Clearly (!?) Undefined

Archives - 100 Worst Written by Capn Incredible June 24 2009

#97: Robo Vampire

Studio: Filmark International Ltd.
Directed by: Godfrey Ho
Starring: Robin Mackay, Nian Watts, Harry Myles
Release Date: 1988
Box Office Total: N/A

Why It's Awful

If anyone ever tells you Robo Vampire is a watchable movie, you should immediately report them to your local neighborhood watch. These people may be friends or family members who may attempt to convince you by describing it with delightful adjectives like "cheesy" and "kitschy". But don't believe them. Robo Vampire is the source of the most multinational pain since Lyoto Machida learned Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Robo Vampire is directed by Korean filmmaker Godfrey Ho. For those unfamiliar, allow me to briefly illuminate his career. Ho is Asia's answer to Uwe Boll, the culmination of Eastern technology, an out of control half-man half-VCR that consumes two movies and splices them into one unwatchable mess. Ho's films aren't films, they are what I used to do with the questionable portions of my cafeteria lunch when I was seven. At least fifty of the movies credited to any of his forty aliases have the word "ninja" in the title. This particular one is a brutal overdubbed remake of Robocop where all of the nouns were replaced with "drugs" and "vampires". A robot kung-fu fighting some vampires sounds like the dream marraige between "awesome" and "radical" but Ho padded the story with the high points of another, completely irrelevant mercenary movie. Neither of these plots ever intersects with the other, but they do transition back and forth between movies, sometimes in midscene.

That this movie even achieves the level of clarity usually reserved for alcohol poisoning is amazing. It's a cheap Korean knock-off of an American movie as filmed in Canada, and set somewhere in the Golden Triangle. Robo Vampire usually comes packaged as a horror movie, but almost every scene is a transitionless lurch to see how quickly it can self-destruct into another series of fists and explosions. Very few characters are given names, just moustaches, so if spending an an hour and a half distinguishing various greasy men based on their upper lips sounds like your idea of a Saturday night, then stop reading this and go enjoy your martini and movie, Tom Selleck.

Movie A centers around an arm of a drug smuggling ring that hires a Taoist warlock to aid their cause by summoning a vampire army. These vampires are kept at bay using some magical laundry tickets affixed to their foreheads. While asleep they are stuffed full of heroine and placed in coffins to be smuggled into some nameless country with an apparently thriving corpse import industry. Whatever unearthen hell Gravetopia must be is never given a name, but the movie does briefly mention the drug trade in the west, so my theory is that the bodies and the drugs are related to ACORN and the Hollywood liberal elite.

The logical continuation to summoning vampires is to summon a super vampire, and Robo Vampire does not disappoint. Shortly before the vampire boss is summoned the Taoist warlock reveals to his bosses, a dark-haired man in a business suit and a man in a blue and white "RACING" sweatshirt, that the head vampire cannot be harmed by bullets, and this is perhaps the one point the movie doesn't manage to forget later. He gives them some garlic necklaces and paper slips for protection. The ritual awakens the vampire from his slumber in a coffin full of snakes and...a hamster? The ritual is then interrupted by a ghost, a wailing woman named Christine who provokes the following dialogue:

Taoist: How dare you enter here you witch!
Christine: How dare you take my lover's corpse Taoist and turn it into a vampire beast! Now he is condemned to a living death and we can never be together in the afterlife!
Taoist: But he is from the east and you the west. How can you explain this?
Christine: Orientals are a stubborn race. Both his parents opposed our marriage. It was then that we decided if we could not be together in this life, Peter and I would be together forever in the afterlife! You have robbed us of this by turning him into a vampire beast! Now my only thought is of revenge! Now my dreams have been shattered! I hold you responsible for my misery!

The Taoist and ghost then fight for a bit and place the palms of their hands together, slowly puttering their feet back and forth below the bottom of the camera's view to give the illusion of gliding back and forth across the ground. I assume this is supposed to be some highly magical shit, because someone beneath them is shining a lamp underneath their chins and a noise plays that sounds like synthesized wind. The Taoist finishes summoning Peter, a hopping monster in a gorilla mask that shoots bottle rockets from his sleeves, to fight his former lover. At the last moment the man in the business suit shows why he gets to wear the business suit - he comes up with the idea to marry the ghost and the vampire so they will both cooperate.

The entirety of this piece of the movie is the centerpiece for the argument against wasteful government spending. After being killed by Peter, Tom Wilde is assembled as the "Androibot" to fight the war on drugs in the Golden Triangle. Most of the assembly procedure of the Androibot was left out of the movie, maybe to protect government secrets, maybe to prevent people from building their own quasifunctional robots out of polyurethane covered Chinese tupperwar. What's left is a shot of a man welding a car battery into a hollowed out aluminum crotch attached to a machine that blinks a big red minus sign when bad things happen and a big green plus sign when slightly fewer bad things happen.

The Androibot is programmed to walk and shoot in exactly one direction, meaning our 1988 robot technology was somehow less advanced than our 1988 Super Mario Bros. technology. We hadn't even figured out how to build robots with joints that wouldn't manifest the imaginary "VRRRRT VRRRRT VRRRRT" noises little children make with their mouths when they are pretending to move like robots. The smugglers cleverly take advantage of this by surrounding his loud, plodding ass with vampires and blowing him up with a rocket launcher after less than five minutes screen time. Fortunately, less than one minute later his rocket-induced "short circuit" gets fixed with a sautering iron, a power drill, and some of the best knob turning skills that simple modern man can provide. He is dispatched once again for a final and pointless confrontation pitting teeth that cannot penetrate metal against bullets that cannot penetrate vampire face. And then in the final thirty seconds the movie remembers that he had a flamethrower in his gun allllllll along.

