EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing gives me greater joy than when our site gets mentioned on my favorite podcast, The Cannon Canon. There are a few movies they’ve covered that I haven’t, so it’s time to fix that.

The ancient future test is one to determine if the movie that you are watching fits into that genre, a time when books like Neuromancer were being strip-mined for ideas to make high concepts films that were five minutes into the future in the 1990s but are now hopelessly mired in the past.

Let’s give Nemesis this test.

Does it have the title of a Philip K. Dick book but not really have much to do with it?

Nope, but you would not be blamed if you believed that director Albert Pyun and writer Rebecca Charles — who is of course Pyun using a different name* — weren’t watching tears in the rain and robotic mutton sleeping.

Is there a lot of rain?

Of course there is.

Does the male hero wear dress clothes and/or a trenchcoat?

More than that, everyone in this movie wears sunglasses. In the day. At night. Sunglasses on top of sunglasses.

Do Keanu Reeves, Ben Affleck, Dolph Lundgren or Udo Keir appear in it?

Amazingly, no.

Does the internet do something it can’t do yet, yet look dated AF?

Oh man. You can download your entire soul onto the video game grid, something Jared (Marjorie Monaghan) does before — spoiler warning — sacrificing herself.

Are Stabbing Westward, KMFDM, Ministry or God Lives Underwater on the soundtrack?

The budget couldn’t afford any of those bands. It’s also a few years too early.

Is it a crappy version of Blade Runner?

Can a movie be Blade Runner, The Terminator, an anime and The Matrix seven years before that movie got made?

Are there numerous Asian-influenced scenes?

The U.S. and Japan have pretty much become one big country.

Do people use future terms that make no sense?

You know it, akachan.

Are there a lot of whirring sound effects?

All the whirring.

Do people stare at the camera as it moves through a neon-lit strip club?

I mean, they have sunglasses on, but I think the answer is yes.

Are there rock stars in it?

Shockingly, no.

Is there a feral child?

You would think so, but somehow, nope. There’s a dog that Alex saves in the beginning and loses, but that happens so fast that there is really no emotional impact.

I’ll still say that this is an ancient future cyberpunk movie.

After Dangerously Close and Down Twisted, this was to be Albert Pyun’s last film in his three-movie contract with Cannon. Golan and Globus wanted Pyun to make a more mainstream action movie and he pitched a remake of Nicolas Ray’s Johnny Guitar with John Travolta — who Cannon thought didn’t have enough power at the box office — and Alex Rain, a serial killer being chased by the cops movie. Pyun started on the Alex Rain script, which was to star Kelly Lynch as an FBI agent hunting a serial killer amongst the Neo-Nazi community 25 years in the future. Or maybe 400 years and on Mars. Before that could happen, Cannon had him finish Journey to the Center of the Earth and do Cyborg.

In 1991, Pyun made Arcade for Full Moon and went back to Alex Rain. His new idea was to have the lead be a violent street urchin working undercover for a futuristic L.A.P.D. He planned on Megan Ward, who had been in Arcade, to star. He started looking for the right studio to make it with and decided on Imperial and the Shah Brothers. They told him that if he changed Alex from a 13-year-old girl to a 30-year-old male and cast French kickboxer Olivier Gruner, he could do whatever he wanted.

After being bullied as a kid, Gruner started to study Shotokan karate, boxing, kickboxing and full contact kickboxing. After school, he joined the French Navy, volunteering for their Commandos Marine unit and fought pirates. He left the military and won his first kickboxing title — the W.A.K.O. World Championship — before plastering the 1987 Cannes Film Festival with his photo. Obviously, he’s been a success — he’s been in more than forty films — as well as having a fashion line, being a volunteer firefighter and even continuing to work as a bodyguard for clients like Celine Dion.

He starts the film as just 86% human named Alex Rain. He’s an assassin/bounty hunter for the LAPD — not a stretch, right? — who is attacked on a routine case by Rosaria (Jennifer Gatti, Double Exposure) and The Red Army Hammerheads. After months of cybernetic reconstruction — who can even guess his percentage now? — he finds Rosaria in Baja and gets his revenge. That’s when her handlers show up to get the pieces, Sam (Marjean Holden, who has been in everything from Dr. Caligari and Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot to playing Sheeva in  Mortal Kombat: Annihilation) and Alex’s ex, Jared (the previously mentioned Marjorie Monaghan).

Alex decides that he’s done with the LAPD, but he’s brought back in by Commissioner Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson!) for one last job. He has to stop Jared before she sells vital security intel about the Japan/U.S. summit to the Hammerheads. To add another influence to the film, they Snake Pliskin his heart by inserting a bomb that will blow him up in three days unless he finds Jared before she meets with Hammerhead leader Angie-Liv (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, who is literally the bad guy’s bad guy; speaking of Phillip K. Dick he was in the TV series of the book The Man In the High Castle).

You may not be shocked to learn that the cops are the bad guys and the Hammerheads have humanity’s best interests at heart. There are several sinister androids stalking the highest levels of human society, copying the minds of powerful leaders into their perfect synthetic bodies. One of them you’ve already met, as Farnsworth has been taken over and has already sent another cyborg named Julian (Deborah Shelton, Body Double) to destroy the Hammerheads. She removes the tracking device in his eyeball, injects him with a scrambler that allows her to remove the bomb in his heart and sacrifices herself to save him when the cops bust in. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, she’s also naked — as she is for most of the film — and shares some love scenes with Thomas Jane. She volunteered to be nude for these scenes and Jane decided to follow her lead.

Alex saves the life of Max Impact (Merle Kennedy), the sister of the cyborg he killed earlier, Rosaria, and wins her over to his side. Despite all of the Hammerheads getting killed — the movie jumps from city to jungle in some of the action — Alex and Max used Jared’s digital spirit to destroy most of the replicating machines and then kill Farnsworth and Germaine (Nicholas Guest), who tells him that they can’t stop all of their creations.

There are several endings. The  Extended Version has Alex and Max walk into a still-alive Farnsworth cyborg while Sam’s voice asks, “Should we take them out now?” Farnsworth answers, “Why not?” Farnsworth is still alive in this cut as they never fight him in the previous scenes. There’s also an ending — which is the one I watched on Tubi — where this conversation happens but you never see Thomerson’s robotic bad boss.

This movie has so many people in it that I forgot its cast includes Thom Matthews (Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives), Yuji Okumoto (the best bad guy ever, Chozen Toguchi from The Karate Kid Part 2, as well as one of the Howard Cossell-loving brothers, Yee Sook Ree, in Better Off Dead) Brion James (who was in everything; he grew up in his parent’s movie theater and went on to be in films like The Horror Show (AKA House 3), Brainsmasher… A Love Story, Striking Distance and perhaps most essential to this movie, Blade Runner), former surfer Vincent Klyn (Cyborg and so many other Pyun movies), one-time Bad News Bear and someday Freddy Jackie Earle Haley and Arnold’s buddy Sven-Ole Thorsen, who played La Fours in Mallrats, Thorgrim in Conan the Barbarian, The Demon in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story and henchmen and hired thugs in more movies than I can even think of.

Pyun made a lot of movies. He had a thing called “Rock and Roll Filmmaking” where he’d spend the first few days just getting pick ups he’d never use. This caused producers to get upset. But you know, do we even know that producer’s name today? Nope. But we can watch this Pyun film and be amazed at what he did on such a small budget and that this was the time that fate decreed that it would all work out right, that all the influences would come together and that this was his most perfect film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*Thanks to the always amazing Bulletproof Action for confirming this.

You can listen to The Cannon Canon episode of Nemesis here.