Robo Vamp

What do you get when you put two completely unrelated films together? You get the incomprehensible mess known as Robo Vampire, that's what! Seriously, this film is two films, one what basically incorporated an earlier film to pad out the film they were making. Robo Vampire is what they were making and I am not sure what the other film was, but it was obviously a film that did not feature any robot army men or vampires. Then again, the Robo Vampire portion of the film does not really feature any vampires either as it features what appear to be zombies and a ghost woman!

The story, oh boy, this is going to be a tough one. Seems there is a drug war going on and there are inexplicably zombies/vampires around so the drug dealers get the incredible idea to use these creatures to stop the drug agents from stopping them! Well, the drug agents create a cyborg to combat the vampires! Meanwhile, an agent is kidnapped after some priest who was hoarding cocaine was killed and another agent is sent to rescue her having a completely separate adventure than the vampires or the robot resides in!

The film is all over the place as it is a mashup of two films so one minute you are watching a robot battling hopping zombies and the next you are watching two people jumping out of a cable car. Not sure why they decided to fuse these two films together, but you do get a rather interesting mess to view.

So, this film is not good, but at least it's not boring. I mean, you start getting tired of a scene and then you are violently hurled into another completely random scene! The robot in the title looks like crap, basically a dude wearing tinfoil and oven mitts or something and he carries around a big gun that he can make come to him and that is about the extent of his powers. Not sure why they felt the need to deploy vampires against him as the rocket launcher took him out! Just a total mess of a film that relies on the viewer being able to meld two films that have nothing to do with each other together. Not an easy feat...

The reason this movie isn't at the top of the "worst ever" list is simply that it's not yet as well-known (or infamous) as "Plan 9 From Outer Space," "Manos," or "The Beast of Yucca Flats." This is one of those movies that makes you gape in disbelief. The ludicrous storyline pits Robo Warrior (who's dressed in floppy silver coveralls, motorcycle goggles, and a car radio antenna) against a cadre of traditional Chinese hopping vampires. The vampires are being controlled by drug dealers, naturally enough, who employ a Taoist monk to help them create a Vampire Beast. Said beast is a guy in a Mandarin robe and a gorilla mask! Then the Beast's dead finacee, a girl in a see-through nightie, shows up, and the pushers decide the couple should go ahead and get married... But that's only half of the movie. There's also ample footage cut in from another movie, a generic Asian-made shoot 'em up. In my favorite scene, the slow-walking Robo chases the slow-hopping Beast in the pokiest slow-speed chase since OJ and the LAPD. If Ed Wood had lived to see "RoboCop" and "A Chinese Ghost Story," this is the movie he might have made. It's that bad. And it's that good. Scour the bargain bins for this one.

Convincing a friend to watch ROBO VAMPIRE is an exercise in trust. It's near impossible to explain in any great detail what's so fun about it. It's something that has to be experienced first-hand. I had zero knowledge of what to expect when I first sat down to watch this beauty. It was one of 50 public domain Z-grade movies in a cheap collection I grabbed for $10. Then an Internet search brought me to the cover art of Robocop clutching what I assumed to be the titular vampire in the foreground while the world exploded behind them. I was sold, if cautious. What I proceeded to watch was beyond words. I was often so wracked with laughter that I was forced to pause the movie so I wouldn't miss a minute of it. It's hard to put the plot of ROBO VAMPIRE into words with any sort of confidence but I'll try my best to give you an idea. It's about heroin smuggling in Asia. There's a drug kingpin who's grown tired of a particular "anti-drug agent" (I'll assume he means DEA) named Tom, and he's hired a Taoist to train vampires to handle it. Tom dies in a bust gone wrong and, before his corpse has time to cool, he's turned into a robot cop. A sort of…Robo-Tom. Meanwhile, in another potentially unrelated storyline, another "anti-drug agent" named Sophie is taken hostage by what may or may not be the same drug operation and a special team is sent to bring her home.

