelton
Speaker 3: and Billy Moon played by Thomas Jane. They like to
Speaker 3: stand around naked and disgustingly sweaty and peep out the window.
Speaker 3: The camera is very interested in both of their butts
Speaker 3: and in their sweat, where it's just showing the dripping
Speaker 3: with sweat.
Speaker 2: High level of sexual humidity in this room without a doubt.
Speaker 3: But also this makes all of the bad guys in
Speaker 3: the suits and the pleated khakis especially funny. By contrast,
Speaker 3: I guess just because like it's well, I don't know,
Speaker 3: maybe you're saying like it's just the heat of the
Speaker 3: passion that's making them this sweaty, But I was thinking
Speaker 3: it's supposed to be the weather.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it's the passion. I don't think
Speaker 2: these two have been setting around talking about politics the
Speaker 2: whole time.
Speaker 3: So plot wise, I truly cannot explain the full deal
Speaker 3: with Julian and Billy Moon. Even now I've seen it
Speaker 3: twice and made notes, and I still don't understand what's
Speaker 3: going on with them. They're involved in some kind of
Speaker 3: setup or trap for the hero because Farnsworth and the
Speaker 3: German creeps are scheming about this. We hear them scheming
Speaker 3: about it. But what is the nature of the trap?
Speaker 2: Well uncertain, Okay, at least in my viewing. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: you know, it is a very distracting scene because again,
Speaker 2: these are these two people are naked the entire time,
Speaker 2: so you'd be forgiven to sort of maybe lose the
Speaker 2: thread of the conversation given what's visually going on here.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and they're naked, and we see on Billy
Speaker 3: Moon's army as a tattoo on his arm that says
Speaker 3: Billy Moon I love Yeah exactly. It's like a name tag,
Speaker 3: but only if you're naked. So Billy Moon does not
Speaker 3: last long in this movie. He just stands there naked
Speaker 3: for a long time. The camera gets these angles on
Speaker 3: his butt cheeks, and then finally Vincent Kleines shows up,
Speaker 3: comes into the room and kills him. So, as we
Speaker 3: said earlier, Billy Moon never leaves the hotel room where
Speaker 3: we meet him.
Speaker 2: Now, Julian beats up Billy Moon a bit here, and
Speaker 2: apparently Deborah Shelton really did sort of rough up Thomas
Speaker 2: Jane a little bit. Oh no, and then it's fine,
Speaker 2: It's fine. Maybe even helped him out and helped him
Speaker 2: have a little more rugged good looks.
Speaker 3: You know. Deborah Shelton is one of the actors that
Speaker 3: I saw an interview with from behind the scenes, and
Speaker 3: seemed to me that she was taking her role in
Speaker 3: this film and the themes of the film quite seriously. She
Speaker 3: was like, it is an interesting movie that has something
Speaker 3: to say about humanity, and so I'm all, I'm invested
Speaker 3: in this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think she also did like some sort
Speaker 2: of crazy workout regime to make sure that she was
Speaker 2: trying off for this. Yeah, she's buffing intimidating here.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So Alex checks into the hotel where Julian is
Speaker 3: staying and he meets another character named Yoshirohan. He's the
Speaker 3: guy who runs the hotel desk. This guy puts on
Speaker 3: an act first like at first, like he's just a
Speaker 3: hapless employee. He later turns out to be a serious
Speaker 3: Red Army Hammerheads operator. So again, basically everybody in the
Speaker 3: movie either turns out to be a cyborg or a
Speaker 3: Red Army Hammerhead. And then Alex he goes checks into
Speaker 3: his room. He starts to prepare one of his painkiller injections,
Speaker 3: so he's about to speed load. Uh oh, you know
Speaker 3: what that means. But then he thinks better of it
Speaker 3: and he smashes it on the floor. So it seems
Speaker 3: like he's going to quit the drugs, and he says
Speaker 3: to himself, no more of their drugs. If Farnsworth is
Speaker 3: going to kill me tomorrow. I want to be clear.
