After twenty years of laying dormant, the long forgotten Nemesis suddenly came back on-line and lurched into life. Quite why it decided to do so is anybodys guess as the Nemesis franchise might one of the most spectacularly awful franchises that’s ever limped to a fifth installment.
Compared to what was to follow, Albert Pyun’s original Nemesis comes across like the fucking Matrix, but taken on its own merits, the Oliver Grunner sci-fi/actioner is a creaky, cult offering high on action and stylized lighting and low on comprehensible story. From there, budget issues and the fact that Pyun simply couldn’t tell a coherent narrative for toffee, meant that subsequent sequels lurched drunkenly from Terminator rip-off, to Predator rip-off, to even plumbing the depths of Cronenbergian soft core porn for its fourth installment.
However, Pyun (in a producing capacity) has passed the baton over to Dustin Ferguson – but has he passed his flaws over too?
Oh, don’t worry. The director of Murder Hornets and Amityville In The Hood needs no help in that respect.
So, after a lengthy title crawl (over 3 minutes!) attempts to spell out the status quo for the past four film despite the timeline writhing as violently as a snake on a hotplate, we now find ourselves even further in the far flung future to find that the terror group known as the Red Army Hammerheads now rule the earth. However, a far more grizzled Alex Sinclair is still fighting the good fight, even though the Hammerheads had managed to turn the tide against the L.A.P.D. thanks to a smear campaign in the media – no, really – but her life changes when she stumbles upon, Ari Frost, a small orphan child clad in a black fancy dress wig and ripped jeans in a desperate attempt to make her look like the adult actress who’ll eventually portray her. Deciding to raise the girl despite not being trained how to use “the emotional heart of humanity”, after twelve years of really ineffectual looking fight training, both the grown up Ari and Alex agree that humanities best hope is to send the former back in time to fight the media campaign as it happens – not before it’s happened, mind you; as it happens.
Ari arrives in a past where everyone acts like they’re in the lead up scenes in a porno and vast expanses of orange-bleached, dystopian wasteland seem to be a short drive from perfectly normal neighbourhoods. After a quick run in with the Hammerhead’s cyborg assassins, who take the form of anything from twin blonde bimbos to burly robo-warriors who are oddly susceptible to a punch in the face with a flesh and blood fist, Ari, with her group of Matrix-lite buddies flee to the dessert and take refuge at the most unappealing bar possible.
However, unbeknownst to them, the bar has something far worse lurking inside other than gin-soaked misogynists and tired looking strippers and if the world’s going to be saved, Ari Frost is going to have fight for her life against the latest model of Nebula killing machine.
After basking in the questionable after glow of Nemesis 5: The New Model, I was genuinely unsure of how I was fling to tackle this review – which is a bit awkward considering I’ve got knock out an entire bastard column on this thing. It hardly seems fair to even call this a film review as this latest attempt at maintaining a franchise that’s long since shit its guts out seems more like a failing student film than an actual, legitimate feature. Every single thing you can possibly think of that shows up a movie as a horribly amateur endeavour is present and correct: actors who are clearly anything but, sets that are blatantly a barely disguised crew member’s living room and laser guns that are spray painted toys and it it even gets worse from here.
Virtually every aspect of the production is aggressively unwatchable with vast sections of the 70 minute running time given up to more filler than trash actress Dawna Lee Heising’s face. Not only does the opening crawl literally crawl by, we’re expected to sit patiently while we’re served up numerous scenes of the film just spinning its wheels while it desperately attempts to stretch matters out to the minimum required feature length. Montages of empty desert? Check. Plot adjacent strippers dancing for a bored looking crowd? That’s covered too. Non choreographed fight training that looks like a game of patt-a-cake between two drunks? We got you, fam. However, when the plot bothers to wanders in like a dead beat dad, things get extra painful extra quick.
It’s weird, because the “film”makers obviously know their Nemesis lore, opting to not only clear up some of the insanely convoluted timeline and bring back the character of the Nebula (who, for some reason, now glows like a nineties raver under a blacklight), but also finds room for a cameo for franchise main-stay Sue Price. It’s a legitimately nice gesture, but the way it’s all carried out plays like the cinematic equivalent of having a hair stuck at the back of your throat.
The awfulness comes at a rate faster than one of Ari Frost’s punches (not exactly hard) as virtually every second of this thing has a unintentional point and laugh moment.
“How bad is it?” Ari uniroically asks a colleague with a plainly visible hole blown in his chest despite him actually getting shot in the arm. “It hurts like hell, but I will be fine.” he garbles in some unintelligible accent as his wound moves from shot to shot. A news presenter presumably played by the uncle of a member of the crew, trawls through unsubtle exposition while he rolls his Ws like Johnathan Ross. Two spies monitor proceedings in what looks like an office reception area with a big sign reading “Surveillance” on the wall behind them. If wasn’t for the mercifully brief length, the goofs would keep coming forever.
However, the film reaches the absolute pinnacle of Shite Mountain when the film attempts to pull off the armchair set melodrama of Kill Bill 2. The sight of charisma-free Schuylar Craig blankly goggling at the site of cult action actor Mel Novak (who vaguely looks like the Crypt Keeper armed with a wig and tattooed eyebrows) as he attempts to explain away the end of the film is made all the more like a fever dream by the fact that it’s overseen by the zeppelin-sized cleavage of Lee Hesling and the on-set mics fail to pick up a lot of the dialogue.
Quite possibly one of the worse movies I have ever aimed my eyeballs at, Nemesis 5: The New Model takes a franchise that had already buried itself into the ground and plants it even deeper than a fossil’s butt bone.
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