Heads up! The Brentwood/Deimos release of Robo Vampire is letterboxed at approx 2.35:1 , the previous bagain bin edition was pan and scan. Unfortunately it's co-feature The Devil's Dynamite is p&s.

Thanks for the heads up. I know two people who will be very excited to hear this news.

FYI, their upcoming release of the sequel Counter Destroyer is also widescreen.

COUNTER DESTROYER? is that a sequel to ROBO VAMPIRE??? is there such a thing? well a movie like ROBO VAMPIRE definitely deserves a sequel! Great news about the widescreen print! I will be getting that!

Just watched ROBO-VAMPIRE last night... and all I can say was WOW. ROBOCOP meets MR. VAMPIRE, with a bunch of anglo actors running around like they stepped out of an Antonio Marghetiti RAMBO clone from the 80's. How many movies were cut together to make this? I admit it's a pretty delirious experience, especially after a few Mike's Hard Limes, but... I'm still not quite sure what I watched last night.

All the recent hoopla (generated by Brentwood, no doubt) about their new releases being of superior quality to their old releases was certainly debunked by this presentation. Sure, it's letterboxed, but it's obviously taken from an old VHS source, and there's a bar clearly placed on top of some foreign subtitling (Vietnamese or Thai I would guess, but I could only occasionally see the tops of some of the letters poking out) underneath the picture, and the bar isn't dark enough to mesh with the rest of the border, so it's annoyingly visible throughout the running time. Makes me worry about all their upcoming Paul Naschy and Leon Klimovsky releases.

One thing's for sure, the packaging is a big improvement. Once again the most extreme elements of greed win out: marketing over content. I can't even begin to imagine what a high definition Brentwood release is going to look like, and they've been promised in the near future for NIGHT OF THE WEREWOLF and VENGEANCE OF THE ZOMBIES. Maybe they'll just put a VHS tape through a line doubler three or four times or something.

COUNTER DESTROYER?! I've never even heard of the damn thing, anybody seen it? I can't think of any movie more undeserving of a sequel than ROBO VAMPIRE, why not make NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES II while you're at it?

My suspicion, so far unproven, is that ROBOVAMPIRE and COUNTER DESTROYER are several different films edited together, and between them was enough length to make two new movies. After all, if I remember correctly from my hazey dazed viewing a few nights back, ROBO ends with lots of plot lines left dangling. Of course, that also seems to be part of its appeal.

No suspicions required -- longtime HK movie fans have long been equally repulsed and attracted to horrendous cut and paste jobs like these. See John Charles' extremely informative review of ROBOVAMPIRE here.