You've got a lot of killing ahead of you. Good luck.
The more I see of Astron-6's work, the more I like the collective cut of their jib. What I especially appreciate about their films is they don't outstay their welcome. If one of their ridiculous ideas can only sustain itself for an hour plus credits, then that's how long the film will be. And yes, that is the precise length of 2011's Manborg, which director Steven Kostanski co-wrote with fellow Astron-6er Jeremy Gillespie. Together, they concocted a throwback to the unapologetically derivative sci-fi/action films of the '80s -- in particular, the wave that followed Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop -- with their story of a soldier shot to pieces on the battlefield of a future war with the forces of Hell under the command of the villainous Count Draculon (Adam Brooks). Following his heroic death, the nameless soldier is put back together with all kinds of cyber enhancements and rebooted as Manborg (Matthew Kennedy), a literal killing machine whose lack of an owner's manual makes it a challenge for him to figure out how his peripherals work.
Before he's able to get properly oriented to his new identity, Manborg is captured alongside martial artist #1 Man (Ludwig Lee, who shares the fight choreography credit with Kostanski), and they're forced to fight for their lives in an arena overseen by the traitorous Dr. Scorpius (Brooks again) and a hideous demon in a comically immobile latex mask known as The Baron (Gillespie). Their fellow human combatants: a hot-headed Aussie named Justice (Conor Sweeney) and his sister Mina (Meredith Sweeney), who is somehow not Australian. She is, however, the unlikely object of The Baron's desire, which leads to some of the film's most hilariously understated moments as he awkwardly flirts with her and chastises himself later for his failure to make any progress. For the most part, though, Kostanski and Gillespie go so far over-the-top with their gags that some can't help but land. And Kostanski gives his stop-motion animation chops a workout bringing various demons, robots, demonic robots, and robotic demons to life. I look forward to seeing what he and the rest of the Astron-6 crew cook up next.
To bring Manborg up to something approaching feature length, Astron-6 attached the fake trailer for Bio-Cop, an extreme body horror film written and directed by Kostanski in 2012. Prefiguring the group's subsequent stab at the giallo with The Editor, the same year produced the neo-giallo short Yellow, which first came to my attention courtesy of krimi/giallo aficionado Leonard Jacobs. With its masked killer -- clad in the requisite leather gloves and long coat -- Yellow hits many of the genre's visual signifiers, and even squeezes in a direct quote from Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou. Its slender running time prevents director/editor Ryan Haysom and his co-writer, director of photography Jon Britt, from delving too deeply into any of their characters, though. Probably just as well considering how much slippage there is between them, but I can understand why some have come away from it feeling like there's something missing. Perhaps we'll get to see what it is when Haysom graces us with a feature.