There seems to be a revival of cheesy 80s-style movies as of
late and I absolutely love it. The crazy
crew at Astron-6 have bestowed upon us Manborg,
the ultimate homage to the era. Sometimes you just want to kick back with your friends, make some
popcorn and laugh your ass off at a silly, fun flick. If a cyborg man fighting hordes of vampire
Nazis in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future sounds like a good idea to you—we
should be best friends. Now don’t get me
wrong, Manborg isn’t a good film by
any stretch. However, it is aware of
this fact and revels in being as awesomely terrible as possible—tongue planted
firmly in cheek.
The plot sounds like it was ripped out of the notebook of a
twelve-year-old boy: demon vampire Nazis from Hell overthrow the Earth and a
reincarnated cyber-soldier known as Manborg is the only person/borg who can
stop them. The main villain’s name is
Count Draculon (how kick-ass is that?!). This isn’t Shakespeare but it fits the theme perfectly and with a 60
minute runtime, it never drags. The most
impressive part of this film is the look they chose for it. It looks exactly like a FMV from an old Sega
CD game, video compression and all, and somehow this looks amazing. It bears more than a passing resemblance to
the original Mortal Kombat game, with the heavily digitized characters and
muted color pallet. All the special
effects and costumes look homemade but in an ingenious way, I was very impressed,
especially upon discovering it was made for about one thousand dollars in a
garage. The music sounds like it was
ripped directly from a Sega Genesis game and it complements the action
perfectly. If that’s not cool enough,
there is stop-motion claymation too. Sweet. The dialogue is hilarious
and well-written--I was taken by surprise by how witty it was.
Astron-6 is quickly becoming one of my favorite B-movie
director teams. They seem to know what
their audience wants to see and are very happy to provide it. I really like watching good low-budget films
because it forces the makers to be more creative with their ideas and the
implementation. We should support film
makers like these if we want to see more of this type of thing produced. There definitely needs to be more Manborg in
our lives.
-Review by Michelle Kisner
