I'll get right to the point: Robo Vampire is an egregiously bad movie, incompetently directed, edited, and acted. Released in 1988, the film consists mostly of surreal fight scenes and violent 1980's-style machine gun battles, although admittedly the filmmakers will occasionally slow things down and try to advance the plot by allowing some random characters to natter at each other for a while (the absurdly brusque conversations in this movie have to be heard to be believed). It's pretty awful.





We begin in some kind of deserted jungle village. Two generic dudes in camo carrying monstrously big machine guns wander into the frame, accompanied by a prisoner they're apparently escorting. The camo-dudes throw open the lids to some coffins that are sitting out in the open, and are so terrified by what they see inside that they fall back and shoot at them. All hell breaks loose. Some snakes pop out out of one of the coffins and slither around, but the real danger proves to be a guy with a mangled face wearing old-timey Chinese clothes. He jumps out of a coffin, hops around ridiculously for some reason, and attacks the camo-dudes and their prisoner with some clumsy martial arts. The prisoner escapes, but the camo-dudes are killed (the second one gets the worst of it; the "vampire" bites into his neck and theatrically tears out a big wad of flesh). This all occurs within the first two minutes of the movie. I should also note that apart from establishing what the film's numerous vampires look like and how they tend to behave (particularly the silly way they hop around) this scene has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. The escaped prisoner doesn't show up again, and the events depicted here do not tie into the larger plot in any way. Nice!

Next, we're shown some drug smugglers smuggling some drugs. They're caught in the act by a group of cops, who shoot at them (ah, the 80's, when good guys were allowed to just shoot down criminals, regardless of whether they were provoked or not) and put an end to their shenanigans. Unfortunately, one smuggler escapes to tell the tale of the bust to his boss back at the HQ. The Boss, who looks something like a thin Ron Jeremy, laments this loss: "Listen," he tells two henchguys, "we've gotta find a way to handle Tom, that goddamn anti-drug agent!" (The agency Tom belongs to is left unnamed). The henchguys exchange a glance. "Boss, what are your plans then?" one asks. The Boss responds: "I've employed a Daoist. He'll train vampires to deal with him." Judging from the non-reaction of his henchguys to this line, I'm going to have to assume that hiring a vampire-trainer is as commonplace as hiring a gardener in the universe of this movie (click here to listen to the line; it's pretty funny).

We cut to some grimy basement, occupied by "vampires" like the one we saw at the beginning of the movie. They're standing still as statues, though, held in place by bits of magic paper stuck to their foreheads. An uppity comic-relief guy appears and blathers inanely at them, until another guy shows up and they get to work doing something or other with packages of drugs. In the course of this, one of them screws up and wakes up the vampires, who instantly attack them with their goofy martial arts. The idiots get beat up, but hold out long enough to be rescued by the vampires' trainer/owner/whatever, who competently fights them off and re-spells them into standing still. This guy, we learn later, is the Daoist the Boss hired.

Some odd, disjointed scenes follow. The Boss talks to some random guys on the docks about switching from drug smuggling to body smuggling, and we're subsequently shown (in rather graphic detail) a young woman slitting open a dead cow and stuffing it full of bags of drugs. So bizarre is the editing here that a suspicion begins to arise in the minds of astute viewers...





Later, some more of the Boss's henchguys show up at the Daoist's place to inquire after the vampires he's trained. Before the Daoist can present the super-special vampire he's made to the skeptical henchguys, however, a woman in white flowing robes appears on the scene and attacks him. "How can that be a lady ghost?" one of the henchguys blurts, to the undoubted bafflement of anyone watching.

As it turns out, this "Lady Ghost" was the lover of the guy the Daoist is planning on resurrecting as a "Vampire Beast". She doesn't want him to be resurrected, because then they'll never be together in the afterlife. She fights the Daoist, but before she can kill him, he manages to bring the Vampire Beast to undead life to fight on his behalf. Vampire Beast and Lady Ghost go at it for a while, until Vampire Beast (did I mention his costume consists of a gorilla mask?) finally recognizes her as his former lover and stops fighting. This angers the Daoist, but the henchguys calm him down by suggesting that he marry the Lady Ghost to the Vampire Beast (????) since they obviously love each other so much. The Lady Ghost finds the idea immediately enchanting, and begs the Daoist to marry them. "A marriage," he muses thoughtfully. "All right." So he begins to make the preparations for their wedding ceremony.

