Manborg is a low budget science fiction film that was made in Canada for about a thousand dollars. Canadian dollars which are usually not worth as much as the US dollar but there you go. The movie really looks better than you might expect for that cash. That total also means no one got paid which is a great cost saving. I'm sure there are plenty of film studio's staying up late trying to figure out how to get more people to work for free. Steven Kostanski is the writer, producer, director and special effects guy. Most of his credits are for special effect work. He directed another movie after this one and 4 shorts. It took him three years to put Manborg together. A year of shooting and two more of postproduction and the movie was released in 2012. The story's about the invasion of Earth by demons from hell. Some soldiers are killed and one body is dragged off screen. We jump several years into a shitty future after the demons, under the control of Count Draculon, have taken over. The body that disappeared wakes as a cyborg, who later dubs himself Manborg, and finds he's the prisoner of the Count. His memory is gone and he doesn't remember that it was the Count who killed him.
Manborg is forced to fight in a stadium with the other prisoners against some ugly CGI beasts and guys in rubber suits on hover bikes. There's plenty of yakkin' and fightin' before Manborg and his fellow prisoners, the trio in the picture on the right above, beat the monsters and later, at great cost of life and limb, destroy the Count. The movie doesn't use many practical sets, they shoot on green screen and put stuff in the background. It doesn't always look that good but most scenes are watchable. The acting is all over the place but mostly amateurish and played for laughs. The silly story and enthusiasm almost make it work. It's more for the fan of low budget movies with monsters and shit like that. It will have it's champions because of what it is. Not something I would want to buy now that I have seen it. I might want to watch it once again but I wouldn't need to.
Gangs Of The Dead is a better made movie than our first selection but the story is pretty much what we've seen before and none of hte characters are likeable so it not quite as entertaining as you might hope. It's a 2006 zombie film that takes place in a shitty part of Los Angeles. It's only got a limited amount of CGI and while most of it is about average there's a really nice shot of a meteor crashing into a bridge. I'm guessing that's where most of the effects budget went. That, or they got someone to work for free. The meteor unleashes something that turns the dead into zombies and they attack everyone they encounter. Everyone alive. Two groups of gang members, one black and one hispanic, show up at Reggie Bannister's hideout in a shitty warehouse to do some illegal business. They weren't both supposed to be there at the same time and being motherfuckers they get all bitchy and confrontational. The cops were waiting, tipped of by an informant, and soon enough they come racing to the scene only to be interupted by a swarm of zombie hobos. Reggie is killed by a cop van driven into the warehouse. The gangs are trapped with a couple of cops. None of the cops were as unlikeable as the gang members but they aren't that likeable either. By the end of the movie pretty much everyone is dead. There's nothing exceptional about the movie, it's kind of average, like something you might pass the time with on the SyFy channel. It scores a 3.4 on the IMDb and it's probably a movie that is a bit better than that. I wouldn't need to buy one.
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