This Is A Thing That Exists!: Manborg

I think this movie just ejaculated into my brain...

So I just watched Manborg, a super low budget sci-fi action masterpiece from a small film making collective out of Canada called Astron 6. I'd never heard of them up until now, but apparently they are mostly known for short films and have some affiliation with Troma, a movie canon with which I am woefully inexperienced given my tastes for schlock. If Wikipedia is to be believed (as it always should be) the film cost merely $1000 Canadian dollars to make, and to say that this fact blows my mind is the greatest understatement in the history of mind blowing. Manborg is as awesome a movie as I could ever conceive, as if the producers somehow crept into my brain Inception style, pulled out everything I've ever wanted to see in a movie, and just made all of it, all at once. It left me breathlessly fist pumping into the air from beginning to end, and all I can say now after I've watched it is that this, is a thing, that exists!

Fuck yes it does. And we are all better for it.

Manborg is the story of motherfucking Manborg, a post-apocalyptic robocop re-built with machine parts with the power to kick massive amounts of ass, and revived into a dystopian future world dominated by cyber Nazi demons from Hell. But remember, “it's not about the killing, it's about family,” as his brother says to him right before he is killed by SatanHitler. Yeah, that's a complete lie, it's totally about the killing, and as the titular killing machine is let loose upon the world, its so awesome that I lack the capacity to articulate it effectively. This is exactly the movie I would want to make if someone gave me the opportunity and the budget to do it, which is why no one will ever give me that opportunity or budget, and the fact that these guys did it for themselves and told the budget to go fuck itself makes me feel doubly like shit over my own lack of output, which is only ameliorated by the fact that watching the movie they made felt oh so fucking sweet.

The zombie Nazis have hover boards and light sabers. All the monsters are stop motion. Shit explodes for no reason. Any one of those sentences is enough of a justification for this movie, and yet they all equally apply. This is the kind of movie that demonstrates why I prefer low budget productions over big budget mainstream fare. The creativity born out of necessity, the “Fuck it, let's just do what we love” attitude, infuses every moment of this film. If a major studio had been anywhere near this, it would never have been made, or if somehow it got to the point of production, all the ingenuity would have been sucked out of it to render it something unrecognizable. The kind of money that made Oblivion look so good would have been a cancer to Manborg.

While watching, I made the observation that this might just be the most Metal thing I have ever seen, and that's before I learned that the action all goes down in a place called Mega Death City. When a cyber-eyed demonic commander with a permanent rictus grin appears above a battle arena in a four way holographic image to welcome the pitiful humans to the Terroropticon, where “there are no losers, you either win or you die,” the idea of somehow not liking this movie seems like some kind of horrible nightmare. I know I'm sometimes prone to hyperbole when talking about movies I really like as if they are self-evidently awesome, as though not liking them is some kind of personal failing, but with this one, I think we might have a good test to rout out the pod people. If you cannot appreciate the greatness of Manborg, you are clearly not of this Earth!

This movie is like every time you've ever watched any movie and thought to yourself, “that scene could be better if they did it like this.” Then you took all those better than the original scenes from all those different movies, and put them together into one massive hodgepodge of Manborg. Its a mash up of all of my childhood obsessions, a little bit of Doom, a touch of Charles Band cheese, a character or two right out of Mortal Kombat, and a full on anime babe whose background changes to a cartoon every time she attacks, whenever its her turn, because the fight scenes are staged like a freaking turn based RPG. Are there plot holes and other problems? Sure. Is there a Heaven after all? Were the holograms really holograms or were they Jedi ghosts? Does it fucking matter? No it fucking doesn't! You know why? It's fucking Manborg, that's why!

Holy shenanigrams, I want Manborg's big meaty dick of awesome inside me again. I want to have its babies; it's motherfucking kick ass little babies with machine gun arms. For whatever reason I didn't try this, but I'm fairly certain I could have masturbated to this movie and achieved full climax, despite nothing overtly sexual about it. From now on, the standard by which I judge every movie will be Manborg. Genre is immaterial, if its not as good as Manborg, than there is no point for it to exist. That no other movie is as good as Manborg is beside the point. I don't need any other movies to exist, because I now have Manborg.

Seriously, go see Manborg!

Manborg!