Knights

Set in a post-apocalyptic environment, cyborgs led by warlord Job rein over the human population. They basically keep them as livestock, as they need fresh human blood to live off. Nea and her brother managed to survive one of their attacks when she was a kid, and years have past when she came face-to-face with the cyborgs again, but this time she's saved by the cyborg Gabriel, who was created to destroy all cyborgs. Job and his men are on their way to capture a largely populated city, while Nea (with revenge on mind) pleads Gabriel to train her in the way of killing cyborgs and she'll get him to Gabriel.

Cheap low-rent cyborg / post-apocalyptic foray by writer / director Albert Pyun (who made "Cyborg" prior to it and the blistering "Nemsis" the same year) is reasonably a misguided hunk of junk with some interesting novelties. Very little structure makes its way into the threadbare story, as the turgid script is weak, corny and overstated. The leaden banter tries to be witty, but it pretty much stinks and comes across being comical in the unintentional moments. Most of the occurring actions are pretty senseless and routine. The material could've used another polish up, as it was an inspired idea swallowed up by lazy inclusions, lack of a narrative and an almost jokey tone. The open-ended, cliffhanger conclusion is just too abrupt, especially since a sequel has yet to be made. Makes it feel like that that run out of money, and said "Time to pack up. Let's finish it off another day (or maybe in another decade). There's no rush." However it did find it rather diverting, thanks largely to its quick pace, some well-executed combat and George Mooradian's gliding cinematography that beautifully captured the visually arresting backdrop. Performances are fair. Kris Kristofferson's dry and steely persona works perfectly as Gabriel and a self-assured, psychically capable Kathy Long pulls off the stunts expertly and with aggression. However her acting is too wooden. A mugging Lance Henriksen gives a mouth-watering performance of pure ham, as the villainous cyborg leader Job who constantly having a saliva meltdown. Scott Paulin also drums up plenty of gleefulness as one of the cyborgs and Gary Daniels pouts about as one too. Pyun strikes up few exciting martial art set pieces, involving some flashy vigour and gratuitous slow-motion. Seeping into the background is a scorching, but mechanical sounding music score. The special effects and make-up FX stand up fine enough. Watchable, but not quite a success and it's minimal limitations can be a cause of that.

I think that "Knights" is a great film. Well...it has many shortcomings but I like films of Albert Pyun. That movie is just like a vision of future and I like it. I've been saw "Knights" hundred times. There is many cyborgs. One of them is Matthew I very like him. You know, the best thing of that movie is that Jon Epstein was on that movie. He's so ... funny.

For its genre, I guess this film was OK. Post apocalyptic Earth, lots of deserts, dirty people in rags, fighting, even blood sucking cyborgs. The only beef with it is that it seemed to be made in the 80's. I even imagined myself commenting on IMDb about how Kris Kistofferson and Lance Henriksen made movies before Alien and Terminator. It turned out that this movie was made afterwards.

I must define the notion of OK. I knew it was trash, therefore I expected things like bad picture editing to make the fights look cooler, obvious stunt men instead of the real actors and ridiculous fighting. I also expected to see cardboard characters in a movie without plot. The only surprise was that the fighting was half decent, as the female star (also a good looking one) is an actual kick boxer.

If you see this movie on TV, it might be worth a watch. It's not too bad, so you can't rent it to make fun of it too much. So it's a bad idea to rent or purchase it, basically :)

Knights is the third movie in the bafflingly constructed Cyborg franchise which started with the Jean Claude Van Damme movie Cyborg (1989).

It tells the story of a girl who is trained to fight cyborgs who are intent on slaughtering countless humans in order to create an unstoppable army.

The girl in question is played by Kathy Long, for those unfamiliar she's more well known as a professional kick boxer and a stuntwoman than an actress. I guess you could say she was the 1990's Zoe Bell.

Full of high octane action (Mostly melee) this is another weak addition to the franchise which is insanely disjointed and I simply don't get it.

Starring industry veterans Lance Henriksen and Kris Kristofferson it's mediocre stuff and demonstrates that even the greats have blotches on their records. Henriksen inparticular is really quite awful here.

3 movies in, not impressed.

The Good:

Scott Paulin

Some okay choreography

The Bad:

Simply really generic stuff

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Lance Henriksen has done some absolute stinkers

This is one of the two postapocalyptic fantasy movies that Albert Pyun made in 1993 - and it's the bad one. Apparently all his energy went into "Nemesis" which was an entertaining non-stop action movie, and had a much more expensive look. "Knights" is clunky and cheesy, a bottom-of-the-barrel sci-fi that too often resembles a video game (new opponents pop up all the time and must be exterminated as quickly as possible). The only thing that saves this movie from the trash can is Kathy Long; not a particularly attractive woman, but undeniably a brutally efficient fighting machine. As for Kris Kristofferson, considering his age at the time (58), I hope his stunt double was well paid. (*1/2)