A while back, I bought this 50-movie set, Sci-Fi Invasion, for five bucks. That adds up to ten cents per movie. The packaging for 1988’s Robo Vampire promises a cyborg battling vampires. Oh, how I wish it was that.

Here’s what happens: A drug kingpin has a bunch of vampires under his control, and he’s using them to get the cops off his tail. One cop is injured and brought back to life as a Robocop rip-off. There’s a subplot about a female ghost in love with a gorilla monster, and an additional subplot about a bunch of tough guys out to rescue a kidnapped woman.

Speculative spectacle: I don’t even know. Our cyber-hero looks like an ordinary guy wrapped up in tinfoil. At one point, his enemies blow him up in a massive explosion, only he’s fine the next time we see him. The vampires, meanwhile, get around by hopping instead of walking. They look like little kids playing Easter Bunny.

Sleaze factor: The lady ghost cavorts in a see-through top, the female kidnapping victim is used and abused by her captors, and some random skeezy guy spies on a girl while she’s skinny-dipping.

Quantum quotables: “We’re changing the drug smuggling business to a variation on the body-smuggling business.” – a sinister crimelord, who clearly knows what he’s doing.

What the felgercarb? Where to begin?!? There’s one woman’s obvious male stunt double, our hero digging a path under a small fire instead of just walking around it, the fact that the gorilla monster also has teleportation powers, a parasol thrown like a boomerang, one guy’s fried chicken lunch magically flying around the room… there’s no end to the random nonsense.

Microcosmic minutiae: Producers had the rights to some other low-budget Asian action movie, so they spliced huge chunks of it into this movie, accounting for about half of the running time. This would be the kidnapping plot. I spent a couple of hours trying to find out what movie that originally was, but no luck.

Worth ten cents? Robo Vampire isn’t a movie. It’s just footage. Stringing a bunch of unrelated scenes together does not automatically make a narrative. We’ll all just have to wait until someone makes a real cyborg versus vampires movie.

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