Beyond the walls of sleep…beyond the dry, dusty montains of Arizona…deep in the cobweb/dustbunny jungles that invest your local video store…there, puny mortal, you shall bow before the great God Pyun and fall to your knees in terror.

Or, you know, something like that.

Seriously, though: I dreaded this movie. As I dread cancer (he said, lighting a cigarette), mall cops and the IRS. My first foray into the Land of Albert left me cold as a well diggers ass. The ludicrous action sequences, the shoddy dialogue, the fiery explosions, the Tim Thomerson…how, with all that, could a movie still be a complete waste of my time? That’s some kind of talent, right there; a malignant, ugly kind of talent that sent my spider-sense right into the red. Damned if I were to stick my head into the lion’s mouth again without a good reason.

Then came this roundtable. And there went my bravado. The words were out of my hands before my mind could stop them. “Dibs on Nemesis 2,” I cried…as if this movie were of any importance. As if any self-respecting critic would beat me to the punch.

And yet, I survive. My name is Dr. Psy Chosis and I have a story.

Given this picture’s writer/director, the story isn’t much…but you’ll see that shortly.

After some choice shots of cybernetic carnage (which amount to absolutely nothing, thank you very much) we come upon the year 2077. The three-year Cyborg-Human war has draw to its inevitable conclusion, with the human race enslaved under the cyborg’s tyrannical booties. In a last ditch effort for the future, a rouge scientist genetically engineers a “DNA Human,” the fabled ubermench (or rather, uberfrauh?), and appoints a gun-toting refugee named…something or other…to carry Our Last Hope to term.

Of course, the cyborg mucky-mucks are none to happy with this, and engage their trusty bounty hunters…both of them. Mother Mary quickly evades her augmented assassins with the help of a big gun and a time machine, seemingly lying forgotten in the rubble of Los Angeles. She crash lands in 1988…in “East Africa,” no less…and is quickly slain by one side in the unnamed country’s on going Civil War. Welcome to the twentieth century.

Lucky for us (*cough, cough*), her daughter, the DNA Child Alex, gets a nick-of-time rescue from the other side of the War. True to Tarzan form, Alex grows to womanhood in the wilds with all the skill and skimpy costuming this entails.

For twenty years, everything is fine and dandy. For a white girl in the middle of “East Africa,” Alex (now played by professional bodybuilder Sue Price), seems to have it okay. There’s the obligatory spat with a member of her tribe who’s not so hot on the whole “gender equality” gig…but (in true Pyun style) a few punches to the jaw put him in his place. Her test of Womanhood complete, enlightened male Juna (Earl White), takes her back to mom’s old time machine and explains what happened That Day.* Alex is non-committal (also in true Pyun style)…though the futuristic knife she finds inside the craft seems to help with the convincing.

And, just to drive the point home, a second machine crashes in the desert, disgorging Nebula (Chad Stahelski, voiced by Michael Halsey) a seven-foot, laser toting assassin from the future, come to kill the savior in our present past before she can fulfill her destiny, end the War, and bring freedom to her people.

Whoa. Deja-vu.

It’s not long before Nebula is cutting a swath of destruction across the Serengeti, blasting anyone and everyone that happens to blunder into range. As time traveling cyborgs go, he’s not exactly low-key. I don’t need to remind you all of the above is nothing but an excuse for numerous action set pieces. Gotta give the people what they want, by-God…as long as they hunger for an endless parade of violence.

There are plenty of things wrong with this movie. For one thing, if these cyborgs are so damn dangerous, why does it take them twenty years to locate Alex? And, once they do, what’s to stop Nebula from hop-skip-and-jumping its way back to the exact moment Alex landed? C’mon, you guys have time machines, for God sake. Better to kill the Savior when she’s a helpless infant than wait around twenty years for her to become a body builder. And now that I think about it, wouldn’t the strategic removal of Alex mother in the recent past put an end to all this? How about the uppity doctor who engineered Alex in the first place? What possible threat does she pose to Cyborg Rule, orphaned and oblivious as she is? Won’t she be pushing ninety by the time the cyborgs come to power anyway?

You’re not supposed to think about that. In fact, this movie demands that you do not think at all during the course of its running time. It’s like one of those anti-thought bombs the DC supervillains were always coming up with in the sixties. You know, the one’s that were supposed blank people minds?

So all your zombie friends are going to like this movie just fine. Hopefully, your taste is somewhat more refined. Hopefully you prefer movies with substance, something to move you and make them stick in your mind.Nemesis 2 has none of that. And yet it has two sequels…which I’m sure I’ll get to, some day.

