INFRAMAN

INFRAMAN-

The original title: Zhong guo chao Ren (translation: Chinese Superman). Made in 1974 in Hong Kong. Today a lot of people love Hong Kong Cinema from; John Woo to Jackie Chan, from Ang Lee to Stephen Chow. This film pre dates all of those, it came the year after Bruce Lee's death. Still in mourning Hong Kong decided to take on the Japanese pop culture icon Ultraman. Hong Kong's very own Inframan or as they called it The Chinese Inframan had about the same budget as the Ultraman TV series in Japan. The costume consist of a motorcycle helmets, leather pants, plastic mask with bug eyes, and lots of animated lightning.

The plot is simple; evil Princess Dragonma lands in Hong Kong demanding the Earth to surrender to her, otherwise she will releas her army of monsters to attack. The monsters consist of a giant spider, giant cat, a tree/squid creature and set of weird twins with elastic power tools and by the way one of the monsters name She-Demon has a set of eyes out of the palm of her hands, (an idea that later used in "Pan's Labyrinth" only done in a much low tech and low budget way).

Inframan is played by Li Hsui-Hsien (Danny Lee) later Li reaches the height of his career starring opposite Chow Yun Fat in John Woo's "The Killer" as the cop named "Little Eagle". But here Li is just another Brue Lee wanna be in an ugly jump suit. Inframan has all the entertaining spoofs values of any typical Japanese giant monster movie. The fight scenes last forever, not much of a plot and very bad music. Everyone rides a motorcycle and even the alien army is made up of guys with motorcycle helmets.

All the good guys work for a science patrol, they have the ugliest disco outfits for uniforms. At on point the squid monster attack the base, each guy was being strangled by a giant tentacle. If you look closely you can see one of the guys' split his pants! I guess that's a blooper...but with a movie like this one it's hard to tell which is the blooper and which is part of the film...