Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Jing Jork Phee Sing (1985)


Look at the cover, hype or what? The eighties in Thailand, at least the first half, was a dream for drive-in cinemas. They took the print and traveled from village to village, showing the latest Sorapong Chatree-movie and sold moonshine and food at the same time. Those where the days! So there was an enormous production of junk-cinema released all the time, mostly action with Chatree pointing a big gun at the audience from the colorful posters. Jing Jork Phee Sing has no gun on the poster, but Chatree gets a chance to kick som ass and transform into the silliest werewolf in a long time.

As usual I had no subtitles when watching this classic, but the story seem to be about a gang of polices (or something like that) and they are hunting a gang of bad guys in the jungle. They could also be a gang of people hunting a dangerous dog and are running into a bunch of baddies all the time. Anyway, a witch (with a huge chin!) and a magician (with a blonde wig!) is also involved and they have camp out in the jungle with a small army of henchmen. Our heroes (they could be two different groups actually...) hide in a cave, and wake up a couple of gory looking zombies that are wiped away with some of Chatree's magic. After some mindless action and long scenes of people walking in the forest (and also skinny dipping and not less than two attempted rapes) a black dogs comes to the meditating Chatree and with red lasers from it's eyes transforms him to a werewolf. But more zombies are ahead...

I usually has no problem understand the storylines in these old Thai movies, but here it was confusing. The quality of the VCD was also crappy. so it's easy to mix up the characters after a while. It's a quite typical lowbudget movie from Thailand, a lot of running around in the countryside, to many storylines and cheap and funny effects. Sorapong Chatree is a very good actor who obviously never said no to a movie. One day he could star in masterpieces like Gunman, and sometimes it was movies like this. He's a competent hero and shows up some good fighting skills in the end, which was a nice touch to the final. The last half hour is also the funniest, with a good zombie-attack, fighting, action and a strange happy ending where everyone become friends!

The zombies look silly and gory, and one of them suddenly has long rubber-arms (you can kinda see it at one of the screenshots down below), but there's not much graphic munching I'm sorry to say. The infamous werewolf is a sight to behold. This black dog comes up to Sorapong, shoots some red lasers on him and we're treated with a very, very, very, very primitive transformation-effect where pieces of fur shows up on Sorapongs face one by one like a very bad stop-motion effect. They he suddenly is a beefed up version of Paddington the Bear, walks out of frame... and that's more or less it. He's not even transform into a werewolf in the end-fight!

Jing Jork Phee Sing is retared, silly fun. I'm not sure I can recommend it to any other than fans of really obscure asian movies!






8 comments:

CiNEZiLLA said...

Crazy Shit!

Where do you find all these wild wondrosities? Never mind I'm fully content reading your excellent pieces on them.

J.

Anonymous said...

I ask the same. Where do you find all this crazy flicks? Amazing! Keep up the good work.
By the way. On this friday my childheroes Bud Spencer/Terence Hill will get the lifetime achievement award at the Italian Oscars. Well deserved, don´t you think.

Ninja Dixon said...

It's not that difficult! There's some Thai places who sell stuff, and when I was in thailand I bought a lot of obscure stuff directly on the street. Someone will help me in thailand to order from even more obscure thai-places :)

Bud and Terence? Lifetime award! That's amazing! I guess this will be on tv, do you live in Italy? Maybe you can keep so updated if just this clip shows up on YouTube? They are my childhood-heroes too, and they so deserve it!

Anonymous said...

I am going on a hunt for some Thaimovies, thats for sure.

No i am swedish =) But i got the info from my aunt who lives in Rome since many years. And yes it´s live on Rai Sat Cinema, and than it´s rerunned on Rai Uno later on friday. Will probably be on Youtube on saturday. I have no idea if they will be there to accept the award though. But they are both in good shape with their own new tv series in the works so i am guessing they will attend.

Jack J said...

How and where does Fred find these films? Well, being into world-weird cinema (Mondo Macabro style cinema) means you put on your little jungle helmet and venture into the unknown. ;o)

I've had people, people who are even horror fans, ask me bewildered why I watch Turkish and Indonesian cinema. it's like asking the adventurer why he goes into the jungle.

xanthor fek said...

I tried to order some stuff from Thailand 5 years ago and they refused to sell to me because I live in Turkey! wish I could see this stuff.

Jack J said...

Gee, I just found out there's a cut & paste version of this from Tomas Tang! The title of the dubbed version is MAD MOVES and it's out on Spanish VHS. I have no info of an English dubbed release. Go here:

http://goldenninjawarriorchronicles.blogspot.com/2010/09/mad-moves-werewolf-is-on-loose-at.html

Ninja Dixon said...

Wow Jack, I would love to see that version! Thanks for the link! And what a great poster, I will update my review with it!