Vampiric Robo Cop? Believe me, it’s not nearly that awesome…

Movie Rating: 1/5

Cheese Factor: 5/5

So Bad, it’s Good: 4/5

Disclaimer: Though most movies that will be reviewed here are PG, Robo Vampire does feature exposed breasts and some blood.

Where do I begin with the Chinese-made “Robo Vampire”? Perhaps the title would be a good starting point. Most people reading the name would probably think that the movie features a vampire with robotic parts. Think Dracula mixed with the Terminator (which would be kinda awesome, by the way). Instead, we have a really lame version of Robo Cop fighting against Asian, undead creatures called Jiang-Shi, who are commonly called “hopping vampires” known for hopping about, with their arms outstreetched. Hsien-ko from Capcom’s Darkstalker’s series is one of these, but cuter. While I have seen these monsters pulled off in a creepy way, they look as stupid as possible here as they hop about in syncrhonized circles and snicker in a stupid tone. These are the villains, folks.

Robo vampire is notable as being not only one bad Chinese film, but two of them spliced together in the most awkward way possible. The two movies were shot with very different film quality and one scene where someone in one movie talks to someone in another emphasizes this difference. The movies aren’t cleverly connected, so this is really more like a review double feature than anything.

The first story concerns drug lords who are taking over the local area. They attack a priest in a Christian church, but a white woman with blonde hair, a white power suit and a machine gun steps forward to stop them. The reason that I emphasize her appearance is that she later has to jump out a window to avoid a grenade and her body double is not only wearing a dress, but is also a Chinese man with a gray, curly haired wig on… Wow… I don’t even know how they thought that people wouldn’t notice this, unless they were falling asleep already.

The first story progresses that team of commandoes has to commit all out war on these drug lords and nothing will stop them, except some bad dubbing.

Meanwhile, in the other movie, a Confuscian priest is working hard to keep his collection of “vampires” under check. As the tradition goes, these monsters can be rendered inert by placing a small tag on their forehead, covering their face. The reason that he is collecting these Jiang-Shi is so that he can sell them as enforcers to the local drug lords. This plan is stupid for multiple reasons:

1. He has to be nearby to control them. He has an assistant (an incompetent one, I might add), but I don’t know how he intends to send these things out to work for other people. They’re not DVD players, they are merciless undead who devour life force. Which brings me to my next point…

2. They eat qi, or life force. Yeah… even with giving them to criminals, it seems like the Jiang-Shi would just eat them instead. They’re not particularly intellegent.

3. Assuming that they are trying to make traditional Jiang-shi, you couldn’t really utilize them to your advantage anyways. These creatures are people who have died away from home and are walking their way back at night to their homeland so that they can get a proper burial. They will kill anyone who gets in their way. So, unless the person you want killed happens to be in the direction of the zombie’s homeland, he probably won’t be hurt.

Things go bad whenever the apprentice priest accidentally knocks a spell tag off of a Jiang-Shi’s face and the priests have to fight them off in front of the drug lords they were attempting to sell to. How embarrassing!

Just as they’re wrapping up the fight, a ghost woman appears and announces that she is seeking vengeance against the elder priest. She was a Chinese woman who was in love with a man from the West, but their love was forbidden. The man was later changed into a strange Jiang-shi/Gorilla hybrid by the priest for little or no reason and, in response to this horrific development, the woman killed herself and came back as a powerful spirit of vengeance. The priest tells her that they can be together now if she only promises loyalty to him. She agrees to these terms, seemingly forgeting that he’s the cause of the conflict in the first place.

Elsewhere, a group of cops are massacred by a group of Jiang-shi because of the creatures’ immunity to bullets and their stupid bouncing. One of the cops, who I’m pretty sure had no lines before then, is rushed to critical care, but, unfortunately, he perishes in his military base. Another officer says that they ought to not waste any time and change his fallen comrade into a mechanized mockery of God’s will. The boss just nods to this, without giving it a second thought. I guess nobody liked that guy, anyways.

Thus, Chinese Robo Cop is born! He has tin foil skin and karate chop action. He may be slow, incredibly loud and unable to talk, but his bullets can harm the previously invulnerable undead (though there’s no explanation to why this is…). Every time he makes a movement, no matter how small, he makes a piston sound, which gets really annoying.

This is what he actually looks like…

The robot goes on a crusade against the undead and eventually comes across the lady ghost and her gorilla-faced hubby, who are making out, or something. The ghost woman pleads, “please don’t kill us, we are in love”. This would be a pretty sensible argument, except that they are a ghost and a zombie, so they can’t really be killed. Our protagonist (who is unnamed in my memory) has a flashback about a woman that he was in love with, but who left him because of his extreme dedication to his dangerous work as a police officer. He slowly nods and walks back down the stairs that he had been coming up.

Now, this scene is the closest that “Robo Vampire” comes to showing any kind of competence. For the first (and last) time, we are given some insight into the character of the protagonist. We see that he is capable of mercy, not just a mindless killing machine and his silence actually works here, since his decision is based off of internal conflict. He cannot kill these two because they represent the same thing that he does, being changed from a human into a monster and he cannot bring himself to tear them apart. It almost kinda works…

It’s all ruined, however, by the lady ghost and gorilla/ zombie/ vampire ambushing him right afterwords, anyways. If this was all a ploy to trick him, why didn’t they just ambush him from the start? There’s no way that they didn’t hear the tin man coming… What had happened before almost made this piece of crap seem like, you know, a movie, but it was all thrown out the window by a poorly edited transition.

What follows is more mind-numbing fighting, including a scene where the cyborg is melted and reforms (but with a $50 budget).

In conclusion, “Robo Vampire” is a very cluttered movie with a host of problems. It tries to be too many things at once: science fiction, horror, fantasy, romance, action, crime drama to name most of them, but fails at accomplishing any of these themes in any competent manner. We see the past of the main character (if you can call him that) for a minute or two, but this characterization has no effect on the rest of the movie. For me, “Robo Vampire” is one of those “so bad, they’re good” movies because it is so unbelievably cluttered, poorly directed and shows a baffling incompetence that I rarely see. Robo Vampire’s problems stem not only from lack of budget and the time period, but in the sense of storytelling, which, at its core, is what movie making is supposed to be about (or making money). While many stupid movies are made enjoyable with their use of cliches, Robo Vampire is more of a beast that becomes memorable because of its sheer strangeness and terrible execution. It’s definitely on my list of top ten “so bad they’re good” movies, which I’ve seen a pretty good number of in my time.

Sources:

Mill Creek Entertainment’s 50 Sci-Fi Invasion product Information: http://www.millcreekent.com/sci-fi-invasion-50-movie-pack.html

http://www.encyclopedia-obscura.com/moviesrobovampire.html

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0387301/?ref_=tt_ov_dr

 

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