Past Misdeeds: Supersonic Man (1979)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

aka Sonic Man (which I can only imagine to be a side story about our hero’s less favoured brother)

Poor Professor Morgan (José María Caffarel)! He is such a genius when it comes to energy SCIENCE! (energytology?), that evil, perhaps ever so slightly crazy, villain Dr. Gulik (Cameron Mitchell) sends out a bunch of his sub-COBRA goons and one of his oh so very impressive killer robots to kidnap him, somehow making the authorities believe the good Professor defected somewhere leaving a lot of dead bodies behind.

Fortunately, some aliens have decided that enough is enough with all that human nonsense, and have sent out superhero Supersonic (Richard Yesteran) to take care of business on Earth. When he’s not flying around to a one-finger synthesizer version of the Superman theme, or activating his varied superpowers via finger pointing and weird hand gestures, Supersonic (probably not Supes to his friends for copyright reasons) works as a moustachioed private eye. In this function he more or less stumbles (we shouldn’t ascribe to purpose what we can ascribe to random chance in this movie) upon Morgan’s daughter Patricia (Diana Polakov), who doesn’t believe her father could do anything morally dubious at all, and could really use a private eye to find him.

The private eye business will turn out to be Supersonic’s greatest weakness once he gets down to the whole thwarting evil Dr. Gulik, rescuing good Professor Morgan business, because like all private eyes, he too has the tendency to get conked in the head from behind, which makes life somewhat difficult for a superhero who needs to talk into – or at least think at – his (magic) space watch to transform. Hopefully, random chance will help him out there too.

I’m not much of a fan of the Italian and Spanish rip-offs of Superman, perhaps because I already don’t find the original to be exactly riveting (I’m very sorry, but Superman as a character does little for me, probably because I find perfection incredibly boring), but most probably because most of the resulting films were neither particularly inspired nor particularly crazy, which could only ever leave us with a shoddy superhero movie. [Future me’s position towards the first two Superman movies has rather improved, yet I still don’t like the rip-offs any better].

Juan Piquer Simón’s Supersonic Man is the great exception to the rule, because while it’s as shoddy, dumb, and silly as three other cheap superhero movies combined, it is also a film containing oh so many indelible charms I find it utterly impossible to resist it. There may be little the film does actually right – except for Simón’s frequent cinematographer Juan Mariné’s surprisingly pleasant photography – but most everything it does wrong, it does in delightful ways that’ll convince you a man in a cape can fly over a fake yet beautiful model of a house.

What the film, or rather Simón, does particularly right is finding a way to actually awaken Cameron Mitchell from the stupor he is in during too many of his low budget nonsense outings and get him to chew the scenery in his own inimitable way, like a prettier William Shatner on very bad drugs. During the course of the film, Mitchell gets to chew and spit out not only scenery, helpless co-actors, and possibly your mind, he also has at least half a dozen great, absolutely ridiculous villain speeches. If you’re really lucky, he does give these while having “philosophical” – which in the context of this film means “deeply stupid” - discussions with Caffarel’s Professor, whom he always keeps at his side to have someone to gloat at. Caffarel, speaking lots and lots of more loquacious versions of the words “tut, tut, you evil madman” does make a contrast that helps Mitchell shine extra bright, too, for where dear old Mister Mitchell gloats, gesticulates and mugs, Caffarel is clearly above emoting (or really, moving too much), possibly because he’s afraid that Mitchell will eat him too.

There are many other joys to be had in Supersonic Man, and not just the way Supersonic (the Man is clearly implicit) goes out of his way to not help henchmen in need (making the last Superman movies look much friendlier all of a sudden), or the fact that the film is absolutely hilarious, except in those moments when it is actually trying to be hilarious through that most horrid type of comic relief – a homeless comedy alcoholic. I could probably go on listing things for a few thousand words, but it’ll be better for everyone’s sanity if I only mention one or two.

So, there’s that famous scene where Supersonic lifts a barely three-dimensional steamroller out of Patricia’s way, like a real champ (if a real champ were a guy who cheats outrageously), with said steamroller having been built (probably in half an hour of somebody’s lunch break) either from very light wood (if you’re the more kindly minded type of thinker), or actual papier-mâché (if you’re more of a glass half empty kind of mutant). In any case, the great beauty of his scene is not just that the steamroller is clearly not a steamroller but how utterly shameless Simón is about it, obviously not caring one bit that his audience notices the extreme short cuts he’s willing to take. Curiously, in this film, that approach doesn’t look so much like a director looking down at his audience and his film than like a guy sharing a private moment with us.

As a second example, there are Gulik’s killer robots. They are silver, they have tasteful little glowing lamps, they have tiny rockets, they have in-built flame-throwers, they have in-built gas-throwers, they are so fast (cough) they can move at least three or four meters a minute (Simón already training for Slugs?), and they look exactly like giant toy robots. In fact, they look and feel exactly like what an eight year old would find awesome in a robot, so again, Simón seems to know what he’s doing with them.

These robots, as well as the film’s approach to special effects, also suggest to me that, while the film is clearly meant to rip-off the Donner Superman film, Simón is actually working off the much older serial model for Supersonic, something that also explains the film’s stop and start episodic plotting, the archetypal characters, and the way the action scenes are staged just as well, perhaps even better, than mere ineptitude would. One might even start to think there’s no ineptitude involved here at all but a rather clever and private revival of an often forgotten style of filmmaking hidden away in plain sight.


Or I just might be crazy, but then, so’s Dr. Gulik, and he gets all the best lines. Soon you will know the true force.