Speaker 3: I hope Jared really hurts Lapd. I really do. She
Speaker 3: can sell her data to the dogs for all I care.
Speaker 2: Damn all right, but taking a stand against something for reasons.
Speaker 3: Okay, So we still have not met all the characters
Speaker 3: that are around to me. We got to meet Angie
Speaker 3: Live played by Kerrie Hiroyuki Tagawa, first presented as some
Speaker 3: kind of gangster or crime boss. Later becomes clear he's
Speaker 3: a Red Army Hammerhead. He's all swagger and sneer. He
Speaker 3: speaks with this strange, interesting, synthetic future accent. He says, bra,
Speaker 3: yeah constantly, Bra. So Angie and a bunch of henchmen
Speaker 3: and sunglasses go up to Alex's room. They beat him
Speaker 3: up and interrogate him, and he says, make it easy
Speaker 3: on yourself, Bra, I can find a place on you
Speaker 3: that's still human, where you can still feel something, bra,
Speaker 3: and then he just knees him and crotch found. Angie
Speaker 3: says that the Hammerheads are freedom fighters, were not terrorists,
Speaker 3: were freedom fighters against information systems, and that the taunting
Speaker 3: and the sneering continues until Alex reveals that he has
Speaker 3: a bomb inside his heart, and this freaks out Angie
Speaker 3: and his dudes. They get spooked and they leave, but
Speaker 3: before he leaves, Angie stops to ask Alex how he
Speaker 3: feels about becoming less and less human one surgery at
Speaker 3: a time, and Alex says he never had a choice.
Speaker 3: So next we get the meeting between Alex and Julian,
Speaker 3: so Julian takes her henchman Michelle again. This is Vincent
Speaker 3: Kleine to Alex's room. Michelle attacks Alex in the shower,
Speaker 3: so here's their nude fight scene mentioned in the themes
Speaker 3: list here. But Alex shoots Michelle in the bathroom and
Speaker 3: sparks fly, so it turns out he was a cyborg,
Speaker 3: and Alex comes out of the shower naked. Julian explains
Speaker 3: that she needs to do a surgery on his cyber
Speaker 3: eye to remove a surveillance device implanted by Farnsworth. Obviously,
Speaker 3: the ensuing eye surgery scene is inspired by Terminator with
Speaker 3: the self eye surgery scene in that, but it is
Speaker 3: I think this is truly gross and unique, like it's
Speaker 3: very good, like they put She's got a suction cup
Speaker 3: that she puts on his eyeball, yanks his eyeball out
Speaker 3: on this big stalk it's a metal robot stalk for
Speaker 3: the eye, and just stands there working on it while
Speaker 3: Alex is like uh, and then eventually puts it back in.
Speaker 3: She also does a kind of digital hacking surgery on
Speaker 3: the bomb in Alex's heart, which is going to mean basically,
Speaker 3: it means the bad guys cannot blow up the bomb
Speaker 3: in his heart without decrypting her code first. And so
Speaker 3: he's got four lights under his skin. When all four
Speaker 3: lights go out, it will be decrypted and they can
Speaker 3: blow him up. Okay, now, as we're getting into the
Speaker 3: back half of the film, I feel like we need
Speaker 3: to be more summary here in our discussion. So I'm
Speaker 3: just going to try to do my best to This
Speaker 3: is again not in the order that the information is
Speaker 3: actually revealed, but I'm just going to try to put
Speaker 3: all together what we eventually learned is going on. Julian
Speaker 3: explains that Jared remember her, Yeah, his former lover Slash,
Speaker 3: the cyborg who's kind of his boss from Baha. She
Speaker 3: her body was destroyed while she was trying to escape La,
Speaker 3: but her mind and soul were uploaded to a data
Speaker 3: chip which Julian has in her hand, and she gives
Speaker 3: the chip to Alex. Julian gives Alex his mission. He's
Speaker 3: got to take the Jared chip to the Red Army Hammerheads,
Speaker 3: who were just in the room a few minutes ago,
Speaker 3: so missed opportunity there. He's got to take the chip
Speaker 3: to them at a meeting on top of the volcano
Speaker 3: at sundown. For some reason, this will stop Farnsworth. But
Speaker 3: wait a minute, what is Farnsworth doing that needs to
Speaker 3: be stopped. Even on the second watch notes, I was
Speaker 3: a little confused about this, but I think eventually they explain.
