I wonder if MVD have any other Pyun films in the works for blu-ray. For what it's worth, I found the website today for Moonstone (who licensed Nemesis 1-4, Crazy Six, Blast and a number of other non Pyun films to MVD) and they list Kickboxer 4 (not Kickboxer 2) and Brain Smasher in their catalog.
I wonder if MVD have any other Pyun films in the works for blu-ray. For what it's worth, I found the website today for Moonstone (who licensed Nemesis 1-4, Crazy Six, Blast and a number of other non Pyun films to MVD) and they list Kickboxer 4 (not Kickboxer 2) and Brain Smasher in their catalog.
Hopefully someone can license Knights from Paramount before Warner Bros closes their vault after the merger.
^ Ordered a copy from Orbit even though I should've really waited until reviews come in. That Joysticks fiasco left a sour taste in my mouth. And I haven't even watched my copy of Side Out yet. I'm afraid to based on the reviews.
Hopefully MVD or VS can pick up and finish Sorcerers. According to Pyun's widow a film print with all of the footage exists. The only thing that needs to be finished is the CGI. There's also a few characters in the script that are supposed to animated and need voice actors to be cast for.
For decades, Albert Pyun lugged around five 35 mm film cannisters everywhere he went.
His wife Cynthia hated having them around, but Albert wouldn't let them go. If they moved, it was the first thing he grabbed. If they were living out of a tent, the cans would come with them. If they took a long road trip, the cans would be tossed in the trunk.
So, what was so important in those heavy cans?
It was Albert's original cut of CAPTAIN AMERICA.
Yep, the film that negatively defined his career, the huge box office bomb, the long-standing joke as the worst superhero film of all time, and the project that led Albert's career to slide into the land of smaller and smaller budgets... He kept that thing by his side until his dying day.
Why?
Because the public had never seen the version he had in those canisters.
Until now.
Recently, a friend of Albert’s reached out and offered to send me a different cut of CAPTAIN AMERICA. Of course, I assumed it was going to be the Director's Cut Albert put out on DVD himself more than a decade ago, which added in a few scenes but remained basically the same movie. How much could change?
Holy crap. So much.
The legend goes that a few weeks before shooting, the budget of CAPTAIN AMERICA was slashed to nothing. Albert was stuck with action scenes he couldn't shoot, a hell of a time filming in Croatia, and an ******* production manager he fought with every. single. day. To get through it, Albert has said in interviews that he set his sights on creating a straightforward film. His producers had hated the experimental style he brought to his original cuts of CYBORG and ALIEN FROM L.A, so he wanted to prove he could make a more streamlined "meat and potatoes" (his words) motion picture.
This may be the case in the theatrical release.
It was not the case with his original cut.
Of course, Albert got ambitious. He always did. His version has a radical structure, a completely different tone, and a very different synth score by (We think) his regular collaborator Tony Riparetti.
In Albert’s "Original Cut," the film is presented at first as a mystery, starting with Captain America crashing a missile in Alaska and then jumping to the present as he wakes up a stranger in a strange land. He was supposed to be a hero, but he failed on his first mission, and now everything he knew is gone. It was supposed to be simple, but it wasn’t, and now he has no idea what to do. It’s a much more downbeat tone, with very little whiz-bang and a whole lot of “What was the point of it all?” spread throughout. Screenwriter Stephen Tolkin has said in an interview he wanted to make a “Left-Leaning Captain America film” and that was not present at all in the theatrical version, but it’s the defining theme in Pyun’s version.
You know all those WWII scenes in the theatrical release's opening 30 minutes? In Albert’s Original Cut, they’re spread throughout the film as flashbacks in a non-linear order.
Instead of seeing the fight with the Red Skull by the rocket right at the start of the movie, it’s scattered throughout the film in clever ways, to the point that even in the climax, it intercuts the WWII Red Skull fight with the Present Day Red Skull fight!
And speaking of the Red Skull, one of the big sticking points with the producers was that Albert’s Original Version of the film wanted you to feel bad for the bad guy, as his origin was meant to mirror Cap’s, leading to an absolutely jaw-dropping tragic climax that must be seen to be believed.
I’m not saying this version is going to change everyone’s mind about the movie because, if anything, it double down on a lot of stuff people disliked, and it’s still got all the same problems of the original: A lack of action, “silly” costumes, and some definite “decisions” - but goddamit, in his original cut you can see a genuine authorial intent guiding an impossible production, to the point that out of all of Albert’s films, it may be the most emotionally coherent!
And no one knew it existed.
I don’t think it was intentional on Albert’s part. The details of what he had done in his original cut probably slowly fell away from his mind as he made more and more movies. He remembered his version was different, but the intricacies kind of faded beyond the ending, which he vividly recalled on a commentary track, but could not re-watch because they were in the cans, and he had no way to screen them.
At the time of the film's production, the producers made a deal with him: You can keep your cut of the film, but we’ll do our own. They put all the flashbacks in chronological order, scored the movie with chintzy keyboard jams, and cut out all the tragedy of Red Skull’s backstory.
You know how the rest of the story goes.
Near the end of his life, Albert’s wife said he would have “episodes” where the past would come back to haunt him, and a subject he talked about a lot was the failure of CAPTAIN AMERICA. He was wracked by guilt, knowing that people thought he had made a joke out of it because, in truth, he genuinely loved the character of Cap and thought he had done something interesting with the tools at his disposal.
Albert never did get to see this version of CAPTAIN AMERICA screen for the public. His wife tried to get it scanned before he passed away, but for the longest time, they believed one of the reels was irreparably damaged, and once they had finally figured out a way to fix it, Albert was gone.
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Linear Mode
