The Marvelous Microbudget Manborg

On Substack there exists a community of film lovers, often referred to as FilmStack, who are doing the good work of trying to save cinema. Aside from raging about the glaring lack of an official "film" category on the platform (which I believe is a crime against culture), they are starting a movement they call NonDē. The idea is to replace independent cinema, which has been co-opted by Hollywood to the point where it is almost meaningless, with a whole new ecosystem organized around empowering creators.

Will it work? I have no idea. I'm not really here to save the industry from itself; I'm just here writing about pop culture because if I look too hard at what's going on in the real world it makes me want to puke. Regardless, I admire the spirit of the nascent NonDē movement. It has led to an interesting discussion about modern microbudget films.

When I decided to start writing about movies and pop culture I said to myself, "Pickle, there are already trillions of bloggers out there writing about this topic, so you should try to focus on stuff most of them are ignoring." All this discussion of microbudget movies has reminded me that I should follow my own advice, and I can think of no better film to get back on track with than the 2011 Canadian sci-fi action masterpiece, Manborg.

Okay, masterpiece is too strong a word, but my fellow Pickletonians, it doesn't get any more microbudget than this. I discovered Manborg after watching Director Steven Kostanski's 2016 film, The Void, which I hope to review soon as well. That is also a microbudget film, though it cost about 80 times as much to make. While The Void has an impressive amount of polish for its budget, Manborg is a true DIY affair. It was made out of literal garbage for around $1000 Canadian dollars (about $730 in real, American money) and shot mostly in some dude's garage. That amount of money probably wouldn't cover brunch in some parts of Hollywood, let alone be enough to produce an actual film.

One irony of Manborg is that it looks so terrible that only a cinephile is likely to find it appealing. The footage often has a grainy quality that very much mimics what you'd get from a VHS camcorder, which kind of works as it parodies the cheesy sci-fi from the VHS era. But while much of Manborg screams "amateur!" you can feel the passion that went into its making. The film leans into its limitations, using ridiculous dialog to forge the wooden acting and junk drawer costumes into something special. Like the titular character, it doesn't always work quite right, but when it does it's quite effective.

Kostanski has managed to assemble a lot of flawed parts into something that justifies its hour-long runtime. It's an impressive accomplishment and a testament to the possibilities of true low-budget filmmaking in the modern age.