After we just kicked off our Year of the Knockoff with our look at the wonderfully under budgeted and under talented Ator: The Fighting Eagle (you can hear our talk about it here), I decided it would be fun to dive into the wake of another successful film and see what was floating back there.
Having just watching a midnight showing of Robocop, I decided to take a chance on a film that was suggested to me by Kevin (AKA the guy who was responsible for giving me the wonderful Year of the Western list), 1988's Robo Vampire.
First let's establish what people like about Robocop:
- It has a very dark sense of humor with its over the top news stories, commercials for products (the 6000 SUX can get 8.2 miles to the gallon), and its sexploitative older man saying 'I'd buy that for a dollar!' It is poking its thumb right in the eye of 80's decadent excess and capitalism.
- The practical effects work of the Robocop suit itself and the brutally effective shots of violence (no pun intended).
- The ED-209 falling down a set of steps and then making animal noises.
- Kurtwood Smith as Clarence Boddicker.
- Peter Weller's performance. He is able to make your believe that he is part machine in the way he moves and interacts with others.
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| For the most part. |
Here's what we get in Robo Vampire:
- A plan from a drug kingpin to smuggle drugs in the coffins of vampires (specifically Jiangshi, Chinese hopping vampires. Check out El Goro's way thorough and thoughtful explanation of the Jiangshi. Highly recommended!)
- This same person gets mad that his smuggling business keeps getting interrupted by law enforcement, so he decides to train a special vampire to just kill the drug cops.
- Once the special vampire is trained (and is wearing a gorilla mask for no real good reason), the kingpin finds out that a ghost is trying to ruin his plan.
- This ghost was previously a girl in love with the vampire before he turned and they made a suicide pact in order to be together forever in the afterlife. The kingpin allows them to get married only if they agree to work for him. They agree and are wed.
- One of the drug cops gets killed and his team decides that they can turn him into android warrior in order to keep fighting drug lords. There is very little debate about whether they can or should do this.
- Somewhere along the way a robot cop will fight hopping vampires.
Robocops? Hopping vampires? Gunfights? This film has to have some kind of a budget in order to make all of this work, right? Behold.
I will give the filmmaker accidental credit for the music sounding like something out of Street Fighter and I appreciate the effect it took to make each robotic step sound like a thud (even while on the sand).
This film is actually the combination of two films (Godfrey Ho, the director, seems to have a track record of doing this) with a lot of the drug smuggling and crime portions separate from the vampires, ghost, and robot cop portions. As much as it doesn't make any narrative sense, I kind of appreciate the bold no cares given approach of just terribly dubbing over whatever dialogue you want in a scene in order to make it connect to the next one. It doesn't make for the most satisfying film watching experience, but I don't think Robo Vampire cares if it makes sense. Just get to more of the sweet sweet badly edited fight sequences.
I think I may have said this on the podcast but I want to state that I think I enjoy these out of left field trash heap films more now than I used to because I find it hard to be suprised by any mainstream film. This is partly my fault because as I am interested in what's coming out and so I read up on it and in the process likely spoil some of the initial discovery that should come with the first time you watch a film. I also blame the marketing as it does a great job of showing a few key things that should be held back to surprise the audience but want to make sure the audience knows what they should be excited about. A film like Robo Vampire has no footprint (outside of Kevin and a handful of people on the internet that have found it before I did) and so I can honestly be satisfied that I have no real idea where it was going. Granted, I don't think the film knew where it was going either, but it had just enough sparklers and bad edits to get to the finish line.
Steve and I asked this question about Ator: The Fighting Eagle, did it learn anything from the film it was trying to copy? I will give Robo Vampire a very small yes.
Here's what it kind of sorta got right from Robocop:
- Crime was so bad that law enforcement was desperate for anything to turn the tide.
- A fallen officer becomes the subject of an operation to turn him into a android.
- Robo Warrior has a brief flashback to his life before involving an argument he had with his wife. (Side note: this occurs as he happens to see the ghost and the super vampire start to consummate their marriage. He leaves them in peace. They then decide to attack him for.... reasons?)
- There is a lot of over the top violence that looks halfway decent at times (budget considered).
- A very abrupt ending.
I am now going to use three metrics that I am going try to apply to this film and to any of the other films we cover during The Year Of The Knockoff:
On a scale of 1-10, how close did it adhere to the film it wanted to knock off?
I will give it a 3 as it did have a guy in a suit attempting his best to mimic the the slow robotic movements of Peter Weller. The crazy dubbed in sound effects kept me smiling the entire time.
On the Ator Scale, was it better or worse than Ator?
Production wise, this was way worse than Ator. However, it is rare for a film to make me laugh by myself while was watching it, and Robo Vampire did do that. At least 3 times I found myself busting up. Had I not been as entertained, this film would have been a complete waste of time.
Would you recommend this film to anyone else?
There are only a handful of people I know that would go out of their way to watch a film like Robo Vampire. I can't recommend it for most people, but the few of you out there that are tickled by the idea of a guy that looks like a silver oven mitt that is supposed to be a robot fighting hopping vampires that disappear only with the help of a quick edit, then this is truly a feast to enjoy.
Robo Vampire is a bad movie that badly tries to cash in on Robocop. None of it really works but that's probably why I like it. I like living in a world where someone looks at an incomplete drug trafficking film and says to themself, 'You know what this film needs? Shitty Robocop and vampires.'
Bonus:
The whole film is available to watch for free on YouTube!
You may still ask for your money back.
If you guys have any other suggestions for knockoffs that Steve and I should watch, let me know in the comments below or on our Facebook page.
