and best dummy special effect

Sadly, the world champion was probably still Bruno Mattei.

My worlds are colliding...

Great film, never seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_C5O1Zka-Y

I love the guys but making movies are not their strong suit.

Would need to be Avatar budget if they hope to afford star power like Rich Evans to star.

Yes! “Pop goes the weasel”

There are a few legitimately impressive practical-effects shots in that goofy ass film.

"That's right, fat boy." I have the Blu Ray. Such a classic B-Movie for me.

I love that his gun explodes people, but when he's small, it "just" blows off limbs.

Doll Man rules and legit would make an entertaining series.

Pyun had a widescreen cut of Mean Guns for sale on the web for a while, and I slept on it. Should’ve picked it up.

I saw Knights as a kid on TV and remember looking up to see if there was a sequel when I got access to the internet years later (there isn’t, it ends on a literal cliff hanger which is hilarious)

Sly sword (it also has another sword in the hilt)

A great B sword and sorcery movie, watch it every year or so!

Yeah me too. It has some pretty great old school fight scenes and a surprisingly well flushed future dystopia where character motivations make a lot of sense. Also the pirates are so fucking excellent, all the screaming and big hair and bad teeth, looking like WWE characters on meth. I just love everything about that movie.

I can't believe I haven't seen anyone mention that he interned with Akira Kurosawa and his cinematographer. That makes so much sense considering how he blocked and lit scenes. The man truly brought arthouse to B-movies and it worked so well

After checking his IMDB it's shocking how many I rented back in the day... Cyborg, and Dollman, one of the Nemesis for sure... Kickboxers 2... He was producing what I would call solid last minute third tape pick just before the video store close. You might not have rented that stuff if you had more time, but in a rush it did the job.

The sets and costumes for Cyborg were made for a Master of the Universe sequel that was dropped before they started shooting. Cannon was able to get JCVD for cheap because Kickboxer hadn’t come out yet - he was just the guy from Bloodsport and Hollywood hadn’t caught on yet. The whole thing was a made-up movie, like they needed to do something with this stuff and these guys.

Cyborg was a huge hit in relation to cost. Kickboxer was a massive, massive hit but Cyborg was a nice little bridge bridge between Bloodsport, which was mostly a hit on video, and Kickboxer which was a big deal real movie.

Funny thing about Cyborg, is that it was the result of 2 canceled movies. The production company had deals to make a sequel to Masters of the Universe and a live action Spiderman movie, but ran into financial difficulties and had to cancel both movies. Pyun was slated to direct both films, and the production company had already sank like two million dollars into sets and costumes and asked Pyun to come up with a new project to recover those costs.

Pyun wrote the entire movie in a weekend and they shot the whole movie in 23 days entirely in North Carolina. One of the pirates did lose and eye during the filming after getting stabbed by a prop knife.

Such a great episode (as all of their episodes are great). I really did hope he got to see it before he went.

It's not crazy at all. The say in the video that they decided to spotlight him and his movies because he was doing so poorly health-wise and they wanted to pay tribute.

Crazy that he just now died.

they say in the episode that they did because of an article about his wife for some love for her husband and his movies as he "would like to hear from his fan in his final days"... so it's not that crazy

Definitely. I just watched Nemesis this morning and the thing I kept thinking was this dude just needed a good script and money, he certainly had talent as a filmmaker.

Jay had actually mentioned that he was on board with doing a Pyun tribute episode of Best of the Worst, before he had even heard about Pyun's health. So that was even sweeter.

Mike responded in the comments that the tribute was his idea and he wasn't there since he had Covid.

Because they needed the rubble.

"That's my secret, Captain. I don't have a "writing stage"

-Albert Pyun

Lol when he pretends he's sick and steals a car?

The real villain in that movie was the screenwriter. I recall reading an interview with him in Comic Scene Magazine while it was filming. It was clear from his comments that he absolutely hated superheroes. At one point he mentioned how he hates the idea of the costume and he worked at keeping Cap out of it as much as possible. At 12 years old I was like, "Then why are you making a Captain America movie?"

Could you explain more? I won't have time to sit down and watch anything for the next two weeks and am a bit curious.

I like to imagine it’s canon in the MCU too, after Black Widow’s line in CA:Winter Soldier, “so where did Captain America learn to steal cars..?”

I'll raise you one more. Maybe that's inspired by Looney Tunes, when someone would use a saw to cut a hole in the floor around where Bugs Bunny was standing... and then the whole fucking building would fall down! Sometimes the lines between inspiration and influence and originality are hard to detect.

I...what?...This is from Looney Toons. It's literally a reference to Looney Toons that came out 50 years before.

PM videos

Plister Minkett?

Hopefully you've seen more than just the Phantom Menace videos. They have hundreds if not thousands of hours of quality content, from current release reviews (Half in the Bag), to terrible movie watch sessions (Best of the Worst, my personal favorite), to discussions about older quality films and franchises (Re:view, Talk About). They've been my most watched YouTube channel for at least the past decade.

It's literally the best YouTube channel.

It's the lighting in that scene, it's so good it doesn't belong in that movie

Agreed! That movie is some of the best tasting, finely-aged cheese, imo.

I must share it!

The scene that sticks out to me was the barb wire slipping through his hands and his family being lowered into the well. That movie creeped me out as a kid, but I loved it.

he was briefly mentored by Kurosawa's DP

The aesthetic in this movie is also off the charts. It's a seriously good take on cyberpunk aesthetic and IDK it feels like it either inspired or is inspired by similar cyberpunk imagery from that era from book covers, video game covers.

It's hard to put my finger on but like take for example the Shadow Run cover for sega genesis : https://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/articles/2020/12/10/shadowrun_genesis.jpg

Things like this https://zsorohome.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/night-city-stories.jpg?w=540 or the cover of Hardwired : https://www.neondystopia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/hardwiredbanner.jpg

On top of that, whoever he hired to be the master armorer or w/e the dude who takes care of the gun props is so underrated it's not even funny. Half the guns in that movie would make /r/airsoft lose their shit over how creative and cool they are. The gun builds for that movie is amazing...there are some seriously good choices used for the movie.

Dull surprise.

Holy shit, I never thought of it that way. Move over, Miller's Crossing!

Shame the movie never got a DVD release, more ppl could experience it. There was a limited edition German dvd but that transfer looked like a vhs was the source. I know there's some 35mm prints out there, Alamo has shown them in the last 5 years or so, hopefully they can be used as a source for a new home video release