A man is escorted through the remains of some ramshackle building by two guys in camouflage, armed with assault rifles. There are several coffins lying around which are paid no mind until one pops open and out flies a hopping vampire! The vampire makes short work of our two armed men and the other guy escapes, cue opening titles! Its off to a great start I have to say, if I was going to make a movie I’d start with hopping Chinese vampires kicking some ass, can you picture Keanu Reeves running from a hopping vampire and he’s all “dude!” n’ stuff? Beautiful. Er, anyway, here’s evil Druglord #1, surrounded by a Far Eastern-looking crew of thugs and bad guys. He wants to get rid of his arch nemesis Tom, yes the mighty Tom, anti-drugs agent extraordinaire! Druglord #1 must be all out of sane options, because he’s decided to hire a Taoist priest to train hopping vampires to kill Tom! Druglord #1 sends two of his goons to keep an eye on the little crew of sleeping vampires he has ready at attack, and to put bags of heroine in a coffin, their latest smuggling technique (its not even worth going into what a ridiculous idea that is). Unsurprisingly, the goons’ bumbling leads to vampires being awoken and things look bad for them until they’re saved by the Taoist priest (who isn’t fit to carry Lam Ching Ying’s sticky rice, I might add) who discovers that those bags weren’t filled with heroine, they were filled with rice powder! No wonder the vampires woke up! Okay. We then get treated to a bit of A WHOLE DIFFERENT MOVIE where a young lady cuts open an animal (a cow I think), stuffs it full of drugs, and then closes it back up. It was a real animal and it was still moving when she cut it open, ick.

Meanwhile in the first movie, the Taoist priest beings two unidentified white men (we’ve not seen them before and we don’t see them again I don’t think) to take a look at his new creation, the Vampire Beast! Things don’t go quite according to plan because even though the Vampire Beast is a fearsome chap (though his face looks like a gorilla mask with pointy teeth stuck on it), the ghost of his dead lover appears and is very angry that her man’s corpse has been used in this way, meaning he cannot join her in the afterlife (which can’t be a bad place if all the women have to wear see-through tops like this one). The Vampire Beast still loves her (aw) and so the priest agrees to let them marry, but only if they obey him. While these exciting developments are happening, a group of men, one of whom is Tom, are talking about their agents including Sophie (from the SECOND movie, those wily dubbers!) and how they need to go and arrest the drug dealers (they JUST thought of this?). So arresting they go, Tom and some guy with a moustache attack the Taoist priest and his henchmen in their jeep. The henchmen are killed but Tom and friend didn’t reckon on the awesome power of HOPPING VAMPIRES, as the Vampire Beast and a normal vampire are unleashed (in broad daylight). Moustache guy gets mauled, and Tom manages to fire a few ineffectual rounds into the Vampire Beast before he is blasted by Beastie’s amazing Fireworks of Eternal Damnation (funny how Vampire Beast’s hands turned into little fireworks-launching tubes, that Taoist thought of everything!). Doctors attempt to revive Tom (yeah, screw the moustached guy!) but their expensive equipment (consisting of flashing plus and minus signs - plus=alive, minus=dead, TECHNOLOGY!) showed that he was too far gone. However, a man approaches the anti-drug boss and asks for permission to use Tom’s body to create “an android-like robot.” What a great idea, all those poor drug dealers will be there thinking this is a regular android they’re dealing with when OH NO! Its really a ROBOT! All their plans will be out of the window!

In another place, but still in the same movie, the Taoist priest says that Druglord #1 should go and kill all the other anti-drug agents! WHADDACONCEPT!!! A bunch of heavies are sent in the SECOND movie (totally seamless editing, I swear) to see a priest who is hiding drugs. The drugs prove to be fake and the priest is killed, but the other anti-drugs agent Sophie appears and starts gunning down the thugs until she is captured and taken to Druglord #2 who drips water on her head and forces himself on her. The anti-drug boss guy from the first movie talks to a guy in the second movie (wow, how do they do it?!!!???!) and says they need an operative to go in and rescue Sophie (what about the new robot? Oh yeah, wrong movie) and this other guy picks Ray, some generic, vaguely heroic-looking guy with no personality. Meanwhile back in the more interesting (but much sillier) first film, a bunch of guys packing drugs are arrested by….. ROBOTOM! Dead or alive you’re watching the rest of this crappy movie, creep. Soon after we see the Taoist priest again being stopped by troops, who he quickly slaughters using the fearsome Vampire Beast! However it will not be a smooth getaway this time, as here comes RoboTom to save the day (he calls himself Robo Warrior but that sucks) and the bad guys scatter, I’ll buy that for a dollar! What will happen the next time RoboTom confronts the Vampire Beast? Will Ray be able to save Sophie? Will we get to see that ghost chick’s nipples again? How much tin foil would I need to build my own Robo Warrior? Will this film ever start making sense?

I’m a sucker for really crazy crap like this, I swear. First off, its Chinese hopping vampires, which are one of the coolest things ever. Added to this is a cyborg, and cyborgs are so amazingly cool there aren’t words to truly express it, and then the packaging for the DVD pushes its luck to ludicrous levels by even including a picture of Robocop clutching a hopping vampire with his metallic arm. Heck, I would have FUNDED this project if I’d known about it earlier! However as a movie, well its utterly terrible as you’ll probably have guessed from my synopsis. You know you’re in trouble when the two movies they’ve used don’t make much sense on their own, so editing the two together is going to result in total disaster. The second movie starring the enigmatic Ray is just plain tedious apart from a couple of really cool explosions, but the other movie is total deranged nonsense. There is a part a little further on where RoboTom is almost TOTALLY destroyed by a missile launcher, he (a really bad dummy) is obliterated, but then the people back at base fix him up in ten minutes, saying its “not too bad”! Then wait to you see the thrilling climax to the film as the Vampire Beast slowly hops down a corridor while RoboTom ambles along at approximately the same speed several hundred metres behind him, for what feels like a three thrilling hours.

But you don’t give a crap about the silliness or the boring bits, you wanna know if this is a good choice to get your hopping vampires fighting cyborgs fix and well it is, just about. Unfortunately the movie drags dreadfully, its bad enough when a bunch of bad actors stand around talking for far too long, but its much worse when they’re also dubbed by bad voice actors too. I’m sure any coherent plot either of these two films might have had was totally thrown out of the window when this hideous cinematic mutant was created, and it feels more like eight hours rather than the 90 minutes the box claims it lasts for. However, seeing a group of hopping vampires hop around RoboTom in a big circle is the stuff dreams were made of, and as this is a painfully cheap and nasty DVD, its not going to cost you much to take a look at it yourself (go look on eBay), and there’s always the fast forward button.

No points for story, acting, coherence, originality, talent, pacing, editing, writing, nor did it have any ninjas in it. But I think the exciting combination of dumbass cyborg and hopping zombie pushes this bad boy far away from the Gil, its just good dirt cheap schlocky crap that you’ll enjoy at least part of the time, so it deserves a 2. Tomas Tang deserves a big fat Gil for being such a lazy bastard though.