SEx meets Pyun on the set of The Alamo.

This past Sunday I was in attendance at the Alamo Drafthouse's showing of Albert Pyun's CAPTAIN AMERICA director's cut. I'd never seen the original cut but I'm a big fan of Pyun, especially DOWN TWISTED. DOWN TWISTED is one of the most criminally underrated films of the 1980's. I got to tell him how much I loved it. That made my year.



Some call Albert Pyun a hack and I guess to a certain degree, he is. However, years ago, we called these filmmakers journeymen, people with actual talent who can jump seamlessly from genre to genre. Not many of those people around today. Pyun always seems to get stuck holding the bag as well. And there's usually not enough money in it to finish the film.

It's true that some of his later work is hampered by awful scripts and aforementioned lack of finance but if you really watch his movies, there's a lot of visual artistry at work. You may think he's a hack due to budget, but you can't call him untalented. His work from the 80's will attest to that.

On this night, those in attendance got a sneak peak at the Director's Cut Pyun made and even though it's cheap, it's not bad at all. Quite honestly, I don't like superheroes or comics but his take on the whole CAPTAIN AMERICA thing was way more entertaining than most mainstream films I've seen in the past few years. It isn't bombastic, jarring or expensively fake-looking. For christ sake, it's even thoughtful.

And that's the beauty of Albert Pyun. A vast majority of his films are entertaining as hell even if they are compromised. I sure hope one day he gets the funding and final cut to produce a balls-out action pic that allows him to unleash the style he possesses. And then if it's bad, let the naysayers nay. But I don't think that'd happen. Not by a longshot.

Albert Pyun Website

Pyun @ IMDB

Pyun @ Wikipedia