Following this, Tom the anti-drug agent is sent out on assignment (people invariably call Tom a "cop" but he wears fatigues and carries a machine gun, and so do all his buddies, so this may be inaccurate). At a checkpoint, he stops a red jeep, but -- and this is Tom's bad luck -- the jeep is carrying drug smugglers and that damn vampire-training Daoist. Whilst his comrades are shot by Tom and his forces, the Daoist runs behind a big rock and summons some run-of-the-mill vampires out of a big bottle. The vampires kill Tom and all the other "cops", typically by shooting sparks at them from out of their sleeves and burning their faces up with caustic breath. They also hop around like they're tied at the ankles. It's quite a sight.

Cut to a "hospital": a doctor and a nurse are working on Tom, but it's too late. Two of Tom's colleagues are given the bad news: "It was a fatal wound; he's dead," the nurse explains. The two lower their heads in sadness at this news...for about a half a second. Then one man turns to the other. "Since Tom's dead," this bearded fellow says, "I would like to make use of his body to create an android-like robot." I can only hope that my own passing inspires this sort of comment from my friends. Anyway, because this is a very strange movie, the bearded fellow's superior takes the suggestion seriously. "You're assured of success?" he asks. "Um-hmm," the bearded fellow replies. "All right, it's approved." And with that, Tom is reborn as a RoboCop rip-off called RoboWarrior (although the synopsis on the back of the DVD case calls him "Androibot").

The next scenes take place in a church, where an angry group of armed thugs are browbeating a priest into telling them where the drugs they're after are hidden. They finally kill the priest, find the drugs hidden in a cross, and manage to capture a gun-toting woman in white robes. We learn that she's an undercover narcotics agent named Sophie. What she was doing in the church, and why she had drugs hidden in the cross is anybody's guess.





With Sophie captured, only one man stands a chance of bringing her back alive. That's right: Ray! Who's Ray, you ask? Who knows? The movie introduces him out of the clear blue sky, and at this point the astute viewer's sneaking suspicion about Robo Vampire becomes rather blindingly obvious: the film was sewn together, Frankenstein-like, from two entirely different movies. Basically, director Joe Livingstone grafted the stuff with the Daoist and the vampires and the Lady Ghost and RoboTom onto a pedestrian drugs-and-gangsters-in-the-jungle movie of Asian origin. This movie is all about Ray and his team of commandos infiltrating a compound to rescue Sophie from a druglord. Ray meets up with a guy named Andy, and a guy who wears a blue beret, and Andy's cute sister Wendy, whom he develops a thing for (upon seeing her bathing in a lake, he suavely says, "It's a great view! You should bathe more often!" Smooth!) This part of the movie is not particularly interesting, but it's regularly interspersed with scenes of RoboWarrior fighting vampires, getting blown up, getting fixed by the bearded guy, and going back out to fight more vampires. We learn that RoboWarrior has telekinetic control over his machine gun (he can summon it to his outstretched hand) and can burrow under sand. And if by chance he's blown up by a bazooka, he can be repaired by a bearded guy moving some dials around while he lies prone on an operating table.

Unfortunately, he doesn't really do so well against the vampires. He can generally hold his own, but his bullets don't really affect them, and they can disappear and reappear around him at will.

At length, he stumbles onto Lady Ghost and Vampire Beast in an old abandoned building. Lady Ghost pleads with RoboWarrior, in a heartwrenching scene: "Don't kill us we love each other, you can kill us but wait till our love's consummated!" How a ghost and a vampire can be killed, or have their love consummated, is an ontological puzzle I leave up to the reader. Anyway, RoboWarrior is deeply moved; soft music plays, and he's able to recall a little scene from his life when his girlfriend nearly dumped him for being a cop. He leaves the lovers alone, but they attack RoboWarrior anyway as he's leaving, and a silly battle ensues. This goes on a while. Meanwhile, in the other movie, Ray and Wendy are captured and subjected to water torture, but are ultimately freed and are able to blow up the druglord's compound (after rescuing Sophie, of course).





This upsets the Boss, who consults with the Daoist about rebuilding his drug empire. The Daoist suggests he start by getting rid of RoboWarrior. Unfortunately for the Boss and the Daoist, however, RoboWarrior chooses that moment to attack, and lays waste to their base. The rest of the movie is all but incomprehensible; RoboWarrior fights Vampire Beast and the Daoist all around town (the scenery constantly changes), and then the Daoist fights the Lady Ghost again, and RoboWarrior kills the Vampire Beast and more vampires...and that's the end.

Robo Vampire is a weird, amateurish movie, with very little to recommend it besides the funny dub and the fact that it'll only run you a couple bucks on DVD. Sad to say, until the inexplicable paucity of robot/vampire movies is finally addressed and more sophisticated attempts are filmed, fans of the genre will have to settle for drek like this to get their fix.

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