Movie B involves Sophie, a captured narcotics agent, and a mercenary paid the exhorbitant sum of thirty thousand dollars to lead a team of three deep into the jungle to retrieve her from her captors. Thirty fucking thousand dollars. Even in the eighties James Bond had a larger budget than thirty thousand dollars. Bond blows at least three times that on his martini mixer, the model without any lethal exploding bullshit. For thirty thousand dollars you can barely get a Rolex that tells time, and you can forget about the stasis field attachment. I find this portion of the movie unnecessary as it really draws away from the epic struggle representing the heyday of the vampiric drug industry. Movie A is a shining beacon to the past, a relic of an age before the werewolf cartels moved in on the scene and began cutting their shit with flea powder. A time before zombie racketeering moved into the cities, and from sea to shining sea the countryside was dotted with various goblin bootlegging distilleries. Sophie is the only memorable character from this part of the story, but that's because she's the only blonde waif in a jungle full of squat little brown people, and the only time she's onscreen she's either being tortured or raped by fat Mongolian drug priests.

Worst Scene

Peter stares longingly at Christine as she smiles demurely at the top of the banister covered in a fog of dry ice. She runs a hand down a lock of her hair, her dark nipples protruding from the thin linen sheets of the afterlife. Peter's breath builds as he watches her, and his arms slowly raise like the pulsing gorilla member tucked beneath his kimono. Christine giggles. She knows she is turning him on. She hasn't heard him pant like this since the last time the Patriots won the Super Bowl. Peter clears the space between the two in one mighty hop. He won't let a paltry meter come between him and his beloved. His monkey snarl remains rubber and leering. She can't help but be aroused by it. Christine coyly slides away towards the bedroom. She can tease him more this way. She beckons to her lover, "Come here." Peter can contain himself no more. He has been waiting for this moment since their joint suicide. His outstretched arms flap up and down in the ecstacy of the moment. She will finally be his. Christine assumes the position, a sumo squat with outstretched palms and Peter does the same opposite her. As their palms slap together in the union of unholy coitus, their monstrous growls of pleasure build for several seconds before they collapse exhausted into each others arms.

Gay Marriage

Archives - XvX Written by Capn Incredible January 23 2009

Left

In 1620, England gathered up its religious fundamentalists, put them on a boat, and set them adrift towards uncertain disaster with the promise that if they survived the journey, a harrowing winter with no food, disease, and the native populace, then they too were free to worship in whatever fashion deemed mandatory. In the year 2059, Earth’s last redneck will board NASA’s General Lee, the world’s first rocket with a stickshift. After cutting some doughnuts in the stratosphere, the astronauts will drop clutch and peel out in a final cloud of rocket fuel and phallic supremacy, the stream of exhaust trailing into the heavens like some great middle finger to infinity.

Upon colonizing Mars it will become known as Planet Fuckyeah. Currency will be Slim Jim wrappers and the Martian face will be carved into the likeness of Chuck Norris. Without homosexuals to maintain order the entire planet will resemble a college frat house after the first kegger of football season. As heterosexual society lapses into slovenly filth, Earthlings will relocate to the massive city of Homotropolis. High rise organic farming will provide food for all. The festering glory hole in the ozone layer will close, war will end, and all military spending will instead be diverted to science and the arts. There will come a day when finally, a young scientist glimpses into the eye of God just long enough to hold onto the universal truth that there is no such thing as death and returns to tell his story in the complex language of mathematics. Unfortunately, on this very same day, the Planet Fuckyeahians, annoyed by the fruity elliptical way Earth prisses around the sun, will launch an asteroid into the blue planet via their interplanetary skeet shoot. No traces of humanity will be found on record until a thousand years later when an alien race discovers and hotly debates whether the colossal stacks of hollowed out Camaros and AC/DC albums on Mars are natural formations or evidence of some primitive, stupid, and dead civilization.

Right

Marriage has been defined as the union of one man and one woman ever since the day God removed a rib from Adam, smothered it in barbeque sauce and pixie dust, and called the resulting conglomeration of muscles, organs, breasts, and bones Eve. If we alter the divine definition of matrimony to be the union of a person and a person, people will eventually want the definition extended to include anything that can be humped or scissored. To deal with the onslaught of legislation, the definition will again need to be altered to be the union between a noun and another noun.

The definition of a complete sentence is the union of a noun and a verb. Outraged by the insinuation that unions between nouns and nouns are somehow incomplete, these “same parts of speech” unions will protest until they too can be considered complete sentences. As the English language collapses into burbling gibberish, grammar books will become exponentially thicker to accommodate the new rules that allow words to determine which is the giver and which is the taker during conjugation. The resulting deforestation will cause CO2 levels to rise, people will no longer be using sex to reproduce, and humanity will whimper into extinction when Al Gore, the one man who isn’t getting laid, passes while nurturing a sparrow’s nest alone and exiled on the cold, lonely peak of some distant mountain.