Speaker 3: Jared figured out that cyborgs have figured out a way
Speaker 3: to make copies of powerful human beings, and they are
Speaker 3: one by one replacing powerful humans in the world with
Speaker 3: cyborg copies for the eventual goal of taking over the
Speaker 3: world for the machines and destroying humankind.
Speaker 2: Okay, and this is going to have a direct influence
Speaker 2: on a character that we've seen a lot of so far,
Speaker 2: but apparently never really understand who. They've understood who they
Speaker 2: were right.
Speaker 3: So it turns out the Farnsworth we've met in the
Speaker 3: movie Jack Death Tim Thomerson is not really Farnsworth. He
Speaker 3: is a cyborg cloned copy of the original human Farnsworth
Speaker 3: who I think we never meet in the film, who
Speaker 3: was created by it seems Sam, remember the cyborg lady
Speaker 3: with the blonde wig in the earlier scene, the one
Speaker 3: who was sexually harassing Alex. She's like, ooh, I like
Speaker 3: your augments.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So Sam is now Sam consciousness is in a
Speaker 2: cybernetic Farnsworth. And interestingly enough, this character and like the
Speaker 2: IMDb credits is credited as Sam Farnsworth, So I guess
Speaker 2: you could think of Sam Farnsworth as sort of like
Speaker 2: the combination of Farnsworth's in Sam. Yeah, that's where we are.
Speaker 3: So this exposition dump with Julian turns into an insane
Speaker 3: gunfight where Farnsworth merits. Remember the German guy. A bunch
Speaker 3: of other beefy cyborg hinchmen and sunglasses with these comically
Speaker 3: huge guns start blasting their way into the hotel room.
Speaker 3: They're literally cutting doorways into the wall with bullets, and
Speaker 3: Alex escapes the room by cutting a hole in the
Speaker 3: floor with bullets and falling through multiple levels of the hotel,
Speaker 3: cutting holes as he goes by shooting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is absolutely bonkers. There's just so much machine
Speaker 2: gun fire, just blistering action. It's just unreal. I was
Speaker 2: really impressed, entertained.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, Julian covers Alex's escape, so she she and the
Speaker 3: cyborgs just kind of stand there shooting each other like
Speaker 3: thousands of times, like the scene in RoboCop with Ed
Speaker 3: two nine. But if we didn't establish this already, Julian
Speaker 3: is a cyborg too. After the fight, she's kind of
Speaker 3: all blown up and all her motor parts are all
Speaker 3: over the place. And then Farnsworth comes in and kneels
Speaker 3: over Julian and pokes her eyes out with his fingers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, kind of like doesn't rea like he gets information
Speaker 2: from doing it too or something.
Speaker 3: He's trying to Apparently, how cyborgs get information from each
Speaker 3: other is poke their eyes out to download the data.
Speaker 3: But then it's discovered that she already wiped her memory banks,
Speaker 3: so there's nothing left to get and he goes He's like, oh,
Speaker 3: very good, smart move. You know you wiped it before
Speaker 3: I got it. Julian says, you always were an extremist, Sam,
Speaker 3: so she's talking to him as Sam. And then Farnsworth says,
Speaker 3: you're a cyborg and then Julian says killing all the
Speaker 3: humans isn't going to make you more real, and Farnsworth says,
Speaker 3: I am real, okay. So then Farnsworth destroys her memory
Speaker 3: banks and then he tells Merits. He says to him,
Speaker 3: Alex Rain will be destroyed somehow, some way. He's human
Speaker 3: after all. But I was like, wait a minute, he's human.
