Infra-Man (1975)

          Something of a Saturday-matinee fever dream, this strange superhero saga was made by the prolific Hong Kong company Shaw Brothers, which found most of its success making martial-arts flicks. And, indeed, kung fu fights find their way into Infra-Man, even though the plot is about a cyborg battling demons and monsters sent by a mystical princess who emerges from her underground lair to conquer the surface world. Within the first five minutes of the movie proper (following the credits), a giant dragon falls from the sky onto a highway, blocking the path of a school bus, and then the dragon disappears, somehow causing a giant sinkhole that consumes the bus and sparks a fiery maelstrom that destroys a nearby city. The pace doesn’t stay quite that frenetic throughout Infra-Man, but the level of lunacy does.

          The first major human character introduced in the story is Professor De (Wang Hsieh), who runs a massive government science lab. As a means of telling the audience that the lab is futuristic, the professor arrives at work wearing street clothes and then changes into a sliver-lame lab coat festooned with military epaulets. Soon the humans discover that the culprit behind a series of monster attacks is Princess Dragon Mom (Terry Liu), who wears some sort of dominatrix outfit and a headdress designed to look like a dragon skull. From her subterranean HQ, where the attendants include lackeys garbed in skeleton costumes and assorted indeterminate critters who seem like they wandered over from a Sid & Marty Kroft soundstage, Princess Dragon Mom announces her intention to conquer Earth and/or destroy everyone using her monsters.

          To fight back, the professor enlists one of his subordinates, Lei Ma (Danny Lee), to undergo a high-tech transformation and become the cybernetic superhero Infra-Man. Lei can transform into Infra-Man at will, so whenever danger arises, he instantaneously summons a bright red costume with a bug-like helmet, thereby incarnating a drag-queen’s vision of a Power Ranger. (Accentuating the presumably unintended gay-chic nature of the character, one of Infra-Man’s superpowers involves “thunderball fists.”) Endless scenes of Infra-Man tussling with monsters ensue, and the filmmakers employ zero logic with regard to what levels of power and/or vulnerability each character possesses. Sometimes, Infra-Man simply engages in kung fu combat with human-sized monsters, and sometimes, both Infra-Man and his opponents magically expand to gigantic proportions.

          The creatures in the movie are as silly as the main character, including some sort of octopus monster, various robotic henchmen, and myriad mutants portrayed by actors wearing bargain-basement rubber suits. Further, Princess Dragon Mom seems more like a sexually frustrated S&M enthusiast than a super-villain, because she spends most of her time cracking whips and torturing people. Infra-Man borrows the worst possible tropes from Toho Studios’ Godzilla movies, so the professor delivers such insipid lines as, “Lieutenant, I’m going to need printouts on these monsters!” (Because, of course, detailed files are available on monsters previously unseen by man.) And yet the professor’s line can’t compare to some of Princess Dragon Mom’s dialogue (e.g., “She-Demon, I wish to speak to the mutants at once!”).

          All of this is made so much weirder, of course, by the horrible soundtrack of the movie’s English-language version, which features, in addition to the predictable out-of-sync dubbing, a motif of a monster laughing and scheming in a gravely voice reminiscent of Depression-era American gangster movies.

Infra-Man: FREAKY

The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1974)

          Credited with having made over 1,000 features since its formation in 1958, Hong Kong production company Shaw Brothers has largely focused on domestic product, but the ’70s martial-arts craze expanded the company’s international reach. That period also found Shaw Brothers attempting co-productions with companies that were established in specific genres, hence the dizzyingly weird The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), a kung fu/vampire mashup made with Hammer Films, and this buddy movie set in the Wild West. Coproduced by Shaw Brothers and Italy-based spaghetti-Western outfit Champion Films, the picture blends comedy, gun fights, kung fu, and a liberal sprinkling of sex. Accordingly, The Stranger and the Gunfighter begins with a truly bizarre sequence. As rootin’-tootin’ outlaw Dakota (Lee Van Cleef) breaks into a bank vault, he discovers still photographs of naked women. Close-up shots of the photographs trigger vignettes during which a Chinese gentleman named Mr. Wang tattoos artwork onto the buttocks of the women in the photographs. Keep in mind that Dakota doesn’t learn about the tattoos until later in the movie, so why the vignettes are featured in this scene is a mystery.

