Movie Review: ROBO-VAMPIRE

Directed by "Joe Livingstone"
Hong Kong; 1988

"What the fuck?” “What the fuck?!?”
ROBO-VAMPIRE is one of those kinds of movies. Y’know, that lovely, oddball sort of celluloid beast that can totally confound and thrill you with its unbelievable awfulness. An awfulness that, incredibly, blooms into a kind of ironic pop-art surrealism against all B-movie probability. This is the kind of thing I live for. ROBO-VAMPIRE is totally dumb, completely socially useless, a blatant rip-off, a frankenstienish flick cobbled together from at least two completely different movies (if not more), but it seethes with beautiful weirdness. As for the “plot”, well, here goes: It seems to be about a cabal of caucasian drug smugglers in Asia who employ evil Taoist priests to protect their racket by means of hopping vampires. To combat this, the caucasian cops transform one of their fallen comrades into a cyborg hopping-vampire-killing-machine. Meanwhile the Taoist priest has his hands full as his lead monkey mask faced hopping vampire’s dead fiancée returns from beyond the grave to wage topless ghost revenge against him for seperating her from her loved one. Meanwhile meanwhile, a school teacher has been kidnapped by aforementioned drug barons and must be rescued by actors from an unrelated Thai film. Much shooting and running and exploding ensues. Not to mention hopping. Lots of hopping. Got all that? Good, me neither. This movie doesn’t make a llama’s lick of sense. It veers haphazardly from one scene to the next with no pretension to such high-falutin’ values like having a “story”. Pshaw! You don’t need a story when you’ve got a Robocop rip blasting away at magically disappearing Chinese vampires and hot boob-baring ghost-chicks! I mean, really, what else could you possibly want?

Available as a sketchy looking but affordable DVD double feature from Deimos/BCI.