It is the far future and the massed forces of Draculon (Adam Brooks) have wiped out billions of humans, leaving the oceans red with blood and the cities devastated. However, there are still pockets of resistance fighting back, and one soldier (Matthew Kennedy) caught up in the middle of a battle finds himself rather too close for comfort to the evil mastermind. He watches as his Sarge is drained of blood by Draculon, then is held up helplessly by the enemy and riddled with laser fire, left to die on the muddy battlefield. However, he remains alive long enough for mysterious surgeons to take his body and rebuild it, enhancing it with armour and weaponry to create a combination of man and machine... Manborg!
Come the twenty-first century the in thing to do with genre movie makers was to wear your influences on your sleeve, most often the work of John Carpenter, and there was something of that in this tiny budget effort from the Canadian Astron-6 collective. They were dedicated to reheating the entertainments from their youth with a modern, some would say post-modern, spin, and so it was after a number of short projects they crept closer to a feature with this hour-long spoof of all those post-apocalypse flicks that littered the video shelves of your local rental emporium in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, but after that were relegated to history. Though not if these guys had anything to say about it, for them these cheapo epics were worth another look.
Although you imagine they would prefer you watched their endeavours if not first then at least with some preference, they rather depended on the audience having grown up with the same influences they did, so it would really help if you had seen at least a few of those movies where some action hero would take on ten attackers at once, millions of bullets were fired, if it was taking place in a future dystopia so much the better, and so forth. This did mean a large group of that audience were going to be turned off Manborg immediately since they were not in on the joke and the way Astron-6 made a virtue of their lack of spending money (this reputedly cost a thousand dollars!) to craft effects and makeup even those originals might have balked at, yet it was the sense of humour that was the saving grace.
The title character gets thrown into a jail by the baddies where he meets a motley crew who will become his allies as they fight back, both in a Roman gladiatorial arena and when they manage to better the forces of Draculon. They included Justice (Conor Sweeney), who may be Australian in homage to the Mad Max series, it's difficult to tell, his sister Mina (Meredith Sweeney), both of them well-trained in combat, and best of all the Hong Kong martial arts tribute #1 Man (Ludwig Lee) who spends the entire movie both stripped to the waist and dubbed by a butch-sounding American voice (!). Well, everyone was going to have their favourite, and Manborg had his fans as he fumbles his way to understanding his awesome new powers, which include a machine gun arm that never runs out of ammunition.
The villains were worth a mention too, especially the ridiculous (although that word is relative in a film such as this) Baron (Adam Brooks) who seems set up to be a formidable foe until he inadvertently falls in love with Mina who feels nothing but contempt for him, even bringing her flowers at one point in a curiously endearing trait for a despicable tyrant, just one example of the subversive but goofy jokiness on display. The action sequences, plentiful as they were, are no less wacky, taking the concept of gore and bloodshed to ludicrous degrees as stop motion monsters are blasted to pieces and the enemy troops bring new meaning to the phrase cannon fodder. Naturally it all ended in a massive showdown (or as massive as Astron-6 could afford) as Draculon is finally confronted by our cyborg hero, and the purposefully overripe dialogue was the source of many well-observed laughs. The best thing you could say about Manborg was that with a few tweaks it could have been played entirely straight - but it wouldn't have been half as amusing. Electro-music (natch) by Brian Wiacek.
