Where to even begin with Robo Vampire? It's crazy. The pitch must have been "Robocop fights vampires" - which is admittedly fantastic. But that's not really what made the final cut. Yes, there is about 20-30 minutes of "Robo Warrior" fighting hopping Chinese Vampires (and a topless ghost), but the rest of the movie is some completely unrelated drug war nonsense. I would bet big money that they filmed about a half-hour of Robo Warrior stuff and just edited that into a cheesy action movie. And as we all know, movies just mashed together in post-production never quite work out.
My synopsis: A Drug Lord (who looks like a sleazy Michael Gross) hires a mystic who can control vampires - it's for protection/security, I guess. And when a narcotics officer is killed during a bust, some scientists make him the Robo Warrior! But instead of going after Michael Totally Gross, he's stuck in a B-plot fighting the vampires (one of whom appears to be in a gorilla mask). The main plot is just some uninteresting cop-types rescuing some prisoners from a (maybe unrelated?) drug lord's compound.
Elaborate Genre: Action Hopping-Vampire Craziness
Overall: There are times where Robo Vampire reaches the euphoric heights of being a great bad movie. But it's missing some connective tissue, or even just a compelling main character to keep it all together. It's still a lot of fun though.
Robo Vampire kind of tries to make you think that these two plots are going to interconnect in some way - when our main rescuer guys get in trouble, you keep thinking "yeah, this is where Robo Warrior is going to show up and save their butts." But after about 45 minutes you realize they are actually in two different movies. At that point, the filmmakers pretty much abandon even trying to make it seem like a cohesive story.
And about that Robo Warrior. (Just like the rest of the movie, the title Robo Vampire doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. He's not a robot vampire. He's a robot who fights vampires. Whatever.) He's really quite the goofy sight to behold:
When you first see him, you assume it's a joke. He's supposed to be a highly advanced cyborg, but he's clearly just a guy dressed in shiny fabric. He's got big shoulder pads that look like stuffed animal parts, a spray-painted helmet that never sits on his head straight, and later he's got a boombox antenna just sticking out of it. It's a bad, bad costume - and when you add the super loud "robotic" sound effects that are dubbed in... it's really something that has to be seen to be believed.
The action scenes where he fights vampires are also just goofy - the vampires (and that topless ghost) use magic to fight him, so they kind of fly all over the place through the wonders of reversed film and wire-fu. And the firework budget on Robo Vampire must have been huge. The vampires shoot bottle rockets from their hands (magic, I guess), and Robo Warrior can fly when he has sparklers attached to his boots. It's really damned cheesy, but it's fun at least.
The main part of the movie (some cop guys going after a drug compound) is fine. It wouldn't be worth seeking out on it's own, but as something to watch in between scenes of bad Robocop cosplay it works. The budget here seems a little higher - the film looks okay (well, it's well-lit, at any rate), and there are a lot of extras to get shot/blown up. But it's just kind of boring. There's no one character that you really latch onto - You pretty much just get generic hero guy in generic action movie. There is some crazy bad dubbing and line reads that get you through the dry spells - I suppose I should mention at some point that Robo Warrior was made in Hong Kong and presumably dubbed from Chinese. And there are a couple of pretty funny scenes where dummies get thrown off of things. But let's be honest - this is all filler. We're here for Robo Warrior fighting vampires.
And in that respect, Robo Vampire delivers enough of what you want. To be fair, it's an objectively terrible movie. But if you like crap, it's worth checking out. It just barely misses being a great bad movie, but is still a lot of fun.
I would recommend this film.
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