Manborg

This film has a quality which allows you to transcend the usual role of audience, and makes you feel like you are with friends, albeit very weird (possibly deranged) friends who have a green screen. Based on those brilliant b-movies of our childhood, Manborg follows the adventures of a group of misfits who are valiantly fighting off the Nazi-vampire hordes from hell. With the likes of Number One Man and Justice on the team, there is never a dull moment. It had me on the edge of my seat throughout, and left me hungry for more. Expect excitement, chaos, unrequited love, science, stop-motion monsters, hover boards and so much more. It is funny, it's fantastic, it is gory and it is glorious. Possibly not for the feint of heart, but definitely one I would recommend (and have been). It's never too late... To be a hero.

In the all-too bleak future, mankind has been defeated by the armies of hell. Now, the eeevil Draculon (Adam Brooks) and his malevolent minions rule from a hideous fortress-city.

Enter MANBORG (Matthew Kennedy), a cybernetic being, constructed from a soldier and various spare parts. With help from #1 Man (Ludwig Lee), Justice (Conor Sweeney), and his sister, Mina (Meredith Sweeney), MANBORG seeks to destroy Draculon and all he stands for.

Dark, ultra-gory, and absolutely hilarious, this movie takes its low-low-budgeted absurdity seriously, making what could / should have been an abysmal failure into a brilliant spectacle of intentional idiocy! From the Mina-smitten Baron (Jeremy Gillespie), to the Dr. Strangelove-inspired, Dr. Scorpius (Brooks again), and just about every other character / demon / monster / etc., this is insane moviemaking done right!

FAVORITE SCENES: #1- The gladiatorial matches! #2- Any scene with the Baron! #3- Justice and #1 Man making macaroni and cheese! #4- The fabulously fun-tastic, gut-unraveling, skull-exploding final conflict!

Is this movie an homage? Parody? Homarody? Hmmm.

P.S.- Be sure to stick around after the credits for the COMING ATTRACTIONS!...

Manborg feels you're watching the cut scenes from a video game more than you're watching a movie. It's fun, but it feels like there was so much work put into something which inevitably ends up as a lark. Maybe I'm just a party pooper. Or maybe I like when movies are funny because they are just weird or foreign, versus the forced humor that comes when you make a parody or a genre already rife with unintended humor.

That said, this is a real CGI achievement — just watch the extras to see how much of the world was created for the film. Is it a good movie? Well, it's more like an 11-minute Adult Swim show played out for an hour. There's some goofy humor and some slap happy action. That said — going back to my eleven-year-old self, then my answer would be, "Yes, this movie is awesome."

The horror/cult revelation of the still very young new decade is undoubtedly Astron-6. This outrageous five-headed coalition (Adam Brooks, Jeremy Gillespie, Connor Sweeney, Matthew Kennedy and Steven Kostanski) accomplished their modest breakthrough in 2011 with no less than two long feature films that appeal to the craziest of horror fans around the globe, namely the superb "Father's Day" and this demented little thing named "Manborg". I can only describe "Manborg" as a totally absurd and bizarrely creative throwback to the era of primitive video games, grotesque Science-Fiction blockbusters of the 80's and early 90's and the result of a bunch of weirdos brainstorming crazy ideas. The set pieces and decors of "Manborg" intentionally look terribly cheap and amateurish, the acting performances are deliberately and over-the-top inept and the special effects & make-up qualify as hilarious camp. The story is slightly less "all over the place" as the case in "Father's Day", but still very incoherent and chaotic. In a (distant?) future, the last remaining humans are at war against demons, zombies, vampires and a whole lot of other monstrous species from the underground. One soldier, who died at the battlefield, wakes up again in a laboratory, rebuilt as a cyborg and still in captivity of the horrendous demonic leader Draculon. Together with three other humanoid survivors (two crazed siblings and one deliciously bad-dubbed Asian martial arts hero) Manborg is forced to fight as a gladiator in a futuristic arena, but they are skilled and headstrong enough to revolt against their enemies. This is the ideal entertainment to watch at a Film Festival; together with a chock-full theater of equally avid and enthusiast freaks. The crowd literally goes wild upon being exposed to such a massive amount of gore, camp, deliberate incompetence, craziness and smut! The sound and light effects catapult you straight back to the days when you were playing "Space Invaders" on a prehistoric thick green-screen computer and the awful English dubbing of the #1 man character caused the entire audience to laugh out loud every single he opened his mouth. The screenplay is stuffed with tiny imaginative details, tongue-in-cheek references and lovely gimmicks. The design of the demons and garden variety of other creatures is quite phenomenal and they could actually qualify as genuinely horrific if used in a less light-headed scenario. Doctor Scorpius, for instance, is a much scarier looking villain than all the creeps in big budgeted blockbusters. This shouldn't come too much as a surprise, since most of the Astron-6 members have a background in special effects and/or animation. "Manborg" is marvelous and warmly recommended cult entertainment, if you have a bizarre sense of humor and a good sense of tastelessness, of course.

Knocked unconscious in battle, a young soldier wakes up to discover that he has been turned into a cyborg capable of fighting the (literal) demons of hell in this affectionate homage to the sci-fi themed action movies of the 1980s. The film owes a particular debt to 'RoboCop', but the movie brings a lot of humour of its own beyond spoofing the likes of 'The Terminator' with a particularly funny running gag involving a lovesick baddie with artificial eyes. Creative as 'Manborg' is, it is certainly not a film for all tastes. The deliberately shoddy green screen special effects take time to get used too; same goes for the intentionally over-the-top dubbing of an Asian man and the stop motion monster effects. It is really quite a magnificent achievement though when one considers its parodying of 80s cheese; the film even opens like a VHS tape and has a comical copyright warning at the end that is worth sitting through. There is even an awesome trailer for the most over-the-top cop film ever after the end credits roll. None of this ingenuity can quite make up for the loose character development and thin plotting of the actual film, but this is not the type of movie that one really watches for something deep and meaningful. It is a fun tribute to the films of yesterday and a surprisingly thrilling one at that with some well crafted action sequences when one gets over the cheesy special effects.