By KEVIN HOOVER
PG: Psycho Goreman swiftly endeared itself as a conversation piece upon its release in late 2020, but nearly a decade before the “Arch-Duke of Nightmares’” personal rip-and-tear vendetta against our planet, a different battle was being fought. 2011’s Manborg saw the titular half-man, half-cyborg helm a pugilistic potpourri of Earth’s defenders against the maniacal Count Draculon and his bloodthirsty band of Nazi vampires. Both films – and their audacious namesakes – are the offspring of director Steven Kostanski. One-fifth of filmmaking aggregate Astron-6, Kostanski’s improvisational approach to directing Manborg shellacked an impressive visual appearance upon a project that was DIY defined. Filmed for $1000 with actors adorned in costumes cobbled together with refuse, in a garage outfitted with green sheets which would be plastered with the digital replication of a corpse-riddled battleground, it was a macrocosm that Kostanski skillfully constructed over three years and while juggling a plate full of additional projects. With the recent release of Manborg: The Novelization from author Bret Nelson and Encyclopocalypse Publications, the director crashed our pad to discuss how the automaton is still near and dear to his heart.
Manborg is one of those cult classics whose fanbase grows every time its name is mentioned. For those not in the know, talk a little about the film and some of the stories surrounding its creation.
Back in the mid-to-late 2000s was the heyday of Astron-6, which is a collective of five filmmakers that were based out of Winnipeg at the time: Jeremy Gillespie, Adam Brooks, Conor Sweeney, Matthew Kennedy, and myself. We were all making short films together and having a good time. We were at points in our lives where we didn’t have a ton of responsibilities so we could just focus on making our little movies and naturally everything we made we wanted to escalate and get bigger and bigger. Being a video store kid, I grew up on the likes of Full Moon Pictures. I wanted to make this big sci-fi action epic because I hadn’t done anything like that yet – I didn’t have the know-how or the skill to tackle something that big, but we were in this cycle of constantly making stuff. At the time, it felt like there was no reason not to do it, not realizing it was going to be three years of my life putting this thing together. It was shot on a green screen that my mom sewed for me and costumes were made out of garbage. There was a recycling bin behind the Environmental Design Department at the University of Manitoba that I would scour for discarded model-making bits, and my dad worked at Manitoba Hydro and he’d bring me all sorts of printed circuit boards and random stuff that I would glue onto costumes. It’s very much a homemade movie. I learned after-effects as I was making it, so that kind of explains the look of the compositing. I also just accepted the look because, aside from being a big fan of genre movies, I was also a big fan of video games and grew up on FMV titles from the ‘90s. There are a bunch of horror games like 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria that had a shitty video quality to them that I found very charming, so that was my excuse to lean into the wonky compositing and janky effects that make the Manborg universe more fun. It was a three-year adventure in between working in film and on other projects; we were also making Father’s Day at the same time, so it was a busy time in my indie filmmaking career. The movie got picked up by Raven Banner and that’s what started the snowball effect. It played Fantastic Fest in Austin and toured around and got some real cult attention.
Manborg is a property that’s 10+ years old now. Did you ever think that’s a universe that you’d be revisiting, especially by way of a novel? What did you think when Encyclopocalypse approached you about the idea?
Since I feel like I’ve reached a point where I’d like to think I’m making “real” movies now, I have trouble going back to Manborg because it looks so lo-fi compared to the stuff that I do now. As an artist, I have a lot of anxiety about making things that are imperfect. Obviously, you want everything you make to be the best version that it can be. Manborg, to me, is so clunky and rough around the edges that sometimes it’s not my favorite thing to reflect on, but I will say that the novel has rejuvenated my appreciation for the universe and has gotten me thinking about that world again in a way that I hadn’t in quite some time. I definitely have more of an appreciation for the movie now and especially just the fact that it has an audience at all is heartwarming and baffling at the same.
Part of the charm of your film is its self-awareness of how over-the-top it is and that it revels in its absurdity. Were there ever any concerns on your behalf that the style and tone would be lost in a text-only novel?
The movie itself is very sincere – all my movies are; they’re never “winky.” The secret sauce, I find, is that I take all the universes seriously. I do like the comedic fun aspects, but in my brain, there’s also a dark, gritty, serious version of Manborg that I would probably be just as happy with. I think that’s the key to walking the line of making a movie that could be fun and silly, but also satisfying. I find a lot of filmmakers lean into the goofy stuff right off the top and that they don’t care about their characters or their mythology. Caring about the storytelling is what’s important and that’s something that translated really well into the novel. Reading how Bret expanded upon the concept and fleshed out the characters, it was done with such detail that it rejuvenated my interest in the movie. He built out the universe with the same kind of sincerity that I approached it with, and he treated the material seriously while having fun with it.
A movie novelization allows the author to expand upon ideas that maybe were denied that space in the confines of the sourced film. Were there specific characters or storylines that you feel had so much depth, they could only be fleshed out this way?
I feel like I’ve applied this to all my films, in that I like things that are unsaid. I like characters that show up and you feel that there’s already something going on there. PG: Psycho Goreman is a good example of this. It’s basically just one sequence after another of introducing aliens and creatures, where you want to know someone’s story but only get bits and pieces of it. I was initially concerned about Bret fleshing out Manborg’s story and the characters so much that the mystique and charm would be gone, but that’s the difference between mediums. In film, the kind of stories that I like are more visual and less about telling you information, but in a book you don’t really do that – it’s all description and dialogue. What works about each is the different approach. Bret adds in a lot of detail in ways that the movie doesn’t. Even just the intro, where you get Manborg’s origin story as he’s fighting this losing battle in Earth’s Army against the onslaught of Hell. In the movie, it’s just a couple of minutes in the beginning. In the book, there’s much more preamble. It’s coming at the same thing from a different angle in a way that’s just as fun and interesting.
The obvious question: will there ever be a filmed return to the world of Manborg?
I’ve been toying with ideas of what to do with that, but there isn’t anything immediate. Whether that’s a short film that follows a specific side character or something else, I do want to go back there at some point. In my obsession to be like Charles Band, I want to constantly be revisiting my stuff and building these universes up as much as possible. I love the idea of doing sequels to my own things, because I grew up on sequels, so that kind of serialized storytelling is what’s fun to me. I feel like there’s potentially something down the road – not soon, but at some point.
Manborg is available on most major streaming platforms, while the novelization is available for purchase here.