When the movie was finally over and I had endured the hurricane of pure insanity that was ROBO VAMPIRE, I found some info that gave some context to what I had just watched. There's a very distinct feeling that you're watching two entirely separate movies play out through ROBO VAMPIRE and that's because you essentially are. It was a product of Filmark International Ltd and producer Tomas Tang, who would shot a bunch of random martial arts footage and insert it into half-finished movies to create a cinematic Frankenstein. Once you're aware of that, it's impossible not to notice. It didn't click with me the first time I watched it but now I can't help but notice the whole Robo-Tom plot thread never once crosses over with the Sophie rescue thread. Not a single character crosses the border between stories. ROBO VAMPIRE is about 65% rescue and 35% robot versus vampires. This is all wrong. It needs to be 75% robot/vampires. Maybe more. The rescue operation has its moments. There's a great stunt dive when Sophie does a running jump through a window and we see a stocky, hair man in a bad wig and nightgown nail the landing. There's plenty of bloodless gunfights and martial arts battles with stuntmen throwing themselves around. The dubbing is generic action movie dialogue and characters are interchangeable because no one is anything more than one-dimensional. It serves its purpose but the real gold is to be found in the rare occasions when we rejoin Robo-Tom and the vampires.

Where to start?! Well not that anyone will be surprised but Robo-Tom looks nothing like Robocop. He's a no-budget rip-off, covered in silver-painted safety padding with goggles and a helmet. The vampires wear some sort of traditional Chinese dress and are at least given a little makeup to give the impression of decay on their faces. And they hop! These vampires can only movie via hopping, jumping, leaping, or straight up teleporting. Their attacks include corrosive smoke and bottle rockets fired from their sleeves. In addition to the hordes of regular vampires, there's one super vampire of which the Taoist is super proud. You can tell he's more powerful than the rest because the character has a gorilla's face (i.e. a gorilla Halloween mask). The super vampire is also in love with a ghost woman who is mad because she was hoping to live eternally in the afterlife with her beloved only to watch him become a vampire slave. The Taoist agrees to marry the two together as long as they are under his command. Meanwhile, Robo-Tom proves to be effective against vampires but still can't handle a direct bazooka blast. That's totally fine though because, even when he's melted to a puddle of liquid aluminum foil, all he needs is a little soldering a maybe a new battery before he's back on the beat. ROBO VAMPIRE is totally bonkers and, even when there's no robot or vampires on screen, never let's you get bored. The best news of all? There's two "sequels" out there from Tomas Tang that I haven't seen yet.

Bucket list updated.

Tomas Tang launches yet another cinematic stercolith onto the bewildered general public in this absolutely insane Robocop inspired/hopping vampires/action/love story(!!!) Well, to describe the end result as not making any sense would be a gross understatement; In fact, watching this you'll very quickly find yourself rendered mouth agape in gormless disbelief as the random on screen events flash by before your bleary eyes! But, let this not put you off viewing this cinematic mess, for despite the completely nonsensical nature of it all, it is strangely captivating in a very bizarre way....much akin to being hypnotised in fact! So, what the hell is exactly going on in this? Well, in all honesty your guess is about as good as mine and I've just only just finished watching it! From what I could discern, the story centres around a bunch of drug smugglers who take the unusual step of employing a corrupt Taoist priest/sorcerer to resurrect vampires in order to stash their drugs inside them(!) But wait, for it gets even more bizarre! One of the vampires raised called the 'Vampire Beast' (on account of the cheap fx gorilla mask the relevant actor is wearing), is the ex lover of a lady ghost who shows up, none to happy that her boyfriend is being used so thus preventing the two of them from passing to the afterlife together. So what does the word 'Robo' in the films title pertain to you might ask? Well, in yet another bizarre plot tangent, an American agent is killed by the Vampire Beast and is brought back to life as a cheap looking Robo-Cop clone in order to battle the forces of evil. Yes, this is truly bewildering stuff that really needs to be seen to be believed.......the only trouble being that even whilst watching this, you STILL won't believe it!

It wasn't until the end of this film that I realized it was essentially two movies, both of which on their own could have qualified as pure tripe. One is the the robot vs. vampire story that the title suggests. The other is a more straightforward good guys vs. drug gang movie. Although I have only seen the movie once, I believe you will find that the characters from the one plot line NEVER appear in the exact same shot with the characters from the other plot line. It really is two movies, edited together.

This movie is an absolute riot. I highly recommend it. The first time I saw the robot, I laughed so hard a friend had to pause the film to let me recover. The hopping vampires...oh my, they are perhaps the silliest things to appear in film since the 1950's. The whole thing makes Dr. Who look like it was done by ILM.

For those connoisseurs of bad movies, please get this film. You will not regret it.