Last time on Weird Movie of the Week, we hunted the elusive albino clown. This time, we tangle with Robots and Vampires. There is indeed a description of this movie, but after watching it, using words to describe it seems dumb. I think all we really need to explain this movie is the poster.
Alright, fine, I guess words are necessary. Assorted observations and thoughts:
- Unsurprisingly, the film’s title is misleading. This does not concern robotic vampires, but rather, robots fighting vampires. But as we’ve established, words, even words in the title, do not become movies like this.
- Unsurprisingly, the poster features what must be actual copyright infringement when it comes to the robot’s design, a very clear knockoff of RoboCop. I suspect the movie skirted this issue because this is what the robot looks like in the actual movie:
- Surprisingly, this Robot is not created until about 30 minutes into the movie. Then (spoilers, I guess) he almost immediately gets blown up by a bazooka (weren’t the 80s awesome? Why don’t people shoot things with bazookas in movies anymore?)
- Perhaps knowing how awful the robot looked, the film leaned heavily on their foley department. The sound effects for the robot are exaggerated for sure, but they almost kinda sorta make up for the look of the costume? I mean, not really, but I can appreciate the effort.
- The first half hour of the movie actually concerns a bunch of drug dealers creating and training vampires to protect their drug shipments from the cops. The vampires are of the Chinese “hopping” variety, meaning they act more like zombies than vampires. And they hold their arms out straight and hop a lot. As such things go, this isn’t a particularly good example, but the robotic angle makes it interesting enough.
- At one point, a witch/ghost finds out that her love has been turned into a vampire, which means they can’t be together in the afterlife or something. It’s a wondrous subplot that makes no sense.
- I really don’t need to describe much more of the plot. The vampires kill some cops, the cops retaliate by creating robocop. The rest is all cops vs drug dealers, robocop vs vampires, and permutations of such.
- Lots of cheap explosions and gun squibs, leavened with a sorta martial-arts-lite (doesn’t really stand up to actual martial arts movies). Some of the gun stuff and explosions are decent, but a lot are clearly done on the cheap and don’t look great.
Look, it’s not in any way a good movie, but it is deeply weird, and thus worth being commemorated in a post like this. For the bold, it’s currently available on Amazon Prime streaming, though I should warn you again: it’s a bad movie. Don’t blame me if you watch it. Unless you love it.