962. Manborg (2011)

Starring: Matthew Kennedy, Adam Brooks, Meredith Sweeney

Director: Steven Kostanski

Running Time: 62 mins

Manborg is a Canadian film about a man who, after being killed by the leader of the evil nazi vampires during the last war on Earth, awakes to find himself transformed into a half-man, half-robot, leading him to unite with fellow rebels and use his new powers to bring down the tyranny of these nazi vampires.

Well, with a title like ‘Manborg’, this was to be expected. This is a largely boring, cheesy, unintelligible, badly-acted and poorly made movie that has little to get you interested or entertained. However, it teeters on the edge of the so-bad-it’s-good category, because it’s just not quite clear whether it’s taking itself too seriously or not (probably not).

First things first, the reason that this film isn’t as bad as some of the other terrible low-budget films of recent years is because its extreme stupidity makes it less irritating, because, if you get into the right frame of mind, you don’t have to take it at all seriously, and it can be a bit of silly fun when you reach that point.

However, with this film, because the level of seriousness is so unclear, it takes ages to decipher what it’s trying to do, with some more dramatic and dark opening scenes clearly having no comedy apart from the low-budget image, and it’s not until you get to the latter, more action-packed stages that you start to realise that this isn’t so serious.

Despite that, this is still a really bad film. The acting is terribly wooden, and there is some seriously weird post-sync problem with all of the actors; their voices just don’t seem to fit with how they’re moving their mouths, a strange but consistently irritating issue. What’s more is that the special effects, despite being generically low-budget ($10,000 for this film), aren’t very nice to look at, because there’s too much rubbish CGI that could have been replaced by more entertaining practical effects, which means that this not only has an annoying story, but also a frustrating on screen appearance.

In fact, the story continually worsens as the film goes on. It starts off as a silly Terminator parody, but by the end, it turns into this terribly cheesy action movie, where the fights are tedious and have no stakes in them whatsoever, whilst the dialogue becomes even more painful to listen to, including lines such as: ‘the power of the human will shall never be obsolete!’. Yeah.

Overall, this gets a 2.3, because despite having the potential of a so-bad-it’s-good movie, this is a simply dull, irritating and badly-made film that you will forget within five seconds of watching it.