The synopsis of Manborg provides a certain level of pre-emptive disappointment, particularly if you’ve never heard of Steven Kostanski, or his sometimes-writing partner Jeremy Gillespie. Their gruesome tale is set in the wake of a great war between man and hell in which the evil leader Count Draculon reigns and ‘with every passing hour, another nation crumbles’ to his technological might, army of monsters and incomparable evil. After watching Draculon kill his brother, a soldier wakes from death to find himself half man, half machine, in an apocalyptic and hopeless future swarming with demons. Quickly taken prisoner, the self-named Manborg is recruited to fight hellbeasts to the death, Gladiator style, alongside a lethal motley crew of cellmates. He must fight to keep himself and his new friends alive, though ultimately all he truly wants is…revenge.
It sounds awful. And, actually, it is awful. But it’s also something else altogether. Let me put it another way.
Manborg is like the mewling, blood-drenched Troma-esque hybrid-spawn, fathered by Terminator, birthed by Mortal Kombat, raised by Grindhouse horror and hanging out with the wrong crowd consisting of badly dubbed vintage Kung Fu movies, The Lost Boys, Mad Max, Nazis and the vampires from Buffy, all on VHS.
It sounds AWESOME. And, actually, it is awesome. But it’s also something else altogether. Or at least something more. Let me put it another way.
Astron 6 is a Canadian production company/brain trust made up of, in addition to Gillespie and Kostanski, Matthew Kennedy, Connor Sweeney and Adam Brooks. Collectively they are five mentally questionable individuals responsible for creating a film (or two, if you watch the equally indescribable Father’s Day, produced in the same year) of revolting and marvellous paradox; taking the terrible and making it pretty glorious. In Manborg, the narrative is inconsistent and poorly thought out, the acting hurtles wildly between wooden and cartoonish (the fantastic Matthew Kennedy as Manborg and Connor Sweeney as Justice respectively), steered vaguely by the awful script, and the cinematography is appalling, with low budget green screening, out of time and unrealistic non-diegetic sound, crass editing and Art Attack CGI. The result is glowing; a convincingly and hilariously brilliant homage to a badly aged era and an exploration of everything that can be wrong in cinema. Much like the Diana and Blackbird toy cameras, which at their time were cheap and nasty contraptions rife with the imperfections they are now celebrated for, Astron 6 celebrates all the cinematic drawbacks of cheap and nasty 70s and 80s cinema and, in its celebration, makes it utterly wonderful. It is both demented and genius.
The pitfall of a film like this is to be found in its potential to be taken seriously by the average viewer, or one who is poorly versed in so-bad-it’s-good 80s sci-fi, who will despise rather than applaud its heroic dreadfulness. There are also those who will hate it to begin with and adore it by the end, going from one extreme to the other during a sudden moment of sparkling comprehension that this film cannot be serious. As the latter viewer, my glowing moment happened when my laptop caused the film to freeze at the exact moment a head exploded. I stared at the incomprehensible, unrealistic, vile gore and my head exploded too as I realised Kostanski had been taking me for a ride. The problem here is that with a running time of around an hour, by the time you realise he’s not taking himself seriously and have settled down to enjoy it without cringing, it’s over.
Premiering at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and officially selected for Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, Lund in Sweden, Sci-Fi Film Festival in London and Toronto’s After Dark Film Festival, Manborg has since been picked up for distribution by Raven Banner, a spectacular boutique agency responsible for A Little Bit Zombie (Casey Walker, 2012) and Deep Dark Canyon (Abe Lee & Silver Tree, 2012) amongst others. Its successful screenings reminded its audience that bad acting and worse graphics don’t necessarily limit the brilliance of a film or the imagination of its creators.
More than that, it is…under the surface…a very cleverly made film, superbly balancing the level of low-budget badness needed to be true to itself whilst retaining audience interest. Fans of the cataclysmic The Room (2003) by the man and the legend Tommy Wiseau will revel in everything cheesy that Manborg has to offer and be left foaming at the mouth hoping for more, whilst anyone with a little love for Rodriguez or Roth will at the very least appreciate the gore. Personally, I’m sitting back and waiting for the Manborg Drinking Game to develop, and when it does (and it will), I’ll be more than happy to sit through it again and again in the name of hilarity and Captain Morgan’s rum. Cheers, babes.
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