Speaker 3: I thought he was a cyborg. They're making a big
Speaker 3: deal about how he's a cyborg. There is some distinction
Speaker 3: in this movie that is obviously crucial to the meaning
Speaker 3: of the story that is not coming through about some
Speaker 3: difference like cyborgs as either fundamentally machines or robots with
Speaker 3: human tissue and human appearance, versus a different kind of
Speaker 3: cyborg that is fundamentally a human with machine augmentations. Both
Speaker 3: seem to exist in the movie, and they're both called cyborgs,
Speaker 3: but they're not really differentiated, except we're supposed to understand
Speaker 3: that there is a big difference between them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Plus, it does seem like it's more of a
Speaker 2: linear spectrum going on here, Like everybody is probably to
Speaker 2: some degree cybernetic. It's just how cybernetic are you?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Anyway, Like on one on one hand, it's confusingly
Speaker 3: rendered in the story. On the other hand, I find
Speaker 3: it kind of interesting. It's like something is like stimulating
Speaker 3: my brain with the themes here. Yeah, something about this like
Speaker 3: linear spectrum of a linear spectrum of cybernicity where characters
Speaker 3: are arguing about who's over what kind of line on
Speaker 3: the spectrum.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So anyway, from here, the movie is largely a string
Speaker 3: of chase and action scenes just kind of racing to
Speaker 3: the conclusion. There's one part where Alex plugs the Jared
Speaker 3: data chip into this handheld computer and talks to he's
Speaker 3: got an iPhone, Yeah, and she's talking about the cyborg
Speaker 3: double cross. Jared is talking about Sam and she says
Speaker 3: she was retro cloned into a perfect cell or cell
Speaker 3: duplicate of Farnsworth. But if it's a clone, wouldn't that
Speaker 3: be organic not not a machine? Right?
Speaker 2: And we're gonna say this is.
Speaker 3: Sam. She says, Sam intends to replace humans with cyborgs.
Speaker 3: Sam has to be stopped before she starts a war
Speaker 3: between humans and cyborgs. The question comes up, why is
Speaker 3: Jared helping? Because she's because what Sam is doing is wrong.
Speaker 3: Isn't that enough? So even though Jared is a cyborg,
Speaker 3: she knows right from wrong, something that multiple characters say
Speaker 3: in the movie cyborgs are incapable of. And then Jared says,
Speaker 3: for what it's worth, Alex, I loved you, and Alex
Speaker 3: makes a dismissive comment. He's like, yeah, terrific cyborg love.
Speaker 3: But then she says it takes more than flesh and
Speaker 3: blood to be human, Alex, and then Alex just gets
Speaker 3: into a bunch more gun fights with cyborgs. Oh, there's
Speaker 3: this great scene where a little old lady is being
Speaker 3: harassed by spin Ole Thorson as a cyborg, and she
Speaker 3: pulls out a forty five and blasts him and then
Speaker 3: just walks away swearing about cyborgs.
Speaker 2: Just for comedic effect, just kind of out of nowhere.
Speaker 3: The main thing that has to happen after this is
Speaker 3: Alex has to get this Jared data chip to the
Speaker 3: Red Army Hammerheads guy. Before sundown, there are a bunch
Speaker 3: of action scenes Alex fights. Remember that guy from Rio Marion,
Speaker 3: the Tom Matthews guy with the gun inside his face.
Speaker 3: They fight again while going down a water slide that's
Speaker 3: covered in mud.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like one of these rolling slides that you'll
Speaker 2: see at like fall festivals that people will ride down
Speaker 2: in potato sacks, except this one's covered with mud. And
Speaker 2: yet the way I'm describing it, it might make it
Speaker 2: seem like it looks fake, but it doesn't. Like it
Speaker 2: feels entirely. I don't know, it just works. It's just
Speaker 2: a crazy action sequence with a crazy slide.
