BAD MOVIE: THE BIONIC BOY (1977)

THE BIONIC BOY (1977) – This joint production of the Philippines and Hong Kong starred child martial arts champion Johnson Yap from Singapore. It was also released under alternate titles like Superboy, Trionic Warrior and others.

We viewers first meet 10-year-old Sonny Lee (Johnson Yap) on a televised game show hosted by a man who looks like Liberace. I didn’t say he DRESSES like Liberace, just that his face very closely resembles the Candelabra Man.

Sonny wins the Jackpot on the game show because he’s as intelligent as he is skilled at martial arts. When Not Liberace brings on Sonny’s parents, some gangsters watching the show see that his father is really a former Interpol agent who brought down several of their colleagues and has been living in a Witness Protection Program ever since. (Pretty stupid to let your face get televised to millions then.)

The gangsters add killing the ex-Interpol man to their To-Do List since they are in the middle of muscling in on all export businesses in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and ultimately Australia. Sonny Lee and his parents get even more publicity when Ramirez, a Manila auto magnate, announces he will give the family a new car fresh off his assembly line. 

Our villains decide to kill two birds with one stone by assassinating Sonny’s father AND Ramirez, who is one of the export tycoons they’ve been extorting. It turns out that the former Interpol man hasn’t lost his chops and he kills the assassin sent to whack him and Ramirez.

Our chief gangster, who is dubbed by someone who speaks their lines in spurts of four or five words followed by pointless pauses, sends more men to kill the targets. This time they use a pair of bulldozers to ambush the Lee family in their new car from Ramirez. The attack leaves both parents dead and little Sonny maimed and near death.

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have Moog Synthesizer technology. Well, actually they use bionic technology to save Sonny’s life by replacing both legs, an arm, an eye and both ears. The Moog Synthesizers beat us viewers into submission with an almost non-stop bombardment of some of the weirdest sounds those babies can make.

I’m serious about that. If I’m ever in charge of a Numbers Station I plan to play The Bionic Boy soundtrack in a continuous loop, punctuated only by my twice-yearly interruption to read off a list of digits. But, as always, I’m kind of weird. 

With Sonny’s life saved, Ramirez acts on the sacred Philippine tradition of car manufacturers raising the orphaned child of the last people to receive one of their vehicles. This movie was made in a less suspicious time, but to 2024 viewers the way Ramirez has Sonny hang out with him and other adult men in his employ for the rest of the movie seems kind of weird.

At any rate, our title character can now throw people around like ragdolls, run and leap in slow motion just like Lee Majors, can hear almost any sound and can telescopically take in faraway sights via his bionic eye. Sonny’s signature sound effect is a Moog making whinnying noises like a horse. I don’t know why.

Sonny’s thirst for revenge dovetails nicely with the gangsters’ obsession to kill the little boy and his constant companion Ramirez. Our hero uses his bionic powers and his martial arts prowess to save himself and his adult guardian (I guess.) from the many, many hitmen who try whacking them.

Since this is not a namby-pamby Hollywood movie of the time, Sonny actually KILLS several of the thugs while fighting them. The rest of the movie uses the Lindsay Shonteff formula of the good guy kicking the butts of would-be assassins, the chief villain getting infuriated and sending more hit squads which of course fail. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We finally get some variety when Sonny’s grandparents want custody of the little boy even though they never gave his parents one single free car. Sonny runs away (in slow motion, of course) because he still wants revenge on the gangster boss who ordered his parents killed.

That villain’s goons make off with Sonny when he is on the run. They take the little boy to their boss’s private island in the Philippine Archipelago where, rather than just kill Sonny outright, he holds a sort-of tournament pitting varying numbers of his thugs against the kid.

It should go without saying that our hero trashes them all, knocking them around and punching them several feet away in fight scenes that look as fake as all his earlier ones. I’m okay with it, though, since this is just a film targeted at a very young audience.

After several fights, Sonny escapes the gangsters and gangster babes surrounding him and gets chased around the island. He has to dodge gunfire from the villain’s machine-gun wielding thugs dressed in their Forever 1970s clothing. 

Eventually our title character uses a radio to summon Interpol. They come charging in via planes and helicopters with their guns blazing. The final twenty-some minutes of The Bionic Boy are virtually dialogue-free, as the good guys and bad guys engage in a firefight while Sonny kicks gangster tush.

In my favorite bit, the kid throws a goon down a bowling alley lane to knock down all the pins. STEE-RIKEEEE as Fred Flintstone would say.

Surprisingly, the chief gangster (it’s one of those movies where villains’ names are so rarely used you’re damned if you can remember them) gets away in his plane while Sonny fails to stop him. I guess it was sequel bait, but in his next movie in 1979 Johnson Yap played a whole different character who gets bionic parts. 

Best of all, it’s a crossover movie with – no, not Weng-Weng – but Cleopatra Wong, the Hong Kong studios rip-off of blaxploitation heroine Cleopatra Jones. I’ll review that film some other time.

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