By MICHAEL GINGOLD
He’s joining some other cult favorites in Encyclopocalypse Publications’ growing movie tie-in series.
Encyclopocalypse has announced that the novelization of Steven Kostanski’s sci-fi/action/horror mashup MANBORG will be unleashed June 10 in eBook and paperback exclusively on Amazon; the Kindle pre-order is now open here. Adapting Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie’s script is author Bret Nelson (LUMBER AND OTHER TALES); the synopsis: “A dead soldier is brought back to life as a cyborg to fight hordes of demonic soldiers alongside a ragtag band of adventurers in a dystopian future.”
“Whenever I read about the movie, MANBORG,” Nelson says, “it is noted early and often that the team at Astron-6 managed to make it for $1,000 CAD. I’d rather note, early and often, that the budget limitations were overcome by the talent and tenacity of the filmmakers. Yes, it has a garage-band feel and it’s rough around the edges. But look deeper. The wide shots of Meganet City feature vehicles and people in the backgrounds; you’d expect a pan across a still image. In dialogue, the usual low-budget, minutes-long two-shots are absent. Armies of Killborgs. Stop-motion beasts. Really cool villains and heroes. There’s a whole movie here, a whole world that extends beyond the edges of the frame.
“My goal with the novelization,” Nelson continues, “was to show the wider timeline and the larger view of the world and characters. But to build those things organically from the screenplay and the film. And above all, keep it crazy and fun. That’s my hope for anyone reading it. That they have fun. I certainly did.”
“I am so f**king stoked to be releasing Manborg!” says Encyclopocalypse founder Mark Alan Miller. “It’s one of my favorite movies. So much so, in fact, that I had originally planned on writing the book. But when I was unable to commit the time, I did the second-best thing and hired a better writer.”
Says Kostanski, “Bret Nelson has transformed my admittedly simplistic film script into an engaging action-packed story, expanding the world and the characters in an organic way that typically doesn’t happen with novels adapted from feature films. It’s a great companion piece to the film, and I’m honored to have new life injected into the undead cyborg that is MANBORG.”
MANBORG joins other fright-film adaptations like WISHMASTER, VAMP, TITAN FIND (a.k.a. CREATURE), SCARED TO DEATH and republications of the RE-ANIMATOR and FRIGHT NIGHT novelizations in the Encyclopocalypse library. Check out the publisher’s official site here.