Speaker 3: I loved this action scene. I was like cheering in
Speaker 3: the middle of it. Alex and the wins in this
Speaker 3: fight by smashing Marion's face on an overhead object as
Speaker 3: they're sliding beneath it. He still but it's like the
Speaker 3: end of Speed with Dennis Hopper, you know. So Alex
Speaker 3: ends up being both attacked and assisted by a guide
Speaker 3: by Max Impact, the lady we met earlier. It turns
Speaker 3: out she is the sister of Rosaria, the terrorists that
Speaker 3: he killed in Baja. She wants revenge against Alex. Instead,
Speaker 3: she takes him to Angie again. That's Kerrie Hiroyuki Takawa,
Speaker 3: who is revealed to be the Red Army Hammerhead leader.
Speaker 3: But while they're negotiating what's going on, there's an ambush
Speaker 3: by the cyborgs. So just fighting all across Hawaii, Farnsworth,
Speaker 3: Farnsworth's bad guys, Ill Angie and the other Hammerheads, and
Speaker 3: the fighting and chasing continues. They go through like they
Speaker 3: go down a zip line at one point, and then
Speaker 3: they're fighting in the forest. Max and Allex diving as well,
Speaker 3: I believe, Yes, some beautiful locations with like waterfalls and
Speaker 3: the volcanic rocks and streams cutting through them, and beautiful locations.
Speaker 3: At one point, either Max or Alex I don't remember
Speaker 3: which one shoots Farnsworth with a rocket, so it seems okay,
Speaker 3: he's done for he's been killed, but uh oh, Farnsworth
Speaker 3: is a terminator indoskeleton underneath, so he just turns into
Speaker 3: a stop motion terminator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, this is maybe an effect that
Speaker 2: isn't as great as you might want it to be,
Speaker 2: but I don't know. I still love stop motion effects,
Speaker 2: even when there may be a little crunchy, and so
Speaker 2: this is still fine as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 3: It doesn't look realistic, but I like it. I like
Speaker 3: the way it looks, so so yeah, he's now chasing
Speaker 3: them as a term indoskeleton. Max and Alex meet up
Speaker 3: with Yoshirohan remember him from earlier, the other Red Army Hammerhead.
Speaker 3: They meet him on I think, on top of the
Speaker 3: volcano to escape in this futuristic jet plane, but the
Speaker 3: terminator Farnsworth grabs on for a ride. Rob can you
Speaker 3: describe this fight scene?
Speaker 2: Oh? I mean, it's everything you'd want it to be.
Speaker 2: It is a stop motion fight sequence between the in
Speaker 2: the indoskeleton and Alex, with both Alex and the endoskeleton
Speaker 2: rendered in stop motion, you know, like a little little
Speaker 2: stop motion puppets. So yeah, it doesn't really feel real
Speaker 2: but looks amazing in its own way. They're fighting on
Speaker 2: the back of like kind of like the the opening,
Speaker 2: like the rear opening of this hovercraft or whatever it is.
Speaker 2: And but they're also getting in some like final back
Speaker 2: and forth jabs about what it means to be human
Speaker 2: and who owns what parts and so forth. And I
Speaker 2: think that that basically comes down to how he frees himself,
Speaker 2: Like he's like something about like you know, you belong
Speaker 2: to us, and he's like, well, here you can have it,
Speaker 2: and it's not. His arm detaches, and so Farnsworth indoskeleton
Speaker 2: with his side with Alex. The cybernetic arm plummets and
Speaker 2: explodes in the volcano, or explodes in the way into
Speaker 2: the volcano.
Speaker 3: Is dropped into a volcano and explodes. Amazing quality cut, wonderful, excellent.
Speaker 3: So after this there is a sort of a coda
Speaker 3: where they meet up with Jackie Earl Haley, the playing
Speaker 3: character named Einstein at some red Army Hammerhead lab I
Speaker 3: think they say in the Marshall Islands maybe. So whatever
Speaker 3: the mission was, it is accomplished. It is accomplished. To
Speaker 3: quote the last temptation of Christ though somehow the mission
Speaker 3: requires the digital death of Jared, so the Jared computer
Speaker 3: program data has to be erased, which will mean she
Speaker 3: ceases to exist. And then after this there is a
Speaker 3: there is sort of a coda coda where Alex and
Speaker 3: now Max are working together and I think what they're
Speaker 3: doing is they're going back to LA and they're like
Speaker 3: tracking down and killing all of the cyborgs that have
Speaker 3: copied people and infiltrated whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're having like taking a smoke break in the
Speaker 2: pouring rain, yes, very soaked.
