The Super Inframan

The Super Inframan (1975)
AKA Chinese Superman, Infra-Man

After a diet of depressing cannibal exploitation movies, nothing cleanses the palate quite like some refreshing spaceships, robots, and kaiju (that’s giant monsters for you gaijin). The Super Inframan has got ‘em all, though it comes from Hong Kong, not Japan. It was made by the Shaw Brothers studios in 1975, when the Shaws were riding high on the popularity of their kung fu movies in grindhouses around the world. It was based on the Japanese tokusatsu genre; a blanket term from the phrase “tokushu satsuei,” translated as “special photography,” tokusatsu can be science fiction, action, or fantasy, but the genre is instantly recognizable because of its elements: stylized transformation sequences, giant robots, masked heroes, giant monsters, rubber suits, seizure-inducing photography, and so forth. It’s the cheesy Japanese kids’ stuff that airs on cable at odd hours of the night. Ultraman and Kamen Rider, two shining examples of this very shiny genre, were quite popular in Hong Kong. Shaw was eager to capitalize on the trend, adding bam! pow! martial arts action, and thus the first Chinese super hero movie came to be.

Fortunately the combination makes The Super Inframan pure spun sugar cinema, packed with silly thrills from beginning to end. Giant rubber skeleton-dinosaurs (dinosaur-skeletons?) cause a bus crash, then an earthquake, and then somehow all of Hong Kong is in flames, all within the first ten minutes. But who will save them? Why it’s Lei Ma, handsome scientist! This noble gent is injected with steaming Kool-Aid-like liquids, has wires strapped to his head and emerges INFRAMAN, with apparently limitless but not clearly delineated superpowers. One thing is for sure- he can change into a shiny red suit and awesome bug-eyed helmet via a laser watch and a flash of lightning. Sweet. The Super Inframan fully immerses the viewer in its bizarre universe, a rhythmic parade of giant tentacles from the sky and rubber bad guys being knocked down with roundhouse kicks.

The action can hardly even be called violence, at least not in the visceral horror sense; it eschews realism in favor of hyperbole. In other words, heads and limbs slice off clean from shoulder sockets and heads pop off comically; there is little to no blood in The Super Inframan. The martial arts element to this film is very outsized, culminating with the one-against-many showdown so typical of Asian action films. Even the technology is out of this world; weapons are presented as James Bond-esque gadgets like “mega jumping boots.” The Super Inframan is light hearted and fun, in no way serious, yet earnest in its absurdity. It’s definitely for kids, but beyond that, it’s of a bygone era when self-conscious irony didn’t permeate every aspect of pop culture. Inframan jumps easily out of a fiery hell-pit at one point, but the movie is so damn cheerful about it that viewers have to go with the flow.

Going with the flow is essential to enjoying The Super Inframan. Honestly, the plot can drag for the sophisticated viewer because it’s so simple, and the film is best aided by, ehm, adult refreshments to fully appreciate the low-rent psychedelic visuals. The sets and special effects are reminiscent of Star Trek or Danger!Diabolik, cardboard and chrome command centers with a swinging 1960s aesthetic- the fanciful, endearingly corny aesthetic of the film cannot be overemphasized. The special effects are of the camera tricks and rubber suits type, sprinkled here and there with my favorite celluloid trick, optical printing. Optical printing is the process where multiple superimposed reels of film are “printed” onto a single reel; it’s a time consuming and expensive process used here to make neon rays shoot out of a villainess’ hands. She is a sidekick of Princess Monster, the main nemesis of Inframan and the cause of those pesky skeleton-dinosaurs. Her outfit in this film is truly mind-blowing, a triumph of the bootleg (no offense, China) Tomorrowland aesthetic. She wears a green sequined leotard with a gold lame bra, pink cape, and matching gold lame thigh high boots, accessorizing with a gold-plated skull belt buckle, cat o’ nine tails. She tops it all off with a She-Ra via the Valkyries horned helmet, all of which passes for tough in the Super Inframan universe. She lives in a foggy cave occupied by an army of henchmen in school mascot quality monster suits, not quite on the aesthetic level of Sid and Marty Kroft but of the same acid trip temperament. One of many sublime non sequiturs in the film is the hilarious shot about sixty minutes in of a man driving a motor boat, flanked by a skeleton on one side and by a furry Hong Kong approximation of Swamp Thing on the other, pleasant flute Muzak bopping along in the background. Just another day at the beach…

I highly recommend The Super Inframan for the viewer who likes to be taken to a universe disjointed from our own, with its own set of rules and internal logic. A test to see if you are watching the film in the proper spirit is to ask: “Why is Inframan fighting that hairy goat demon in that pond? And why did they just grow fifty feet tall?” If you simply must have a rational explanation, perhaps The Super Inframan is not for you. If the “why” isn’t your number one priority, it’s got psychotronic everything: fanciful martial arts, kaiju monsters, giant robots, surreal future-past aesthetics…especially recommended for enthusiasts of anything shonen The Super Inframan blasts out of Earth’s orbit bound for Planet Hyperbole, where fighting space lobsters who speak Mandarin in whiskey-husky voices happens twice a day- before lunch.