Super Infra-Man

Let’s start our cocktail with a little bit of Ultraman. You know, the Japanese show where a dude turns into a superhero and grows large enough to battle giant monsters each episode. With this, you get inexplicably confounding dialog and a plotline that must have come in the acid dreams of a free-association writer. Then you add a little bit of Shaw Brothers (the kung-fu guys) for flavor, and you have Super Infra-man – the inventor of the “Power Rangers” style of fight choreography.

The “plot” of this film is that the Demon Princess is going to destroy the world by bringing up monsters from the center of the earth via a fancy transporter beam. In retaliation, the Chinese government (or rather, the “people of earth” from a Chinese perspective) injects a dude with some super-serum in order to turn him into a robotic “Infra-man” who is powered by a nuclear generator and looks like a cross between Optimus Prime, a bug, and Michael Jackson. Sweet, right!?!

This movie isn’t about plot though (I don’t see how it could be as it's near-jibberish), it is about action, and Super Infra-man definitely delivers a nuclear reactor’s worth of that. Once Infra-man (we’re tight, so I can call him that) is unleashed on an unsuspecting plant, he unravels an ass-kicking that would spell out “EPIC” in Braille if it were melted down and played backwards. From there, he goes on to battle a red spandex-clad Wild Thing, a vicious enlarging bug (where he finally gets the opportunity to set the standard for growing big and destroying a monster), an awesomely handlebar-mustached fire-breather and a drill-handed somethingorother, and the fantastic final battle with three dozen skeleton dudes, dumping a hot chick into lava and then...well, you should probably just see the video below.

But, is it good? You ask?

Before I answer, I want to digress into an insight.

You know, there really isn’t a better idea of “science” than there was in these types of films. It’s a little like what you imagined science was when you only knew a few vocabulary words and figured that flashing buttons were the evidence of the future. Scientists were the builders of things to come and they ran their experiments all rogue-like in laboratories which must have been funded by the phsycho-kenetic energy of any Westerner trying to discern the plot of a poorly translated Asian film. Those were the days when you could put a nuclear reactor in a man and not have to face “ethical” issues. It truly was the golden years of hypothetical progress.

So anyway. Yes, it’s good. It’s actually pretty damned awesome, as evidenced below.

Seriously, watch the whole thing. And don't worry if you can't understand the dialog - it wouldn't make much of a difference anyway.

(You can thank me later.)