Speaker 3: Very Yeah. There is a scene where remember Germaine, the
Speaker 3: guy the like the sniveling German accent guy who was
Speaker 3: making racist comments earlier. Well, Alex shows up on the
Speaker 3: roof of the L A p. D Building and shoots
Speaker 3: him in the crotch. Yuh so that guy's that that.
Speaker 3: I guess he was a cyborg too, so done with him? Uh.
Speaker 3: And then after this, oh yeah, the very ending is
Speaker 3: Max and Alex they're like, Okay, we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 3: do it all. We're gonna work together, and Max is like,
Speaker 3: how are we going to get your your body through
Speaker 3: airport security? Now that you're a cyborg and you have
Speaker 3: all this you know, metal in you, and he says
Speaker 3: piece by piece Max. That doesn't answer the question. Yeah,
Speaker 3: peace would trigger security. Yeah, but seriously, how are we
Speaker 3: going to do it?
Speaker 2: I don't know. So there are apparently a few different
Speaker 2: endings out there for this film. The one I got
Speaker 2: on the version that I streamed, features the endoskeleton battle,
Speaker 2: which we already described, and then this bit of dialogue
Speaker 2: where we hear I think Farnsworth or somebody talking to
Speaker 2: Farnsworth saying should we take them out now, like somebody
Speaker 2: that's following Max and Alex. But then other versions shuffle
Speaker 2: things around. I think other versions don't have the endoskeleton battle,
Speaker 2: so like don't establish the ultimate demise of Farnsworth. Or
Speaker 2: then there's versions that have the endo skeleton battle but
Speaker 2: don't have to should we take them out now? And
Speaker 2: in some versions we actually seen see Farnsworth at the
Speaker 2: end saying should we take them out now? Or someone
Speaker 2: telling him that. So I don't know. I guess you
Speaker 2: can sort of pick and choose how you want it.
Speaker 2: But I think the the intended vision here is that,
Speaker 2: of course the battle is not over a sequel of
Speaker 2: some sort might be required. The threat has not been eradicated.
Speaker 3: Well, I say boo to any version that does not
Speaker 3: end with them dropping Jack death into a volcano.
Speaker 2: Exactly like, why did you got a film at Volcano
Speaker 2: National Park if you weren't going to do this? You know,
Speaker 2: I hate to see stop motion effects go to waste,
Speaker 2: so absolutely include that.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, this episode has run very long, but obviously
Speaker 3: we had a lot to say about Albert Pune's Nemesis.
Speaker 2: Bravo. Yes, I loved it. Yeah, absolutely entertaining this. I
Speaker 2: highly recommend this one, whether you're intending to give it
Speaker 2: a very attentive viewing or you just need some just
Speaker 2: absolute delirious action to take place in the background. Either
Speaker 2: way you want to experience, Nemesis is completely valid. It's
Speaker 2: a wild ride.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 2: We're going to go and close it out here, but
Speaker 2: we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Do you
Speaker 2: have memories of Nemesis or other Albert punefilms from the
Speaker 2: past right in We would love to hear from you.
Speaker 2: Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow your Mind is
Speaker 2: primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on
Speaker 2: Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays we set aside most
Speaker 2: serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Speaker 2: Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: If you're on.
Speaker 2: Letterbox dot com, look us up. We're on lighterbox We're
Speaker 2: Weird House, and you can follow our episodes there. We
Speaker 2: have a nice list of all the movies we've covered
Speaker 2: over the years, and sometimes a peek ahead of what
Speaker 2: comes up next.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
Speaker 3: you can email us at contact stuff to Blow your
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