          Anyway, Dakota gets captured by authorities and sentenced to death. Meanwhile in China, Mr. Wang’s nephew, Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh), graduates from kung fu school, gets into a fight with a gangster, and is told he must travel to America and recover a fortune that Mr. Wang hid somewhere. Faster than you can say “plot contrivance,” Ho treks to the U.S. and rescues Dakota from the hangman’s noose. Then they’re off to find the women in the pictures, since the tattoos collectively form a treasure map. A crazed preacher chases after Dakota and Ho, intent on seizing Mr. Wang’s treasure for himself. The plot is mildly imaginative, in a farcical sort of way, and some of the culture-clash jokes generate brainless amusement. (For instance, the naïve Ho can’t understand why Dakota reacts with alarm every time Ho says, “I want to see ass!”)

          Furthermore, The Stranger and the Gunfighter moves along at a decent clip, even though the iffy dubbing common to both martial-arts films and spaghetti Westerns of the era guarantees a weird soundtrack. Similarly, the heavy use of comedic music and wacky sound effects makes action scenes feel cartoonish. On the plus side, there’s so much plot that the movie doesn’t get overly mired in fighting scenes, the ladies in the supporting cast are lovely, and the stars are cast well—Lieh blends impressive martial-arts abilities with childlike sweetness, while Van Cleef ably personifies a brute whose boastfulness often exceeds his skills. While not necessarily a standout amid the small subgenre of martial-arts Westerns (which also includes 1971’s gonzo Red Sun and the amiable Shanghai pictures of the 200s starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson), The Stranger and the Gunfighter offers a pleasant sampler platter of sensations from two popular genres.

The Stranger and the Gunfighter: FUNKY

The Mighty Peking Man (1977)

          Of the various exploitation movies that Quentin Tarantino re-released in the ’90s through his short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures banner, The Mighty Peking Man is undoubtedly the most confounding. Whereas other QT grindhouse faves explore viable themes of inner-city tension, The Mighty Peking Man is a cheap knock-off of producer Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong (1976), which was of course a remake of the classic 1933 movie bearing the same name. Hong Kong schlockmeisters the Shaw Brothers—best known for their martial-arts flicks—decided to piggyback on De Laurentiis’ massive marketing push for King Kong by making a giant-primate movie of their own. To say something got lost in translation is an understatement.

          The monster in this movie is indeed an enormous ape, but he’s presented as some kind of hybrid Abominable Snowman/gorilla, and much of the movie concerns his fascination with a pretty (and normal-sized) blonde woman. Yet while the beauty who bewitches the beast in the various versions of King Kong accompanies a search party venturing into the wild, the babe in The Mighty Peking Man is some kind of female Tarzan, a young woman who crash-landed in the jungle with her family as a child and then survived the accident to become a loincloth-wearing friend to animals including a pet leopard. As if that’s not enough of a stretch—considering the audience is already being asked to accept the presence of a monstrous mammal—the babe in question, Ah Wei (Evelyne Kraft), is inexplicably presented with perfect grooming, hair, and makeup. Seriously, her loincloth top is a push-up bra, and her legs are immaculately shaved. Huh?
          The story, such as it is, begins when the big ape is freed from a temple during an earthquake and lays waste to a nearby village. Because, of course, living creatures normally reside inside statues and then lumber out with full mobility after hibernating for who knows how long. Anyway, intrepid explorer Johnnie (Danny Lee) is hired to track down the newly dubbed “Mighty Peking Man,” but in his travels he encounters and falls in love with Ah Wei. Their dreary courtship consumes a large chunk of screen time, and the naughty highlight of this sequence involves Johnnie sucking on Ah Wei’s inner thigh to remove poison after she’s bitten by a critter. Considering what a lovely figure Kraft has, nice work if you can get it! Eventually, the movie slides into the usual King Kong plot elements, with the Mighty Peking Man subdued and transported to civilization, where he escapes and goes on a rampage that doesn’t end well.

          The Shaw Brothers clearly studied De Laurentiis’ movie, because the last third of The Mighty Peking Man features many shot-for-shot emulations of the De Laurentiis epic. Unfortunately, these rip-off images are delivered by way of atrocious costumes/makeup and cheap miniature work, so The Mighty Peking Man ends up feeling like a spoof of the 1976 King Kong—which, it should be noted, many thought was already unintentionally funny. It’s all enough to make the head spin, especially because The Mighty Peking Man features the same sort of disjointed dialogue dubbing one usually encounters in the Shaw Brothers’ chop-socky movies.

