The Super Inframan (1975)

Though I try to be nuanced, my opinions on entertainment can sometimes reflect a duality of extremes: either you produce art that is genuinely thought-provoking, human, and finely-crafted, or you make pure style-over-substance spectacle, where the pursuit of excitement is more important than plot consistency and logic. If you’re not making high art, you might as well be making high schlock, without any pretensions—you’re more likely to create indelible images if you completely loosen yourself from the strictures of narrative and taste, and the best of it can create something engagingly surreal, where it’s not even possible to know what’s coming next. It actually takes a lot of creative ingenuity to do something like that! In my mind, the prime example of perfect high schlock is The Super Inframan, the 1975 martial arts/monster/superhero flick that was one of the genre experiments by the Shaw Brothers Studios, well-known for their long and influential history in the martial arts film business. To boil it down to its raw essence, Inframan is Shaw Brothers’ rip-off of Japanese tokusatsu shows, especially Kamen Rider and Ultraman (which were popular all over Asia at the time), with a movie budget and their own highly-skilled fight choreography—but that only begins to describe the craziness of it. Structured almost like a series of television episodes strung together, Inframan moves at a breakneck pace, rarely letting things up for a moment before barrelling into another fight scene with one of several bizarre rubber suit monster villains. This is a movie where nutty things are constantly happening, and it never stops being fun to watch.

Famously, this is also a movie that Roger Ebert reviewed mostly positively when it came out, and then changed his star rating over twenty years later because his opinion of it only improved over time (“I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that film.”) He ended his original review by writing “When they stop making movies like Infra Man, a little light will go out of the world.” Having now watched it multiple times, I agree wholeheartedly.

Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans (1995)

In this third of three extraterrestrial review subjects, we enter an entirely new realm: the glorified fan film, based on a popular Sci-Fi TV property. Wait, come back! There’s stuff to say here!

I’ve found myself in and out of the Doctor Who audience over the years: first discovering reruns of the Tom Baker episodes in high school, getting on board the revival when it began in 2005, jumping off board when I inevitably lose interest in watching a TV show on a regular basis, and then watching a few new ones here and there before stopping again. Last year, when Twitch was streaming episodes of the older series non-stop for a few months, I was tuning in regularly—there is still something deeply enjoyable about that run from the sixties to the eighties, even with its low budget nature and the weak stories that are peppered in throughout. What I think always appealed to me about the show is that it often had the feel of a classic Sci-Fi monster movie, combining aspects of the fifties stuff with the darker atmosphere of a Hammer movie—no show had a greater devotion to weird concepts and adorably ratty, but often imaginative!, creature costumes—with the serialization only adding to the charming old-fashionedness of it all. While the show’s time/space-hopping format meant it could be something completely different from week to week, Doctor Who still ended up becoming a motherlode for monster fans, and many of its alien menaces have since become iconic on their own.

Monster Multimedia: Plasmo

We’re in the midst of another themed batch of Creature posts, and following directly after last week’s entry, it’s all about extraterrestrials. Aliens are a kind of monster, we all should agree (…or else), and it seems like they can often be the inspiration for some of the oddest and most unique concepts out there, really letting creators’ imaginations loose. It doesn’t matter what the target audience or medium is, either—at some point, aliens just became a justification for any wacky idea to become a character or creature, and sometimes we can even sympathize with them, because non-humans can still possess humanity.

This is especially important in a show like Plasmo, a thirteen-episode series of Australian stop-motion shorts that aired in the mid-nineties, because all its characters are weird aliens, not a particularly humanoid one among them. Although originating Down Under, Plasmo was one of those shows that benefited from the desperate need for content that many new cable channels had in the nineties, which often meant buying many obscure old shows or foreign productions in order to fill time. This made TV in the decade unintentionally cosmopolitan and historically-minded, which is how a kid in North America (e.g. Myself) could suddenly find airings of a show like this filling interstitials between other shows (it’s also how I was able to see so many old monster movies.) There were certainly not many five minute stop motion shows starring a diverse cast of alien creatures, so it’s understandable why this caught my attention, and why it stuck with me for so long.

Monster Multimedia: Needle/7 Billion Needles

At some point, Science Fiction writers probably got tired of the standard assortment of Bug Eyed Monsters that had populated the pages of the pulps since back when they called the genre “scientifiction”, and wanted to get at something a bit more conceptual, like the aliens dreamt up by H.G. Wells in War of the Worlds and First Men in the Moon. This was especially the case during much of the “Golden Age” in the forties and fifties, where scientific rigour was emphasized over expediency-for-the-purposes-of-plot (and sometimes over plot itself), so writers began looking at biology to inspire new kinds of extraterrestrial life forms and make more interesting and “accurate” stories (and also so we could get some intelligent aliens with character, rather than just slavering beasts to be raygunned.) Among the more notable examples can be found in Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle, which probably introduced a lot of SF-reading kids to the idea of symbiosis.

Bagi, The Monster of Mighty Nature (1984)

The one thing that I find invariably fascinating whenever I take in the work of Osamu “God of Manga” Tezuka (one of the most respected and influential cartoonists of all time, if you didn’t know) is that it always comes off as his work, no matter what the subject matter is. He was inspired by the style of Disney and other American cartoons, adapted it to his own ends (he literally wrote the book on making comics), and in his five-decade-long career jumped from genre to genre (inventing a few along the way) and audience to audience (making kids comics and comics for adults, back and forth)—but his creations still maintained all the very cartoony elements that he utilized in, say, Astro Boy in the fifties and sixties. Look at most of his “serious” comics or animation projects (which includes philosophical Sci-Fi and fantasy, historical fiction, psychological thrillers, and erotica), you’ll still find highly exaggerated or cute characters in major recurring roles, or comical sequences right out of a Twenties Mickey Mouse short—it completely boggles the tone, but at the same time I have to admire the commitment. Tezuka wants to make stories with very important or personal themes (and he succeeds at just as much as he fails, given his voluminous output), but he never wants them to not be cartoons at their heart.

Killdozer

In memory of the late B-movie master Larry Cohen, I’d like to direct you to my post about his monster classic Q—The Winged Serpent from a few years ago.

Sometimes, a great title is all you need to have any sort of longevity—the name “Killdozer” is so blunt and over-the-top that it has somehow maintained some kind of cultural cache for over seventy years. There’s a band named after it, and to make doing video and image searches for it more difficult, there was even a real killdozer that went on a rampage in 2004. “Killdozer” probably got itself ingrained in the culture purely by being a fun thing to say, and so irregardless of its origins it kept being repeated, to the point where I knew the title without ever knowing where it came from.

Where it came from, though, is itself fairly interesting. The original “Killdozer!” novella was written by preeminent science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (the guy who originally said that “ninety percent of everything is garbage” and was the inspiration, at least in name, for Kurt Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout) in 1944, one of the many influential stories he wrote over his six decade career (another important monster story by him was “It” in 1940, which introduced the world to the concept of a monster made of decaying vegetable matter). It’s a quintessentially pulp concept, but also brought to us by one of the SF genre’s most important innovators, so I knew there had to be something more to it than just a story of a possessed bulldozer. I mean, a story about a possessed bulldozer (with a title that uses an exclamation point for emphasis) probably would have been embraced by the SF-reading kids of the forties regardless, but still.