Knights

MOVIE #2,229 • SCORE 9/10 • 12.19.24
SERIES: ALBERT & AKERMAN

This is Albert Pyun in his wheelhouse, deep in his bag. Knights features a climactic scene wherein Kris Kristofferson, playing a (good) cyborg, is chopped in half, strapped to the back of a real-life kickboxing champion turned (bad) actor Kathy Long, and tasked to do swordplay battle against (evil) cyborgs. So Pyun strapped a little person to her back and shot it wide…


I don't know how bad or stale his filmography will eventually get — if there's any of this magic in 2010’s Abelar: Tales of an Ancient Empire for example? I don't wanna get ahead of myself — so let's just appreciate the here and now, and marinate in the arid wastelands of this Pyunian dystopia: it’s a fantastic place to spend 84 minutes.
Here we also see yet another badass female hero (and people thought comparing and contrasting Pyun with Akerman was a horrible idea). Of all the things one could praise him for, his willingness to showcase women in the lead roles (especially in late 80s/early 90s genre flicks) is among the most commendable. Even if Kathy Long is mostly there for the kicking and the punching, not so much the acting.

There’s also a deep introspection at play in Knights, albeit in a Philip K. Dick strained through the lens of Albert’s crazy B-movie world kind of way…


Lance Henriksen, as the main evil humanoid robot (who is weirdly obsessed with parrots), is hamming it up in a performance that is somewhere between awkwardly fay and “help, I’ve had a stroke,” but he is also the film’s philosophical center…


I don’t mean to oversell this aspect of the picture. It’s a dumb sci-fi movie at the end of the day. But Pyun’s willingness to at least TRY to elevate the material with these ideas is perhaps evidence that, given a different trajectory, he absolutely could have been a legitimate auteur and not simply a ‘vulgar’ or cult one. It’s no shock that his best films are also the ones he wrote. At the end of the day, though, a burnt-up cyborg head is a burnt-up cyborg head…

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Knights is a 1993 American martial arts science fiction action film directed by Albert Pyun and starring kickboxing champion Kathy Long in her Hollywood debut. The film was released direct to home video in 1993. It was released on November 17, 1993.