Nemesis 3: Prey Harder

"Owww! Hey, didn't your mom teach you that scissors are dangerous?"

We've watched some bad films, but few of them were as bad as Nemesis 3: Time Lapse (aka Prey Harder). Oh, The Lonely Lady was more repulsive, and we've watched some films that had almost no entertainment value, but Albert Pyun's Nemesis 3 put most of them to shame. We're talking about some pretty stiff competition, films like Trancers III, Shakes the Clown, and Hardware.

We saw the original Nemesis years ago, and we remember it being a confusing and boring film, even though it had a professional look and a good cast. We decided to skip Nemesis 2, because it didn't have Tim Thomerson (Jack Deth from the Trancers series) in it. Thomerson is in Nemesis 3, playing a second version of the android Farnsworth he played in Nemesis. Beyond Farnsworth's presence, it's tough to see how this film has any relation to the original.

In the opening scenes of Nemesis 3, Alex (Sue Price) wakes up in an African desert with no memory of who she is. If we had to guess what happened to her memory, it would be that she lost it by abusing steroids. Price is pretty obviously a pro body builder, and her physique is the only possible reason for her starring role in the movie. She is certainly no actor, as evidenced by her totally flat delivery of every line, as well as her inability to display emotion. Perhaps most telling is the fact that Price looks down after nearly every line of dialogue. Is she displaying some kind of emotional intensity? Is some profound thought running through her head? Of course not! She's most likely reading cue cards. As a personality around which to structure a film, Kristie Phillips (from Spitfire, another Albert Pyun movie) seems like Elvis by comparison.

A quiet moment while Price reads her next line.

In any case, the first half hour of the film is nothing but shots of Alex sweating, intercut with blue-tinted flashbacks from Nemesis 2 and later portions of Nemesis 3 (because the last half of Nemesis 3 is in fact a flashback). It would be one thing if the blue-tinted flashbacks actually meant something, but they're just random shots of things blowing up -- and they go on forever! Didn't anyone working on the film realize that shots of a butch woman sweating, intercut with blue-tinted shots of random action scenes, do not a story make? It doesn't even make an introduction to a story. The whole first half hour of the film could have easily been a two minute pre-credit sequence. If you would like to have the experience yourself, we've reconstructed it for you.

Alex wanders around the desert until she runs across Tim Thomerson sitting on a rock, and eventually ends up shoving a pair of scissors into Thomerson's forehead, proving what we only heretofore suspected: that Tim Thomerson is a robot sent from the future to destroy us. Then the movie flashes back to 22 hours before the events to we just witnessed, where we are immediately greeted by.... a blue tinted flashback! Nooooo! We're going to have to go through it all again!

"This sure beats beer commercials!"

Luckily, we don't have to sit through any more flashbacks. We find out that Alex is a mutated human gifted with amazing powers. We never get to see those amazing powers, though, unless they include a glazed visage, a penchant for exposing one's midriff, and the ability to shoot stuff. Alex discovers that she is part of a family of half-sisters, all born of the same mother (a woman from the future we saw in Nemesis), who have the mutation and "must procreate." Farnsworth 2, the android working for sinister forces in the future, follows Alex to the past with a team of killer cyborgs to capture Alex and her sisters for study.

Of course, the above paragraph is a much clearer presentation of the plot than the movie itself could ever hope to achieve. We spent a lot of time watching Price, Thomerson, and others recite cryptic dialogue that only starts to make a sort of convoluted sense towards the end of the film. Perhaps this is Pyun's idea of a circular plot. We would recommend the circular file instead.

Down to brass tacks: let's jump straight to the most annoying things about Nemesis 3.

1. The acting.

Special effects by Crayola and "Jimmy" Pyun, age 3.

Even setting Thomerson and Price aside, no one in this cast is bucking for an Oscar. At best, Nemesis 3 musters a few b-grade character actors. At worst, it features a pair of Swedish Bikini Team reject cyborgs who loudly and monotonously proclaim their urge to kill everything in sight. Just think, it took two people to come up with the casting for this movie.

2. The special effects.

When the effects aren't annoying, they're bad, and vice-versa. Sometimes they even manage to be both, like the Refracto-Cars or the green lights that emanate from the cyborg eyes. We also wonder what exactly the Refracto-Car effect was supposed to represent -- were they under some sort of force field, or stealth cloak, or what? Par for the course, this is never explained.

3. The ending.

There wasn't one. A character from Nemesis 2 is apparently ressurected, but doesn't do anything. We don't find out why Alex was wandering in the desert. And the story is apparently continued in Nemesis 4, but other than that film's listing in the IMDb, we haven't found any evidence that it actually came out.

And here's a brief listing of things we liked about Nemesis 3:

Oh, wait. Forget it. We can't think of anything we liked about this movie.