“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!”

Sitting Duck’s rating: Eight out of 10 totally not Shocker goon knockoffs

Sitting Duck’s review: If I may paraphrase the opening paragraph of the short story “The Picture in the House” by H.P. Lovecraft, “Searchers after cult movies haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Tubi, and the cardboard mausolea of the horror hosts. They climb to the moonlit steps of grindhouse theaters, and falter down black search engines beneath the scattered algorithms of forgotten streaming services. An ill-lit rumpus room and a copy of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister video rooms at DragonCon. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely columns of mainstream critics; for there the dark elements of pomposity, bad puns, pedantry, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.”

I bring this up because I first learned about Infra-Man not from some movie blog or YouTube channel devoted to shlock… but from Siskel and Ebert. Specifically in one of their Guilty Pleasures specials. Apparently, Ebert had caught Infra-Man at a kiddie matinee, and even though his intellect told him it wasn’t a good movie by his usual standards, he couldn’t help but get caught up in the insanity and enjoy for what it is.

This movie came about thanks to the popularity of tokusatsu shows like Ultraman and Kamen Rider. With a few disco moves and a bellowed catchphrase, the everyman protagonist in these programs would transform into a (usually red) spandex-clad superbeing sporting a ridiculous helmet and ready to lay a smackdown on any henchmen henching about for whatever evil organization of evil they work for.

And their following wasn’t restricted to their home territory of Japan. TV viewers in Hong Kong developed their own tokusatsu fixes that needed to be satisfied. So the Shaw Brothers (renowned producers of kung fu movies) decided to show that anything Nippon could do, they could do better.

In our old future of 2015, the evil Princess Dragon Mom (Terry Liu) has been revived after being in stasis for ten million years. And her first order of business is to put those hairless monkeys that have cropped up since then in their place by establishing her dominion over the Earth through cartoonish violence. The only force capable of standing against her are the blue and silver-clad kung fu practitioners of the Science Patrol. But even they find themselves overwhelmed by her more elite henchmonsters.

To address this shortcoming, Science Patrol leader Professor Chang (Wang Hsieh) has developed a blueprint for creating the bionic badass Infra-Man. All he needs is a chump willing to risk the possibility of dying on the operating table. Someone like Rayma (Danny Lee). Fortunately, medical malpractice isn’t in the cards, and Infra-Man is ready to take on the evil forces of evil with powers that crop up and disappear as the plot demands, as befitting a tokusatsu hero.

Of course, Princess Dragon Mom isn’t just going to stand by and let Infra-Man cut through her mooks like a chainsaw through butter. So she resorts to more underhanded means to bring the Science Patrol to heel.

When a movie has an antagonist with a name like “Princess Dragon Mom,” you know you’re in for something special. Though it’s hardly the only inexplicable choice made in the writing of the dub script. There are a couple more examples to be seen below. You have to wonder what sort of substances the dub script writer was partaking. Not that it’s a bad thing, since half the fun of these movies from Hong Kong is the bizarre dialogue in the English dub.

The other half comes from the fight sequences. These, as you might expect from a Shaw Brothers production, are amazing, featuring a level of stuntman endangerment that would not be matched until The Road Warrior. But something more incredible involves the guys in the monster suits. Anyone who has watched enough kaiju movies is aware of how heavy and cumbersome those suits are. As a result, the monster fights in those flicks are usually awkward and lumbering. I’m not sure if the monster suits here are made of more lightweight materials, or if Hong Kong stuntmen are just more physically fit than their Japanese counterparts. Whatever the case, the guys in the monster suits display greater agility than is commonly seen.

Production values aren’t exactly stellar. The look of the monster costumes are about what you might expect from a kaiju film of that era. The scenery also has the appearance of a Masters of the Universe playset scaled up to life-size. And you know what? This is all well and good. Like the science fiction and SF adjacent shows from other nations during the 1970s, tokusatsu shows had some very slapdash production design. But for a modern viewer, that can be part of the charm. After being bombarded with overly slick would-be blockbusters that have had a ka-jillion dollars spent on them, the simpler couch change funded aesthetics of these older productions can be a breath of fresh air

It may be the case that the Shaw Brothers weren’t able to truly match the weirdness of Japan. Be that as it may, with its own brand of insanity and the superior fight choreography, Infra-Man is a respectable contribution within tokusatsu media and is always good for a lazy Sunday afternoon viewing.

Intermission!

• You’ll believe an Infra-Man can’t fly
• Suddenly, we’re in hell
• Now it’s the set of Blake’s 7
• “This situation is so bad that it is the worst that has ever been!”
• Looks like Cobra Commander moved into the neighborhood
• “It would be futile to fight them with military power. It would lead to defeat.”
• Big deal, it’s just a VW Beetle
• Security courtesy of Keystone Kops
• Life-size Operation game
• Not the face!
• At this point, I’m thinking all the mutants are dubbed by the same guy
• There’s a handily specific deus ex machina
• If you find the mooks to be naggingly familiar, that’s because their look served as the inspiration for the Boneheads in Netflix-era MST3K
• As you might have guessed, the names for Princess Dragon Mom and her henchbeings were rather loosely translated in the English dub. The actual names (at least according to the trivia page on IMDB) are as follows:
• Princess Dragon Mom = Demon Princess Elzebub
• She Demon = Witch Eye
• Emperor of Doom = Fire Dragon
• Giant Beetle Monster = Spider Monster
• Octopus Mutant = Plant Monster
• Driller Beast = Drill Arm
• Laser Horn Monster = Long-Haired Monster
• Iron Fist Robots = Iron Armor Monsters
• Obligatory MST3K Connections: English dialogue writer and director Peter Fernandez was also English language director for Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster (in which he also provided the dub voice for Ryota). English dialogue writer William Ross provided English dubbing for The Legend of Dinosaurs and Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster and was associate producer and assistant director for The Green Slime (in which he also portrayed Ferguson).