Robo Vampire

If robo vampire doesn't make you laugh till you cry then you have no sense of humor. Everything about it is so bad, it begs for you to watch again to catch even more plot holes, or at least a couple more laughs.

The movie claims to be about some drug agent who gets killed and is then reborn as a vampire-fighting robo warrior. But really the movie revolves around a plot about a kidnapped(and somehow beautiful) female agent named Sophie, with a robotic story planted on.

Everything is purely cheese in this movie. Robo-Warriors' costume looks like something you'd see in an elementary school play. He fights vampires that do everything but suck blood( they hop, they appear out of the ground, they shoot fireballs out of their arms). A third subplot about a half-naked ghost chick is completely confusing and terrible. The best part is when the blonde haired female drug agent Sophie jumps out of a window from enemies, and her stunt double is clearly a gray haired man in a dress(!).

On top of all of this you have to remember that the only reason that there are vampires in this movie is because the drug dealers hired them!

I don't care what anyone says, movies this bad should be cherished, and MUST be seen to be believed.

A drug-lord recruits Chinese vampires to protect his business from government narcotics agents. When one of their people is captured, the authorities not only send in a rescue team but also create an indestructible cyborg to take on the enemy.

I knew it, I knew it! Although my copy of Robo Vampire names (blames?) someone called Joe Livingstone as director, everything I saw screamed Godfrey Ho. The insane, disjointed story (the result of two or more films badly spliced together); the crappy kung fu; the awful dubbing; the ridiculous special effects: Ho's inimitable touch was all over this nonsense.

Featuring quite possibly the worst RoboCop rip-off ever (the cyborg's suit is made from padded silver lamé), a hopping vampire in a rubber gorilla mask with fireworks up its sleeves (?!?!), a yucky scene in which a woman packs heroin inside the stomach of a dead animal, a female ghost who bares her breasts in order to distract her foes, and numerous badly stuffed dummies being thrown about in poorly choreographed fight scenes, this has to be one the most bonkers and least comprehensible efforts in Ho's canon. Consequently, it also proves to be one of his more entertaining efforts.

6.5 out of 10, rounded up 7 for IMDb.

ROBO VAMPIRE!

This one is so bad, it's good. Let's fry some brain cells together. Roll tape!

What an experience! Having watched this slice of Godfrey Ho action-trash the other day, I found myself to be both simultaneously enlightened and disgusted at just how insanely terrible and utterly scatter-brained this movie is. But best of all though, it's also incredibly entertaining. This is truly amateur alchemy in movie form and in it's own unique way is brilliant. For the uninitiated "Robo Vampire" is the hack-job work of none other than the great Godfrey Ho! A cinematic mad scientist/hack film director, whose specialty was making the MOST and the WORST martial arts films that any director ever has and he is very much the "Ed Wood of Kung Fu Cinema". The sheer awfulness of this mans body of work cannot be over-stated. Now that I've flattered Master Ho let me try to describe his movie: Robo Vampire. Upon first impression it looks like multiple movies (maybe as many as 3 different ones) have been sloppily edited and spliced together, just like many other Godfrey Ho titles seem to be, so don't expect anything in the way of a coherent plot. And as with any of Ho's movies you have their typically terrible and down-right stupid sounding dialogue (and over-dubbing it in English only makes it sound worse). But best of all is Godfrey Ho's habit of ripping-off popular American-made action films and done so in the most amateur and ham-handed way humanly imaginable. He flavored his own movies with elements that were obviously taken/plagiarized from other, better, movies. Such as "Ninja TERMINATOR" for instance. Yes, built right into the title sometimes, he made it that overtly obvious and did it often. But for ROBO Vampire, well obviously it's something of a ROBOCop rip-off. (NOTE* RoboCop was released the previous year.) If you see the artwork for this movie it literally has RoboCop's image plastered all over it, front and center, subtle. Definitely one of the most blatant examples of copyright infringement I can think of. And is that not the lamest and cheapest looking "robo suit" you've ever seen. As always, amazing production values from Team Ho! Yep, as he demonstrated for us many, many, times over the years, Godfrey Ho had a talent for making movies with a heavy hand... but had little in the way of actual talent. I also highly suspect drug use to be in the mix too, always just so damn incoherent, always.

Well now that I've wasted about an hours time, in conclusion, after having seen the unhinged brilliance that is "Robo Vampire"..... I can confidently conclude that no one else could cobble together a terrible (and incoherent) action film quite like Godfrey Ho. HE IS LEGEND. Make some more man!

Food-For-Thought: If this movie had an aroma, what would it smell like?

Off-hand I couldn't rightly say, but instinct tells me it would be a hideous amalgam of all that is highly odious. But honestly I'd love to hear some of the infernal combinations you guys could come up with. (Pinches his nose *tightly* closed.)

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.

I've seen this movie about 10 years ago (and made a comment in IMDb, which has been erased...) I could not believe my eyes when I saw the hopping vampires (though I already knew about them 'cause I first read a reference about this movie in some book about vampires and stuff) Then in some "lucky" day I found the video in a Video Club and I said to a friend of mine: "WE HAVE TO RENT IT!!!" I just rewind the tape over and over again in one final scene where "Robocop" and the leaping vampires looked like they were playing some game in the kinder garden playground! It was too hilarious.

Ed Wood compared to this is just children play... This IS the most stupid, worst, non-sense and plot less movie I ever saw in my life! In fact I'm even hesitating on how should I rate this movie... 1 or 10??