Time to both turn back the clock and look across the continents. Shaw Brothers is a name near and dear to those who've taken even a glance at Hong Kong cinema--hell, thanks to this studio, we got Wu Tang Clan and to some extent Quentin Tarantino's career. Maybe you've seen some of the Shaolin Temple kung-fu classics with Gordon Liu, or the madness of the Flying Guillotine--all of which only scratches the tiniest service of their behemoth library of martial arts lunacy. Seriously, for like two decades, their yearly output put out so many films with high kicks, you could've solved the world energy crisis with the flexing alone.
And then we need to touch on something from neighboring Japan--the tokusatsu genre, which encompasses both kaiju series like Godzilla, and the many shows of costumed heroes like Super Sentai--which became the basis for something you might've heard of called Power Rangers. Back in the seventies, the big leader in this spandex-saturated market was Ultraman, the monster-grappling transforming hero--to which Shaw Brothers looked, decided they could make it even better with more backflips, and thus made their own brazen but nevertheless awesome knockoff.
The 'story' goes thusly: in the far future year of 2015, which in this timeline looks exactly like the mid-seventies but with more bleepy lights on their tape banks, the Earth finds itself under attack by 'Princess Elzebub', a dragon person who not only enjoys randomly backflipping everywhere, but can also transform into a whip-using dominatrix villainness who summons her ice age monsters to cause random havoc on Earth. Why? Because who cares, that's why. We've more important things to do--like showing off the set of Science Headquarters, led by Professor Liu (Wang Hsieh), and just how many random unlabelled lights they possess!
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| Not since the Adam West Batman has evil looked so fabulous! |
Naturally, something like shoving a tactical nuke in dominatrix dragon lady's face isn't very sporting, so Professor Liu needs to transform his friend Lei Ma (Danny Lee) into the copyright-dodging Infra-Man, just as the lab is being destroyed by a tentacle plant monster just marginally more convincing than a high school play costume. Infra-Man can do many things, like jump in the air, jump some more, and through vague projectiles through very abrupt editing. In any case, we've little time to waste as he takes on paper-mache plant man with lots of squibs going off left and right!
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| Hey, still looks better than the 90s Spawn movie! |
In all seriousness, the fights in this one are pretty damn entertaining--Japanese inspirations like Super Sentai often relied on repeated roundhouse kicks or less than convincing rolling around, here we have acrobatics and all the kung-fu energy Shaw Brothers specialized in. Sure the monsters look fake, but between the wonderfully cartoonish lasers and the constant explosions...nuts to it, it's awesome.
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| Awkward martial arts in spandex, or the next step of the YMCA dance? You decide! |
It's all a matter of Infra-Man having to beat off dragon lady's assault of monsters--which he can do by basically just pulling abilities out of his ass, like spontaneously growing to giant size because hey, Ultraman could do that too. Fortunately, everyone else is just as capable of kung-fu fighting--even the nerds of Science Headquarters can form a brigade of motorcycle-driving martial arts eggheads! This comes in handy when fighting dominatrix lady's army of horned skeleton minions, who throw spears that also explode! And along the way, Infra-Man also learns a backwards flying kick that makes anything he comes into contact with explode! And also, everyone loves shooting random projectiles out of whatever limb they want which makes things EXPLODE!
There's also a tidbit where the daughter of one of the characters talks at surprising length about becoming an 'Infra-Woman'. Nothing comes of it, but decades before Captain Marvel, even things like...this were talking about female representation in superhero movies! Not that this sort of thing would be the best showcase for it, but hey, the thought counts!
In any case, the film ends with everyone having to finally assault dominatrix dragon lady's comically evil-looking mountain base once she kidnaps Professor Liu. It's balls to the wall explosions, kung-fu battles en masse, Infra-Man rocket-kicking a hammy dragon-lizard-man who can turn invisible or something, and then invading the baddie's slightly psychedelic evil lair! Unfortunately, he ends up being frozen by something or another, but remembers he has miniature missiles for the sole express purpose of getting himself unfrozen just on the off chance!
And then finally, after stuntwork aplenty, he takes on dragon lady in her true form, and goes for a decapitation--only to find it doesn't work, as she can just regrow her head. He tries this about a dozen times, before it finally occurs to him to just blow her up entirely. You may insert your own political joke here.
Finally, after all this madness of explosions and cheap costume kung fu, all I can say is this--thank god for Hong Kong cinema, and thank god for this. It's incredibly silly, it's not exactly brimming with budget, but with some drinks and some friends with an affinity for cheap and old-school, you might just have a hell of a time. Oh, and watch it with the wonky English dub of course. You might not get the full intent of the original script...but does anyone really care? Bad dubbing, ludicrous suits, explosions, and seventies laser effects--what can be better?
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