So nonlinear that calling it nonlinear doesn’t cut it, the Hong Kong oddity The Invincible Space Streaker has nothing to do with space, and there’s no streaker. But here’s what goes down, or as much I was able to decipher from its truncated-English subtitles (“I order you kill him!”): After a hard day at grade school, about two dozen little boys go to a local watering hole and remove their little-boy pants to go skinny-dipping. This odd group activity is halted by the appearance of a mystical guy with a stereotypical bad haircut. He’s dressed in a robe that makes him look like Dr. Strange, except that I don’t recall the Marvel Comics character having ever enjoyed an eyeful of undescended testicles during an afternoon romp.
Anyhow, this creepy doctor convinces roughly half the kids to follow him to this lab by using a poster of a superhero as bait, presumably because candy — the favored tool of kidnappers the world over — sucks ass in Asian countries. Doc promises to turn them all into “superman” (lowercase), but once the first kid is wired into a crazy contraption in the evil lair, it’s clear there will be no kid-to-superman transformations.
Instead, Doc changes the first boy into a cute capuchin monkey. The other children react via frightened subtitles: “It’s the monkey! Not superman!” Another kid becomes a pot-bellied pig. A third boy is on the road to mutation when his full-bladdered friend yanks down his shorts and pees all over Doc’s face and the machine. (And it’s no special effect, either, as the camera horrifyingly details.) These two tots manage to escape, but the one whose transformation was interrupted by the ol’ stream-of-urine-as-means-of-distraction trick finds himself turned into a masked superhero. His costume is an unsettling blend of Boba Fett, Evel Knievel, The Fly and Liberace. He kicks bad guys and then there’s an elaborate (at least by the standards set forth thus far) motorcycle chase.
Then there’s more fighting as the hero fights a walking bug, several guys on choppers and, for a split second, what appears to be a man in a wolf costume. Pee-Pee Boy helps out by discovering the joys of explosives, and then promptly dies in a slow-motion scene highly reminiscent of Willem Dafoe’s death in Platoon. This makes the hero angry enough to zap the crap out of the bad guys to emerge victorious. Why he didn’t do that in the first place and thus spare his best friend’s life is beyond me. But all the little boys celebrate this triumph by taking another nude group swim, as the title card screams, “THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMING!” —Rod Lott