Space Transformer

About The Movie

All of Earth's defense systems are controlled by one single girl, a living computer who coordinates every missile system and all the space ships.  Which is incredibly unfortunate, as invaders have managed to sneak into the complex where she lives and infect her with a virus that is actually a miniature version of their army.  Now, it's up to the heroes to shrink themselves - and their giant robot - down to microscopic size and defend her insides full of pasta-growing elves (no, really) from the army of bad guys.

 

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Jim here.  I am commandeering this section of the blog to try to explain the actual plot of this movie.  See, I have, personally, spent far too much time with this movie, and have unfortunately learned how to understand and interpret the events taking place within, the same way that someone who has read too much James Joyce can finally start parsing the meaning of Finnegans Wake... or, alternately, the way that someone who's brain has been corrupted by reading The Necronomicon might start taking the side of tentacle-having individuals more and more.

First of all, you need to know about the source of this movie.  Anime was starting to become very popular in the late 70s and early 80s, but one country that wanted "anime" but didn't want it from Japan was South Korea, who had a whole list of real and historical reasons that they were not quite ready to forgive and forget the war crimes of WWII.

So, in order to satisfy their country's hunger for anime without giving in to Japan, they churned out a number of "animated movies" using existing anime characters, settings, models, etc from Japanese anime and just... sanded off the serial numbers and made them their own. It was this first iteration that was released - to critical acclaim - as Micro teukgongdae Daiyateuron 5

This was then made much, much worse by the inclusion of Joseph Lai, who was "movie producer" in the same way that civets are "expensive coffee producers".  Joseph Lai made his fortune by taking movies from various places in Asia, chopping them up, editing bits and pieces together, throwing in a couple of white guys wearing headbands that said 'Ninja', and then giving them really cool names.

Names like:

• The Leopard Fist Ninja
• Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger
• Inferno Thunderbold
• Bionic Ninja
• Angel's Blood Mission
• Advent Commando 5: Sweet Inferno
• Thunder of Gigantic Serpent
• American Commando 3: Savage Temptation
• Ninja Crackdown
• Fatal Glory
• Catman in Boxer's Blow

Now... one of those names is fake.  But which one?

Anyway, Joseph Lai was mostly known for his work adapting martial arts movies, but he also got his hands on the South Korean Not-Anime and did what Joseph Lai did, which was mainly to find 3 Australians (maybe?) in a van somewhere and have them dub every single line for all the characters in one sitting, with no emotion and no attempt to differentiate who is talking at any time.

These movies, like most of Lai's magnum opus, heavily re-used one another's footage (in order to pad run time) and sort of have a surreal, dream-like quality to them.  They also have no copyright and were therefore featured heavily in Walmart impulse buy $1 bins by checkout counters in the late 90s/early 2000s, which is how Space Transformer came into my hands the first time.

So... actual plot is basically like I said in the intro, just dumber.  So much dumber.  We start in space, where a bunch of not-Starblazer guys shoot at some asteroids, but one of the asteroids gets through and makes landfall.  Inside that asteroid was a spy, and he manages to make it to the home of Ivy, a girl who is the living computer interface for the world's defenses.

He infects Ivy with a "virus" which is actually a microscopic version of the alien army, causing her to fall into a coma and maybe eventually die.  With Ivy out, Earth is defenseless, except for our heroes - an inventor, his comical robot assistant Bipam (Beebo/Beebop/Pie Pan/etc) and a couple of humans who I think are his grandchildren maybe?  The professor first shrinks Bobot and his first giant robot, Diatron 3, but Diatron 3 immediately gets destroyed by the enemy forces (piloting the Waruder combining robots from Diaclone).

The humans then volunteer to be shrunk themselves, this time in Diatron 5, which is more powerful and can defeat the bad guys but immediately gets lost after being injected into Ivy's body, because the plot would be very short if it did not.

About "Inside Ivy's Body" - we're not talking about Innerspace here, there are no blood vessels and tissue walls, there is no Osmosis Jones here.  Instead, Ivy's body contains... a smaller universe, with planets and populations of their own.  One of these planets is now ruled by the aliens, who are keeping a giant tentacle monster locked up in their castle basement (again, I wish I was making this up) and have been oppressing Ivy's internal peoples to maintain control over her.

Our heroes, Chi (aka Cheese) and Nancy, rally the good forces of the universe inside Ivy to fight the bad guys.  These good armies mainly consist of elves or dwarves or gnomes or something, they're small and grow pasta in trees, and they join the battle and all immediately die.

Around this point in the movie, Nancy just... disappears, while Biped gets captured by the bad guys and forced to be the girl villain's sex slave or something.  It's really confusing, even for me.

Cheese somehow finds another person who is lost inside Ivy and is clearly from a different movie.  The two become best buddies, find the remainder of Diatron 5, defeat the bad guys (sort of) via a nuclear explosion (INSIDE IVY), and then Cheese grows back to normal size with Diatron 5 and flies off into space to defeat the bad guys with a giant flaming sword attack that makes the number 5.  Then... that's how the movie ends.  A giant burning 5 over the sound of a dying ice cream truck.

Oh, it's implied that everybody inside Ivy died when Diatron re-enlarges, since he never was extracted or anything and was presumably still inside her when he grew back to normal size.  Even if he had gotten to the surface with it, Ivy would've been crushed, assuming the nuke being set off inside her didn't kill her first, so at least they've got that going for them.

The correct answer was Ninja Crackdown.