Three Faces Of Pyun Volumes 1 and 2

A Buzz Drainpipe Retrospective

The Deceiver. The Cyborg. The Nemesis.

Albert Pyun’s films live in the broken circuitry between direct-to-video pulp and accidental prophecy. His work is often dismissed as cheap, rushed, compromised by producers—but look closer and you’ll see the outlines of a whole alternate cinema: a cyberpunk dream assembled from scraps, a VHS cathedral built on the ruins of genre.

Deceit (1989)

A forgotten whisper in the Pyun canon.
Shot on a shoestring, populated by alien invaders and erotic paranoia, Deceit feels like a fever dream left on pause at 3AM. A comedy of manipulation and survival, it’s Pyun working in pure midnight mode—shadows, suggestive silhouettes, and a world where trust dissolves faster than celluloid. Here is the first face: the trickster, the smuggler of weirdness into a marketplace that wanted something safer.

Cyborg (1989)

The second face—metallic, bloodstained, eternal.
Shot in the ashes of abandoned Masters of the Universe sets, Cyborg is both a post-apocalyptic brawl and a hymn to the broken body. Jean-Claude Van Damme stalks the wasteland, but it’s Pyun’s textures that linger: rust, glass, and the slow rot of humanity under capitalism’s collapse. It’s the VHS blues, scored in distortion, where violence is just another form of communion.

Nemesis (1992)

If Cyborg was the prophecy, Nemesis is the revelation.
A bullet-riddled cyberpunk labyrinth where loyalties fracture as fast as bones. Olivier Gruner plays a cyborg-hunter chasing the shadow of his own humanity, while Pyun’s camera cuts the future into shards of chrome, flesh, and gunfire. This is the Pyun that could have ruled the multiplex—if only the world had tuned its frequency to his. Instead, Nemesis stands as the great overlooked masterpiece of VHS-era science fiction, violent and poetic in equal measure.

Buzz Drainpipe Transmission

The three faces: trickster, prophet, warrior.
Pyun didn’t polish his films; he let them bleed. He left the seams visible, the VHS grain intact, the illusions cracked and flickering. To watch these films now is to glimpse the ‘90s that might have been: neon wastelands, machine uprisings, a cinema of fracture and ruin. Pyun was not Hollywood’s darling, but he was our midnight minister.

Three Faces of Pyun, Volume 1 is not just a retrospective—it’s a rite of recognition.
Watch them again. Let the tape hiss. The future was always low-budget.


Perfect—Volume 2 has a strong shape already. Here’s a Buzz Drainpipe Retrospective draft for “Three Faces of Pyun, Vol. 2”, keeping the same mythic tone as Volume 1 but shifting into his pure cinema / neon dream side:


Three Faces of Pyun — Volume 2

A Buzz Drainpipe Retrospective

Vicious. Radioactive. Dangerous.

If Volume 1 was Pyun the prophet of rust and ruin, then Volume 2 is Pyun the dreamer of neon nightclubs, radioactive highways, and high-school corridors turned mythic battlegrounds. These films don’t just tell stories—they radiate them, pulsing through Dolby soundtracks, fog machines, and hypnotic visuals that feel ripped from a collective VHS fever dream.

Vicious Lips (1986)

A rock band lost in outer space.
Part Star Wars garage sale, part MTV hallucination. Pyun fuses the B-movie musical with pulp sci-fi, creating a strobing, lipstick-smeared vision of interstellar nightlife. The band never makes it to their gig, but that’s the point: in Pyun’s universe, the journey through chaos is the real performance. This is PURE cinema—image and sound colliding until narrative dissolves in glitter.

Radioactive Dreams (1985)

Two boys raised underground, fed only by pulp detective novels, emerge into a wasteland glowing with fallout and absurdity. A nuclear noir, a comedy of cultural detritus, a soundtrack-driven apocalypse. It’s Mad Max by way of Raymond Chandler karaoke. Pyun treats genre like fallout dust—irradiated fragments swirling into something new, dangerous, and dazzling.

Dangerously Close (1986)

The ‘80s high school movie reloaded with heat, menace, and moral decay. A private-school vigilante gang plays judge and executioner, while Pyun’s camera prowls through the neon corridors of youth power gone feral. This isn’t John Hughes—it’s John Hughes after a blackout binge of MTV and Death Wish. Lurid, over-the-top, yet shockingly sharp in its social diagnosis.

Buzz Drainpipe Transmission

Pounds—Albert Pyun—wasn’t interested in literary adaptations or stagecraft. He didn’t translate art into cinema. He was cinema. He built his films from the raw materials of light, sound, and sensation, with characters too big for the screen and soundtracks that still echo in the skull long after the tape stops.

A true modernist of the VHS age. A visualist, a mythmaker, a dream mechanic.
Let us all raise a glass to this man, who made PURE cinema in an impure time.

Three Faces of Pyun, Volume 2 reminds us: not all dreams survive—but on tape, in neon, they glow eternal.



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