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.

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."

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.

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)

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.