          One hopes that Tarantino felt compelled to re-release this movie for some comprehensible reason, whether it was a crush on Kraft or the memory of a fun afternoon spent laughing at the film’s incompetence, but in any event, watching The Mighty Peking Man is a bewildering experience. FYI, the picture has been marketed under many different names, including Goliathan, the title used for the picture’s first US release in 1980; Tarantino went with The Mighty Peking Man when he put the flick back into theaters (and into video stores) in 1999. Whatever.

The Mighty Peking Man: FREAKY

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) & Scars of Dracula (1970) & Dracula AD 1972 (1972) & The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) & The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

          By the mid-’60s, a dreary formula was in place for Hammer Films’ long-running Dracula series: Each movie contrived a laborious new mechanism for resurrecting the titular bloodsucker (Christopher Lee), and each movie ended with Drac suffering an elaborate demise. As the series progressed, Lee’s characterization became more robotic, and the filler scenes depicting various supporting characters became more tedious. By the time the ’70s arrived, even Hammer’s lush Victorian-era costumes and locations felt stale. As a result, Taste the Blood of Dracula is a routine but well-photographed entry notable only for introducing Satan worship into the series, although comic actor Roy Kinnear enlivens a few early scenes. The movie takes forever to get started (an hour passes before Drac bites his first neck), and the formula of blood, cleavage, and Gothic atmosphere is overly familiar; furthermore, Dracula’s overreliance on henchmen makes him seem more like a Bond villain than a legendary monster.
          Scars of Dracula features more of the same, but instead of Satan worship, the story pays rudimentary homage to Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel with scenes of an unfortunate European fellow imprisoned in Drac’s castle. Reflecting how dry the creative well was at this point, the opening scene depicts a bat reviving Dracula by drooling blood onto the count’s bones. Really? Although Lee spends more time onscreen than usual in this entry, Scars of Dracula is one of Hammer’s shoddiest productions, complete with fake bats that wouldn’t pass muster in a student film.
          After a two-year hiatus, Hammer shook up the formula with Dracula AD 1972, which resurrects Dracula in present-day England, and the always-entertaining Peter Cushing returned to the series for the first time in 12 years, playing Lorimer Van Helsing, a descendant of the count’s old nemesis. The movie retains a bit of Gothic flavor by giving Dracula an abandoned old church as a lair, but most of the story takes place in the London youth scene, so lots of with-it kids party in tacky early-’70s fashions (leading lady Stephanie Beacham rocks a fierce mullet hairstyle). Campy dialogue, kitschy musical interludes, and slick camerawork make Dracula AD 1972 a guilty pleasure, and watch for raven-haired cult-favorite starlet Caroline Munro in an early role. It should also be noted that Beacham’s mesmerizing cleavage is such a focal point in Dracula AD 1972 that her breasts should’ve gotten special billing; this movie may represent the apex of Hammer leering, which is saying a lot.
          Hammer continued its new modern-day continuity with The Satanic Rites of Dracula, a Cushing-Lee romp enlivened by the presence of costar Freddie Jones, who plays a twitchy Satanist/scientist, and future Absolutely Fabulous star Joanna Lumley, taking over Beacham’s role as a Van Helsing descendant. The movie boasts an energetic score (proto-disco funk passages, lots of stabbing horns), plus slickly atmospheric wide-lens photography. There are even a couple of genuine jolts (rare in any Hammer flick), like a slo-mo attack on Lumley by several distaff vampires. The fact that the first hour of the movie plays out like an occult-themed conspiracy thriller sets the stage nicely for Lee’s dominance in the last twenty minutes; for once, Lee gets to do more than lunge at people and recoil from crosses, and he seems energized. Satanic Rites is easily the best thriller of this batch, even though it’s barely a Dracula movie in the classic sense.
          In 1974, Hammer’s Dracula series reached a bizarre conclusion with the kung fu epic The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, a joint effort from Hammer and chop-socky specialists the Shaw Brothers. In two brief scenes, John Forbes-Robertson unimpressively stands in for the absent Lee as Dracula, while a tired-looking Cushing reprises his Van Helsing shtick for the whole dreary flick. Boring nonsense about noble Chinese martial artists engaged in brawls and swordplay against decaying vampire ghouls in ornate gold masks, 7 Vampires is the series’ absolute nadir. Plus, who knew Dracula spoke fluent Chinese?

Taste the Blood of Dracula: LAME

Scars of Dracula: LAME

Dracula AD 1972: FUNKY

The Satanic Rites of Dracula: FUNKY

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires: SQUARE