Manborg

This is a "B" movie all the way. It is crazy and looks like it was done as a university project. I really enjoyed it. There is little gore, little money spent on effects ( there had better not have been as the effects were laughable) There was a lot of very imaginative stop motion and fun work with blue screen, every thing about this movie was cheese! not blue cheese as it did not stink, it is just... home made like. Lots of fun for non movie snobs who like movies that have no right being appealing but are. This is one of those. you can not help but to like it. Effects are about a 2 acting about a 2 but because it is done on purpose and is like a living cartoon I would bump that to 7. This movie is over the top and silly, everyone seems to be having a good time.

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.

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."

Imagine an awe-inspiring vision of an inferno descending onto Earth, with machines and demons decimating the last vestiges of mankind. Such an apocalypse brought to life on the big screen could be something brooding and chilling. It could be epic.

This is not that movie.

Manborg is a cheap, silly, ridiculous little film, and it knows it. It has action, certainly, and plenty of gnarly bloodshed and gratuitous special effects. However, the delivery of the action, dialogue, and the overall story is so over-the-top, so silly, and so cheesy that it's hilarious. Most of the characters here sound like they came from a Mortal Kombat video game, thanks to the overdubbed dialogue. One character even tries to fight MK style. One lady fights like she came straight out of an anime, complete with cheap sound effects and streaky lines behind her. Most other special effects look like they came from the original Doom PC game, because they are that cheap. The film is short and pretty fast, but more importantly, it made me laugh pretty often.

The story for this is not an inherently bad idea: I kinda do wish somebody in Hollywood would make a big-scale apocalypse story like this, with the actual forces of Hell being unleashed on the planet (they totally blew it when they adapted Doom). If this same movie was handled with a big budget, big stars, and a distinguished director, it probably would have been awesome. If this movie was a video game instead, it would have been awesome as well. But as it is, the film plays things well within its limitations, keeping things purposefully small-scale and cheap, and simultaneously silly. There are scenes that reminded me a lot of other movies or games - The Terminator, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, The Running Man, Fist of the North Star, and other stuff all came to mind. Regardless, the film is pretty fun, even if it lacks depth or originality.

This film is very cheaply shot and edited, with gaudy and weird special effects that looked like they came from the stone age. Acting is very silly and over-the-top, and with dubbed dialogue, it's rendered even more hilarious. Writing is very silly. This production uses some very cheap sets, props, and costumes. The music score tries so hard to be cool.

If you're looking for something awesomely cheesy and funny, this film will satisfy.

2.5/5 (Entertainment: Good | Story: Marginal | Film: Awful)

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.