Tomb

After last week's enjoyably ridiculous movie SARS Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis (2004), I was intrigued enough about modern Thai B-movies to pounce on the first two cool-looking Thai films I could find. My advice? Never do that.

First up is the straightforwardly titled Thai Thief (a.k.a. Thai Theep) (2006), which presents itself as a rollicking adventure yarn with bits of comedy chucked in for good measure. The DVD cover is a grabber, portraying a chorus line of gun-wielding characters riding a locomotive out of a giant explosion while a squadron of Japanese Zeroes fly overhead. Cool! Plus, two of the stars of SARS Wars are in here! (Somlek Sakdikul and Suthep Po-ngam, who played Bangkok Zombie Crisis’s lecherous kidnapper and bald Jedi, respectively.)

Thai Thief is set in Japanese-occupied Thailand during the Second World War, and most of the main characters attempt to steal a trainload of Japanese gold. This flick is clearly trying for an Ocean's Eleven-type vibe, and needs to try harder. At least there are a couple of goofy and incongruous wire-fu sequences. My favourite of these is when the dashing young jewel thief surprises a pair of Japanese soldiers and draws his pistol on them. Suddenly, the thief's female colleague decides to show how tough she is by knocking out both soldiers with a slow-motion kick straight out of The Matrix (1999). Nice, but do you really have to Matrix-kick two guys who are already being held at gunpoint? That's called being a bully, not a badass.

While unremarkable, at least Thai Thief is competently made. The Vanquisher (a.k.a. Suay Samurai) (2009), on the other hand, is a big, shiny crap bonanza. The poster is amazing — it depicts two beautiful women wearing matching Lara Croft tank tops and wielding samurai swords. That's pretty much the entire reason I picked it up. Swords and cleavage, eh? Let me get my wallet....

The first thing you notice about The Vanquisher is that the acting sets a new standard in cue-card-reading flatness. The phrase “Nope, that doesn't count as a facial expression” kept popping into my head every time someone tried to emote. Some of the characters are meant to be American, so about one-third of this film is in broken English, subtitled into even worse English. Check out this exchange:

“Regard; the report about Kasim.” (Subtitle: “we have here are clues to the taxi drivers”) (?!?)

“That's a good news. No. Keep the police away from him. Let him be my job.” (Subtitle: “non — do not disturb him wait for us to wait a minute this is our thing not just your business.”)

The subtitles lack capitalization, punctuation and sanity. A few of my favourites include “she is a cunning man,” “do you want to explain to explain why,” “I like you so ruthless” and the nicely circular “I know you you know I.”

After 40 minutes of numbing tedium, one of the actresses finally strips down to that famous Lara Croft tank top, and the film starts to get awesome in a clumsy and laughable way. A machine-gun-toting SWAT team blazes through a forest on dirt bikes, blasting everything in its path. Everybody carries a Katana for some reason, and they sword fight at the drop of a hat. Lots of the sword battles incorporate improvised weapons; we see swords versus paintings, chains, computer keyboards, fire extinguishers, wooden pallets, a playground swing set (!) and a briefcase containing a bomb. (Only that last item fails to protect against sword wounds; everything else works like a charm.)

A team of ninjas shows up, but the only thing it manages to do is get murdered by the dozen while spraying machine-gun fire everywhere. (Actually, one ninja does manage to heal his own mortal wound with some drugs, but that just allows him to get killed twice by the same woman.) Some of the bad guys turn out to be good guys, and some of the good guys turn out to be bad guys, or something. It's hard to be sure — anyone who can make sense out of the plot of The Vanquisher needs to be immune to boredom. Check it out if you're an expert bad-movie mocker, but nobody will think less of you if you fast-forward to the good bits.