Promo Posters Continue to LIE!

Manborg
2011

Someone should have warned me this was Canadian...

It's never as good as the promo poster, is it?

I thought this was going to be like Kung Fury and it actually had good reviews (which I now attribute to bad taste and cash payments). Alas, it was more like some geek's wet dream come to life - and poorly orchestrated.

And so we find ourselves fighting the dark forces of Draculon and his Hell army: cheesy CGI, bad masks and worse dialogue. Early in the film, a soldier is killed and his body taken from the battlefield. Fast forward a few years and Manborg (which sounds like a Canadian sandwich) - all trussed up in ventilator tubing and a cannibalized CPU mount - comes online to a world where Nazi Hell troopers rule the impoverished, defeated dregs of humanity. He's quickly captured.

Seems the new ruling class are into gladiator games and so we meet his fellow captees/fighters, whose names I honestly don't care to remember, but unfortunately do. The standout guy is #1 Man, an Asian male character who someone thought would be cooler with a voice-over track. (He wasn't.) Then there's Mina and her brother (who's either illiterate or near-sighted). The movie was almost over before I realized Mina is supposed to be Mina Harker (and a convert named "Lucy/Shadow Mega" is of course Westenra).

Your freedom is in the hands of these dorks.

They get sent to some kind of battle arena, where the others discover that Manborg is actually semi-useful. Eventually they escape, but not before we're subjected to the awkward pining of Hell's number two man (The Baron), for Mina. This was meant to be humorously awkward but it was really just painfully unnecessary.

The Baron just wants you to see the man inside...you know, if you survive and all.

By the way, I don't remember seeing one minority (other than #1 Man) in this whole movie. However, once out of occupied territory, they manged to hook up with an inarticulate midget because...it's a horrible post-apocalyptic B-movie with a bunch of pilfered characters and stereotypes. Enter Dr. Scorpius as holo-mentor to Manborg and apparently, conduit to his dead brother. No really. It was that bad. Scorpius admits to unleashing the armies of Hell using what looked like C+ programming. I'll buy that.

So the break back into Draculon's headquarters, end up in the arena again, and the boss fight between Dracs and Borgie happens. Unmemorable.