In the Philippines, Darna is a genuine pop culture phenomenon, a much-beloved comic book superheroine in the mould of Wonder Woman. She was created by writer Mars Ravelo and artist Nestor Redondo as a reworking of Ravelo’s earlier creation, Barga, and made her print debut in Pilipino Comics no.77 (May 1950). Varga had been a huge hit when she first appeared in 1947 and when Ravelo fell out with his editors and took the character off to a rival, the renamed Darna was even more popular. Drawing heavily from Filipino mythology as much as from contemporary American comics, the character was so popular that she made the jump to the big screen as early as 1951 in Fernando Poe Sr’s Darna, the first of what would lead to 14 films in total between 1951 and 1994, and several television series between 1977 and 2022.

In the 1970s, the popular actress, television presenter, singer, dancer, former child star and future politician Vilma Santos took the role in Lipad, Darna, Lipad! (1973), the first of four iconic big screen appearances that became the de facto public image of Darna for many decades to come. Darna vs. the Planet Women was the third of her films, sandwiched between Darna and the Giants (1973) and Darna at Ding (1980) and acted as a reboot of the character. Die-hard fans must have been slightly non-plussed when confronted by an unexpected origin story that reinvents Darna for reasons that are hard to fathom.

She’s now the alter ego of a disabled teenager, Narda, who is bullied by the village bullies and spends a good amount of time bickering with her boyfriend Ramon (Zandro Zamora) while hanging out with her intensely annoying little brother Ding (Bentot Jr). A UFO turns up, initially zapping Ramon with a ray gun and freezing him, before the ship’s occupants, the eponymous Amazonian Planet Women, emerge, a colour-coded spearhead for a full-on alien invasion. Discovering the frozen Ramon, Narda prays for help and is answered by a heavenly voice that sends her a small stone with the name Darna written on it. When she swallows the stone (not a terribly advisable thing to show given the film’s young target audience) and shouts “Darna” she is transformed into the bikini-wearing superheroine Darna. The Planet Women, led by Electra (Rosanna Ortiz), are after the Earth’s best scientists and it’s up to Darna to stop them, stopping off here and there for some disco dancing, kung-fu fighting and spouting of snappy one-liners.

Darna vs. the Planet Women takes a while to get into its stride, the first act being a mix of comedy and melodrama as the disabled Narda has to put up with those stereotypical bullies and watch helplessly as the long-suffering and none-too-bright Ramon is given a beating by those self-same thugs. The pacing feels a little odd altogether but that’s probably just cultural differences at play – what played well in the west in 1975 may not necessarily have been what Filipino audiences were looking for and if Darna vs. the Planet Women is any indication, what they were looking for was pure pulp silliness and that’s entirely understandable. It may be as daft as it gets, but Darna vs. the Planet Women is strangely irresistible. It may be totally loopy but in truth, is it really and sillier than any of the pre-Superman (1978) superhero films?

Director Armando Garces, director of 145 feature films in many genres, throws in all sorts of diversions to keep those audiences entertained. 52 minutes in and we get a long musical interlude out of nowhere as Ramon and his friend try to serenade Narda and end up serenading her grandmother instead; there’s the obligatory disco-era dance routine – in this case it’s a party in a very posh house instead of a glitzy nightclub; Darna throws some very weak martial arts moves in the equally de-rigueur-for-1975 kung fu sequence, a punch up between Darna and one of the Planet Women on a rooftop; and in surely a unique moment for the superhero genre, God Himself puts in a cameo appearance, manifesting as a beam of blue light in answer to Darna’s prayers.

As well as looking to abduct human scientists, part of the Planet Women’s plan is suspiciously similar to that of the Daleks in the Doctor Who (1963-1989) serial The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and its big screen adaptation, Daleks’ Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. (1966), as well as anticipating the plot of the Chinese science fiction epic liúlàng dìqiú/The Wandering Earth (2019). As with the aforementioned kidnappings, the bonkers scheme involves fitting the Earth with huge engines that the Planet Women plan to use to navigate the planet back to their own solar system. Of course, they never get that far and given the state of the special effects in the rest of the film, one dreads to think what it would have looked like…

It’s all a great deal of very silly fun. It’s a tad too long and some judicious editing of the opening act, cutting out some of the melodrama and knockabout comedy would have helped not only with the pacing but streamlined the whole affair. But what we’ve got is fine, very passable brain-dead entertainment that’s certainly a lot more fun than the likes of Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1965), or The Wild World of Batwoman (1966). It was, presumably, a box office hit as the Darna films kept on coming for two more decades and enjoyed great success in the long running television series of 2005, 2009 and 2022. Santos became the mayor of Lipa City in 1998, the Governor of Batangas in 2007 and was elected to the Filipino House of Representatives in the 2014. She remained hugely popular as an actor, winning awards even after her screen appearances slowed down. To this day, her four Darna films remain as popular as she and though plenty of other actresses have donned the heroine’s bikini since, her portrayal remains perhaps the definitive screen version.