Pyun once again casts his characters to the wind, forcing them to endure trauma upon trauma with nary a second to breath, much less internalize any of this and grow as people. Pyun doesn’t give two fucks for people. Here we have a director who cut his teeth on the overblown gun-fests of the 80s, stalwartly refusing to believe that anyone could get tired of watching people shoot each other.

To be fair, the casting of Miss Price does put an interesting twist on all of this. But familiarity quickly spawns contempt as the usual Action Movie Problems dull my interest in Alex’s quest. Our Heroine makes full use of the Good Guy Sheild, waltzing through clouds of ammo without a scratch. Also, her life among the Indigenous Peoples of East Africa apparently included a full regimen of weapons training with every conceivable firearm, and the ability to nail extras with a handgun blast from hundreds of yards away. The former can be excused due to the presence of a Civil War (hell, been going for twenty years—I know I’d start arming the children); the latter is movie convention so deeply ingrained it might as well live in the Earth’s Mantle.

It’s the old Superman problem, which seemed to plague every action film made during the Age of Ah-nold. If your hero is invincible, how can she possibly die? And if she can’t possibly die, why should I care?

Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Killer cyborg from the future. Comes complete with shoulder-mounted laser cannon, personal cloaking device (though Pyun obviously couldn’t afford to composite Nebula out of the frame), and an array of high-tech visual sensors to aid in tracking its pray…

Whoa, deja-vu. Again. Dude.

There are conventions, there are homages—and then there are rip-offs. Blatant, unapologetic rip-offs. Nebula is worst I’ve seen in a long, long time. Perhaps I’ve been watching the wrong movies. Or the right ones.

Could this movie have been salvaged? Fuck no. This is Pyun we’re talking about here. His average budget per movie couldn’t even land you a midsize sedan. Not to mention his inexplicable obsession with “cyborgs,” along with all the make-up and prosthetics necessary to give them a shambling, bastardized semblance of life. Throw in an apparent joy blowing shit up and you have a man who honestly can’t afford talent. Lord knows what Sue Price got out of this three picture deal.* To say nothing of the supporting cast.

*[She would go on to reprise her character in Nemesis 3 and 4. Pray for her. Please, pray for her.]

Ah. What supporting cast, indeed? Well there’s Pyun regular Tina Cote as Emily, a backstabbing bitch who (along with her “sister,” who’s name is honestly never spoken) gets rescued from some “Rebels” early in the film and spends most of the remainder as her whinny sidekick. Apparently she and “sis” were forced land their plane and got kidnapped once the rebels learned they were American (precisely two seconds after they landed, one presumes). Except that’s all a lie and Emily is really a treasure hunter intent on skipping the country before anyone notices the big sack of gold she and her friends have “borrowed.”

To this end, Emily is more than willing to sacrifice Alex, her “sister”…even herself, as (in one choice scene) Emily bribes one of the gun toting rebels with offers of hanky-panky. She’s an a-moral, unrepentant little wench and she’s one of the few people in this film that Alex does not kill. Even Nebula (who, up until now, has wasted everything in its path) chooses to leave her intact, the better to lure Alex into the standard Action Movie “come out or your friend gets it” trap.

Except all of Alex’s friends (the tribe, who raised her from infancy and presumably taught her the Law of the Jungle) die within the first twenty minutes. Nebula takes care of them right quick, giving new meaning to the phrase “overwhelming use of force.” Is this meant to add resonance to Alex’s quest and provide a trigger the killing spree that takes up the rest of the film?

Aw, hell, probably not. They’re all ancillary characters anyway. I’m sure Pyun was glad to be rid of them. That’s his whole problem as a filmmaker, right there. You gotta give a shit about your character’s, Al, because if you don’t we won’t…and then yo’ ass is in trouble. Then you become something more than just a direct-to-video hack director. You become an object of scorn and derision for every nerd on the ‘Net. Kneel before us, Albert. We know you and we revile you…though we certainly waste a good deal of time on you.

To be fair (though not necessarily Balanced), Nemesis 2 never becomes as painful as its prequel. Miss Price is (at the very least) a visually interesting choice for the lead role. Who knows what she could with competent people behind the camera? I certainly can’t tell here. For those unconcerned with the repetitive drudgery of American Action Cinema, this flick could easily wile away an afternoon. As Mandy said at one point, “This is the kind of movie my step-dad would watch between football games. Its like Terminator meets Power Rangers meets Predator. It’s like a whole ball of crap rolled into one.”

Indeed.