Karate-Robo Zaborgar

Over the course of 52 episodes in 1974, the Japanese “tokusatsu” series Denjin Zaborger followed the adventures of a studly young secret agent and a transforming robot that could be a motorcycle or an armored martial-arts master, depending on the situation. Karate-Robo Zaborgar, writer-director Noboru Iguchi’s tongue-in-cheek revival of the Zaborger franchise, compresses what would’ve taken roughly two dozen episodes on the original series into one action-packed two-hour film, in which everything from the original is twisted—sometimes a little, and sometimes a tremendous lot. Yasuhisa Furuhara plays the hero, who still tools around on his robo-bike (now spelled “Zaborgar” in English), thwarting the plans of a mad scientist and his sexy, antenna-sporting cyborg sidekick. But while on the surface Karate-Robo Zaborgar is colorful and kid-friendly, some of its elements are fairly kinky. The bad guy’s floating fortress resembles a giant scrotum; his bikini-clad minions have screeching dragons that pop out of their breast area; and at one point Zaborgar is attacked by an acid-spewing “Diarrhea Robot.”