Manborg Review: A Cultural Turducken On A Budget
So I got my DVD of “Manborg” from Astron-6 in the mail recently and watched it. I’m not going to exactly be able to say if it’s good or bad here because, well . . . think Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.
Manborg is a giant Turducken of 80’s and 90’s direct-to-video-cheese stereotypes and ideas compiled into one film. Hell invades earth, soldier is brought back as a cyborg, attacks bad guys with team of diverse friends, stuff happens. It’s got stop-motion robots, the titular Manborg, fake poor dubbing for one actor, would-be Billy Idol with guns, a knife-throwing girl, lovelorn demons, and more. The look, the elements, the ideas are things we’ve seen before if we’re familiar with the 80’s and the 90’s cheapie videos.
This was, by the way, made in 2011.
Also it was made for about $1000. Really.
Manborg is a weird, chaotic monument to a very strange time in video/movie making and it was done for the price of a decent windows laptop by some people who knew exactly what they were doing.
Is it good? Well that’s actually kind of besides the point – “good” doesn’t really come into it, though I myself wish there had been some more plot. However the point is that it is a giant pile of things folks like myself remember all to well, and movies we don’t believe we once enjoyed. If you’ve ever seen the spate of cheesy RoboCop ripoffs, or bad action films with vampire/zombie/cyborgs, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s all there.
So right now you don’t care good or bad. You know if you want to buy it.
I’m glad I did.
Along with the film is a fake trailer for “BioCop,” a not-real movie about a policeman who becomes a living biological weapon. It contrasts with the good-natured cheese of Manborg by being a wittily nasty parody of the genres of Mutant Hero/RoboCop films and buddy cop films. The basic conceit of the trailer is that being a mutant toxic hero would be terrible and horrible, and its pairing with the overdone buddy cop genre is cruelly hilarious.
This little extra contrasts well with the good-natured Manborg, diving straight into parody, and adding an extra kick to the value.
Worth it? Well, again you’ll know.
Me, I bought it, and most importantly, I keep thinking just what devoted people can do with $1000. Maybe Manborg is not just part man part machine, but all role model . . .
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
