Weird Wednesday Celebrates Low-Budget Legend Albert Pyun
An unstoppable workhorse whose films celebrated earnest fun
By Julian Towers, Fri., Dec. 30, 2022
An 18-year-old Hawaiian military brat travels to Japan on invitation from Toshiro Mifune. After a few weeks assisting pre-production on Akira Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, disaster strikes when Mifune backs out of the movie to instead act in a cheapo television show, taking with him teenager Albert Pyun's once-in-a-lifetime chance to intern under international cinema's most well-funded auteur.
A aspiring film artist harboring a sprawling pulp vision – radioactive dreams of cyborgs, swindlers, and sorcerers destined for an epic canvas – an alternate-dimension Pyun may well have stopped right there, unable to reconcile his burgeoning imagination with the demoralizing fiscal realities ahead. Thankfully, the fiercely independent filmmaker who inhabits our timeline welcomed that demotion as a foundational lesson: Channel the compromise. Make endless adaptability a careerlong art.
Up until his long battle with multiple sclerosis took him in November, Pyun was an unstoppable genre movie workhorse. (It's not your average director who draws together names like Courteney Cox, Andrew Dice Clay, Kris Kristofferson, and Master P.) His nearly 50-film-long filmography bounded from Canon Studios quickies and VHS exclusives to secret movies shot under cover of night on the sets of other movies. Even up to the very end, suffering from dementia and confined to his home, Pyun was still scouring screenplays and raising financing.
"He's a director where it's important to look at the filmography as a whole. You ignore what's funny or risible in the moment and what comes into focus is: This was a man driven obsessively to create," explained Alamo Drafthouse Repertory Programmer Laird Jimenez. Unable to limit his tribute to a single film, Jimenez has spread four highlights from Pyun's heyday – 1985 to 1990 – across this month's entire Weird Wednesday slate.
Screening Jan. 4, 1990's rubber-suited Captain America adaptation (infamously the character's first feature-length depiction) is a strategic choice for series opener. Jimenez hopes name recognition can get Pyun-ignorant audiences in the door and that the film's chintzy, camp-happy zest – a tone more honest to original superheroes than today's dour cinematic universes – will prepare them for Pyun's more idiosyncratic work, like Jan. 11 screening Radioactive Dreams. The programmer described this 1985 wasteland rock opera as Pyun's "most uncompromised story," a ramshackle buddy comedy brewing MTV aesthetics and Cold War angst with the pungent lyricism of gumshoe noir. "I don't want to say 'Rosetta Stone,' but it has pieces of all his obsessions," Jimenez said.
The postapocalypse continues on Jan. 18 with Pyun's most famous film, the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme face-smasher/Christ parable Cyborg. But shirtless spin kicks in the neon-noir rain, iconic as they may be, are just a preamble to Alien From L.A., the series' Jan. 25 finale that Jimenez lists as his personal favorite. If audiences can get past the 1988 film's MST3K association and Kathy Ireland's decisive lead performance, they'll find a rip-roaring, heart-swelling adventure in the spirit, Jimenez said, of The Wizard of Oz or Journey to the Center of the Earth.
"The budgets went up and down through his filmography. Some films are tough sits waiting for those couple of breathtaking shots or some incredible visual effect or stunt that he really prioritized. But his eagerness is constant and ultimately infectious," Jimenez continued, arguing that the series serves as a necessary reconsideration of a filmmaker reviled by his early critics as a talentless hack. "These are films untouched by cynicism, occasionally brushed with genius, and always excited to be themselves no matter their handicaps.
"The goal of Weird Wednesday has always been reframing the way people think about genre movies. To understand them as more than objects to laugh at, though they are quite fun, but [they're also] documents of creative passion persevering though impoverished resources," Jimenez effused. "Albert Pyun is a perfect Weird Wednesday director."
Weird Wednesday presents the films of Albert Pyun: Jan. 4, Captain America; Jan. 11, Radioactive Dreams; Jan. 18, Cyborg; Jan. 25, Alien From L.A.
Alamo South Lamar, 1120 S. Lamar. drafthouse.com.
