Director: Godfrey Ho
Writer: William Palmer
From: Sci-Fi Invasion
An anti-drug team turns one of its fallen members into a cyborg to combat drug dealers smuggling drugs in vampires. Meanwhile, one of the agents is kidnapped by the cartel and a team of mercenaries is dispatched to save her.
I know that capsule synopsis makes no sense and I’ll be straight with you: the movie doesn’t clarify it. I have a job to do, though, and that’s to describe this movie!
Sooooooooo… yeah.
Cold open on a man being led somewhere at gun point by two white men in US Army uniforms. They disturb a coffin and a Chinese hopping vampire jumps out. The unarmed man runs away as the two uniform-wearing men shoot at the vampire and eventually get killed by it. Title card!
Cut to Ko, the drug lord who looks like Matthew McConaughey’s greasy cousin (no images provided, you have to find and confirm for yourself), who tells his underlings that he’s ordered the Daoist to train vampires to fight the drug agents.
I rewound that part several times to see if I was hearing right.
Cut to the cellar of the vampires where a couple of lackeys are placing drugs in the coffins. Vampires awaken, Daoist monk comes in and puts them back in their place. Later, when he’s going to demonstrate the vampires’ powers, the ghost of a woman attacks him because she was betrothed to one of the vampires before he died and, since the monk has brought him back as a vampire, they’ve been denied the opportunity to spend eternity together. She fights the monk, the monk raises her vampire ex who refuses to attack her, and the monk agrees to marry the two to each other.
Between those two vampire scenes with the monk, the monk is transporting some drugs and gets caught in an ambush by the drug agents. He summons some vampires who kill the agents and one of the bodies is used in an experiment to create a mechanized human.
I was watching this alone and still shouted, “What the fuck?” as though someone would answer my question.
The scientist glues together discarded mannequin parts and the cut-rate RoboCop rises looking like samurai cosplay made from disposable baking tins and duct tape.
Meanwhile, or later, or elsewhere, I don’t even know at this point, the drug dealers break into a church and demand the priest tell them where he’s hiding the drugs. He says there aren’t any and, in the process of wrecking the place, they find the drugs stashed in the cross hanging over the altar. They kill him, but a woman jumps out from the back and shoots nearly all the thugs. She’s captured though and it turns out she’s a drug agent (but then why was she in the church that was hiding drugs?). The cartel subjects her to water torture to make her reveal the names of the other agents.
How am I still describing this movie? I’m not even at the halfway point!
All right. A mercenary is hired to bring the agent back. He meets up with people he knows who have their own grudges against the drug dealers and, through the standard action movie events, ends up saving the agents and killing all the gang members at the hideout. THE END for that part and, no, vampires and robots never play a part in it.
The vampires and the robot face off several times to no great effect. Bullets don’t hurt the vampires and the robot can’t get killed so those sequences just happen then peter out. Ultimately the monk is betrayed by the woman’s ghost and the robot sets the monk's body on fire. No real resolution for the robot, ghost, or vampires, but the movie’s hit the ninety-minute mark, so THE END.
Ah, Godfrey Ho, where even the English-language footage is dubbed by voices that don’t match. I’d always heard Ho constructed his movies from bits and pieces of other films, but the other movies I’d watched of his were at once more subtle and more overt than this. Ninja Champion and Ninja Empire were largely their own movies with an extraneous ninja plot filmed and spliced in. You could take those moments out and have essentially the same film.
This movie, though, is almost a masterpiece of editing. You don’t just have the separate RoboCop vs. vampires and rescue mission action movies, you have scenes that are clearly composed of shots from at least two different movies. Intellectually, it was compelling because I kept looking for the seams and trying to figure out what shot was from which movie. Narratively, it’s incomprehensible.
With all the cutting, a lot of content gets lost. I don’t know if my attention wandered (I was getting into some knitting while watching this flick, yo), but at some point in the rescue plot the drug dealer’s thug that kidnapped the agent went rogue and started helping the drug agents. Also, characters got separated from the group, they arrived in inexplicable locations, and I never knew what was going on. Then we’d cut back to hopping vampires and JiffyPop RoboCop. What was any of this?
The movie is absurd and I found it laugh-out-loud funny so it’s a recommend on that level. The movie is not, in any way, good, but it’s serviceable for a bad movie fix or as something to make fun of. Apart from that it’s a little too disjointed for watching on its own.
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