Back in the days of dial-up internet, when I would visit websites with names like badmovies.org and stomptokyo.com on my parents’ computer to teach myself the Psychotronic Cinema canon, the one filmmaker who seemed completely without defenders was Albert Pyun.
“If the words boredom and cyborgs ring a bell,” wrote a reviewer for a still-extant website called , “then it’s because they are synonymous with the director Albert Pyun (does it rhyme with pain?), whose other movies such as and should be banned under the Geneva Convention or something.” This was the sort of critical judgment that still defined Pyun to me as late as 2018, when my friend Justin Decloux told me he was writing a book about the filmmaker and marathoning his (1990) that used to haunt late-night TV? I’m ashamed to say that the idea of studying him initially struck me as sheer perversity.
