The Super Inframan
In 1958, a new film production company, Shaw Brothers, was founded in Hong Kong and became the largest privately owned studio in the world. Among the 1,000 films the Shaw Brothers made, one stands as uniquely entertaining today as the day it was made: the psychedelic, eye-popping, candy-colored Super Inframan (original title: Chinese Superman), the first Chinese superhero movie.
After a giant lizard attacks a bus full of school children, cracks in the earth appear and Hong Kong is shown crumbling, on fire. The whip-wielding Princess Dragon Mom (Terry Liu) has awakened underground after twenty million years and is determined to subjugate the human race, helped by a ragtag group of mutated monsters. She doesn’t mess around: “Greetings to you Earthlings; I am Princess Dragon Mom. I have taken over this planet. Now I own the Earth, and you’ll be my slaves for all eternity.”
Called upon by the government to respond to the threat, Professor Liu (Wang Hsieh) enlists Lei Ma (Danny Lee, of John Woo’s The Killer, 1989) to submit to radical surgery and become the kung fu fighting, bionic, solar powered Inframan. Inframan can throw missiles like darts, shoot streams of light from his wrists, grow to ten times his normal size and kick with alarming accuracy. His powers are later upgraded with Thunder fists, gloves that shoot off his fists and retract. “For success it’s essential you have Thunder fists.”
Such powers demand an assortment of villains, and Princess Dragon Mom’s army includes henchmen in skeleton costumes, a servant, Witch-Eye (Dana Shum), who has eyes on her palms that shoot green beams, and a coterie of tacky but fun looking monsters who appear as if they stepped out of a Sid and Marty Krofft show (only, the costume zippers are more apparent). These menaces grunt, giggle, roar and show off their zany powers and include a beast with a drill on his arm, iron fist robots who can detach and project their arms and heads, a beetle monster, a long-tentacled octopus, and more. Did I mention Dragon Mom’s lair is in the mouth of a dragon and that she can literally turn into a dragon?
Conceived of as a response (and exploitation) of Japanese superhero TV shows of the early ’70s (particularly Ultraman and the still popular Kamen Rider), Inframan didn’t perform well at the box office and spawned no sequels (Kamen Rider spawned over sixty feature film releases). It still endears itself to new generations of fans, though; Roger Ebert famously upped his rating of Inframan years after originally reviewing it, something he rarely did.
What Inframan lacks in budget, special effects, logic, characterization and a good screenplay, it makes up for in absurd, manic martial arts action. The crazy fights, non-sequitur dialogue and flashy cheap special effects are sure to delight the six year old inside everyone. The first Shaw Brothers movie to be story-boarded, Inframan was a later influence on the Japanese TV series Super Sentai (known in the US as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers), created by Shotaro Ishinomori, creator of the original 1971 Kamen Rider series. You’ll see costumed oddities “thrown” through the air (with the help of wires), a head which just won’t stop growing back no matter how many times it’s cut off and a bug monster squished like a bug. It’s deliriously goofy entertainment and like no other film before or since. Give it a few hours if you want to forget life’s troubles and laugh.
—Michael R. Neno, 2020 Mar 04