Robo Vampire

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Hong Kong / USA • 1988 • 90m •

• Directed by: Godfrey Ho. • Starring: Robin Mackay, Nian Watts, Harry Myles, Joe Browne, Nick Norman, George Tripos, David Borg, Diana Byrne, Alan Drury, Paul John Stanners, Sorapong Chatree, Ernst Mausser, Kent Wills. • Music by: Ian Wilson.

Narcotics agent Tom Wilde is given a second chance at life after being shot and killed. In a futuristic experiment, agent Wilde is returned to life as an Android Robot. He is sent on a very dangerous mission into the depths of the golder Triangle to rescue Sophie, a beautiful undercover agent who has been captured by the evil drug warlord Mr. Young and his inhuman creation the Vampire Beast.

Review:

The title Robo Vampire is something of a misnomer. At no point in this movie is there a robot vampire. Robot vs. Vampires would be more accurate, though the robot is actually a cyborg and the "vampires" are undead creatures that look and act more like zombies, move by hopping around, and are summoned with offerings of drugs. Oh, and they're led by a Gorilla man who shoots fireworks out of his sleeves and a "ghost witch" who may or may not actually be dead. Anyway, they're all employed by a drug syndicate to kill narcotics agents. And somehow, all of this makes much, much less sense than this description would imply.

Robo Vampire is a movie completely devoid of logic or coherence. There is nothing even resembling continuity. Most of the scenes have no connection to each other, no real transitions in between, and if you showed them out of order, it would barely make a difference. Characters appear with no introduction, disappear with no explanation, and occasionally seem to change from White to Asian and back between shots. The scene in which the cyborg first appears does a slow fade from him being activated in the lab to him throttling two soldiers in a forest. Then the movie just forgets about him for a while. Later he's shot with a rocket launcher, and before the smoke has even cleared, he's back on the operating table.

If it seems like Robo Vampire was stitched together from several completely unrelated movies, that's because it totally was. Large portions were lifted from a Thai action thriller, combined with hastily shot new footage and effects shots from some the director's previous films, then atrociously dubbed. And I do mean atrociously. You've got love a line like "Orientals are a stubborn people" in a movie written and directed by a Chinese man. Apparently, directorwriter Godfrey Ho made a career of cranking out frankenfilms like this. His IMDB page lists more than twenty credits for 1988 alone, which gives you an idea just how much time and effort went into this.

Supposedly this movie had a budget of $2.5 million, but it looks like made with about $90, a camcorder, and some off the shelf Halloween costumes. The effects are cheap and unconvincing, the same empty warehouse and riverbank keep showing up again and again, and the robot is clearly the work of a sewing machine. There are a few relatively competent fights and shootouts, which obviously came from another movie. The action scenes with the robot and the vampires mostly look like the result of the editor having a seizure while the actors flail and hop around.

In fact, this whole movie is essentially the cinematic equivalent of a seizure. Or maybe a really bad acid trip. Heaven knows that with the constant references to drugs in this movie the filmmakers must have been on some themselves. I don't know what audience this was intended for, or how it could possibly have made any money, but the fact that this director made 149 other movies of roughly equal quality is enough to fill me with deep foreboding.

Review by williampsamuel from the Internet Movie Database.

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