Faux-grindhouse throwbacks are risky propositions. Sometimes I wonder if these things are just an
excuse for people to make a bad movie on purpose. If that was the makers of Manborg’s intentions,
all I can say is mission accomplished.
In the future, the world goes to war with Hell. A soldier is killed on the battlefield and
turned into a cyborg by a mad scientist. He is sent to fight in gladiator games against
Hell’s minions before banding together with a few fellow fighters to stage an
uprising.
The effects are purposely terrible, which gets old quick. It’s like the movie thinks haphazardly using
obvious greenscreen effects is automatically hilarious. As a result, the whole thing looks like a
shitty Sega CD game. The stop motion
animation is better than the crappy CGI, but it's still not very good.
The dubbing is bad on purpose too, but it’s never so out
of whack that it elicits a laugh. It’s no
Kung Pow: Enter the Fist in that
department. The only laughs come from
the villain’s attempt to woo one of the women prisoners he has a crush on. It’s odd that the intentional humor works
rather well, but the calculated use of shoddy effects and low budget techniques
falls flat.
There might have been enough material here to pick and choose from to make a
three-minute faux grindhouse trailer. At
seventy minutes, it’s all rather insufferable.
If you stick around after the credits, you’ll be treated to a fake
trailer for Biocop, which looks like a cross between Maniac Cop and The
Incredible Melting Man. It contains as
many laughs in three minutes as Manborg did in seventy, which pretty much
proves my point. At least Biocop knew
when to quit.
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