Nangphaya Ngu Phee (1984)

... aka: นางพญางูผี
... aka: Ghost Snake Queen, The
... aka: Nangphya Ngu Phi
... aka: Phantom Serpent Queen, The
... aka: Queen of Ghost Snakes, The

Directed by:
สุริยน ดวงทองดี (Suriyon Duangthongdee) (?)
อนันต์ ชลวนิช (Anan Chonwanit) (?)

A bunch of mysterious deaths occur in a small Thai village that are blamed on snake bites, so a bunch of locals are paid to capture / kill them as stolen music from Psycho II plays on the soundtrack. However, a thunderstorm late one night unleashes a bunch of them. The man who paid the snake killers is promptly bitten and killed just as his very pregnant wife goes into labor. After a knocked over lantern sets their hut on fire, the woman crawls outside, gives birth in the dirt and is promptly struck and killed by lightning (!!) One of the snakes then crawls inside her baby; possessing it. (For the record, they use a baby doll covered in blood for the infant. At first, I thought it was stillborn until they added crying sounds!) The baby girl is then rescued by a couple who already have another baby girl of their own.

Years later, the two babies have grown into attractive adult women desired by many men in the village. Kamfa (Naowarat Yuktanan) is the birth daughter and Boonmee (the gorgeous Pornpan Ketmamatsu) is the adopted daughter. While Kamfa is obedient, gentle, shy and a hard worker who accompanies the rest of her family to the fields, Boonmee is lazy, short-tempered and nasty to her parents, particularly her father, whom she hates. Traveling from Bangkok, a young police officer named Cha (Toon Hiransap) and older Professor Phalat (Sor Asanajinda) take an ox-drawn carriage to the village. The first thing they're greeted by upon arrival is a corpse lying in the brush, which causes their goofy driver (played by an overacting camera-mugger used as comic relief throughout the film) to jump teen feet into the air back onto his wagon. The three then go to a graveyard and find the caskets of the recently dead are filled with snakes instead of corpses. A consult with a shaman shows an evil spirit of a shape-shifting old sorceress who sometimes takes the form of a giant snake monster is responsible.

Though she has no problem leading on a local brute to do her bidding, Boonmee actually is more interested in winning over the affections of Cha. Unfortunately, he's more interested in her sweeter sister, which prompts Boonmee, who has been hosting the spirit of the sorceress since birth, to use her snake girl powers to get her way. She hypnotizes Kamfa and makes her sleepwalk to the village chief's house where his young daughter is recovering from a cobra bite. The sorceress then appears long enough to kill the girl. When the chief shows up only Kamfa is there so she's blamed for it. When the father attempts to intervene, Boonmee transforms into the old sorceress and kills him by biting his neck.

For punishment, Kamfa is set to be executed by the villagers. Cha and the Professor, who went to the city for a spell, arrive back just in time to see Kamfa tied to a stake about to be burned alive. When Cha tries to stop it, he gets into a fight with some villagers and finds himself tied up and about to be roasted. However, a Buddhist monk shows up just in time to pray and cause it to rain. The fire is extinguished, Kamfa and Cha are set free and Boonmee escapes and goes to live in a cave with the old sorceress, some cavemen and a bunch of scantily-clad snake girls who seduce and lure men into their lair so the sorceress can drink their blood. Why Boonmee wasn't just living with them to begin with is anyone's guess but this does at least give us a scene where the snake girls do a choreographed dance to an instrumental disco remix of Blue Monday that lasts almost five minutes. Yeeeeesssss!

Boonmee eventually puts Cha under her spell and takes him back to her cave while Kamfa, Cha, the professor, the goofy villager and Kamfa's mother (Namgneun Boonnak) set out to do something about it. A plastic skeleton, a wobbly, red-eyed giant snake and dynamite all figure in the sloppy and astonishingly poorly edited finale.

Also thrown into the mix are a sacred Buddhist necklace used to break the curse, a real fight between a cobra and a mongoose, the professor giving a snake girl a piggyback ride, a completely stolen soundtrack (music from Carrie and Conan the Barbarian is also used), a bunch of really bad jump cuts and footage from a parade taking place at the Songkran Festival (a national holiday to celebrate Thai's New Year in accordance to the Buddhist calendar), which gets several minutes of screen time. Though there's some fun stuff to be found here, and a great performance from the unknown older actress playing the sorceress, it pales in comparison to the other similar snake woman movies I've seen (try the Indonesian SNAKE QUEEN with Suzzanna instead) and is cheap, dumb, horribly edited and generally poorly made with awful "comedy" and some slow passages that will really try your patience. Still, far from the worst Thai horror I've seen from this same time period. Make of that what you will.

These snake woman movies based on folklore were, and continue to be, very popular in Asia. In Thailand alone there's Phantom Snake (1965) starring Petchara Chaowarat, Snake Queen (1972) starring Aranya Namwong, Nakee (1979), which became the basis for two Thai TV shows (in 1988 and 2016) and was followed by a 2018 sequel, Mae Bia (versions made in 1989, 1993, 2001 and 2018), Devil Medusa (1995), Deep in the Jungle (2008) and others. Even this one received its very own sequel in 1990; Queen of Ghost Snakes 2, starring Trirak Rakkarndee from the first couple HOUSE OF POP films. I was hoping to watch that one back-to-back with this original but couldn't find it anywhere.

This was never released in English and the only available print is really washed out and ugly with an improper aspect ratio (probably from a cheap VCD release), which didn't help with the enjoyment factor any. I'm not at all sure about the director(s) I have listed but the poster seems to list two. The first of these - สุริยน ดวงทองดี - is attached to numerous other Thai horrors like the vampire film แก้วขนเหล็ก (1983; "Immortal Enemy"), the ghost movie แม่นาคอาละวาด (1989; "Mae Nak Rampage") and the QOGS sequel.

★1/2

Wu yi bian fu (1980)

... aka: 無翼蝙蝠
... aka: Bat Without Wings

Directed by:
Chu Yuan (Yuen Chor)

Twenty-eight of the best fighters in the boxer world travel to the Hungfa Temple in an effort to defeat a murderous, lustful demon nicknamed "Bat Without Wings" (Ching Tang) who hides his identity behind a black-and-white "mask" that looks more like KISS make-up. Bat is rumored to have kidnapped, raped and murdered many beautiful young women in the area and must be stopped. After eliminating all but two of the swordsmen, he's finally killed by Szma Zhongyuan aka Iron Palm and the province can now rest easy. Five years pass and a security bureau is passing through a rural area when they stop by a tea house. The owner (Feng Ku) passes along a note to Lei-fing (Pui-San Auyeung), which has been left there for her by one Xiao Qi (Derek Yee Tung Sing). Nicknamed "The Broken-Heart Sword," Xiao is a brave and handsome young fighter known for possessing a white pearl sword and, uh, a green horse with a purple silk rein. Lei-fing swoons at the prospect of meeting him so when the note asks her to come see him at an abandoned local temple it's pretty much a no brainer. Lei-fing tells her party to stay put while she walks to the temple alone.

While Lei-fing is away, the owner reveals himself to be the notorious Bat and quickly slaughters all of the travelers save for a handmaiden Qiuju (Li-Ling Liao), who passes out. Lei-fing arrives at the temple but instead of finding a heartthrob there waiting to sweep her off her feet, she finds the tea house owner / Bat has lured her there. Two swordfights later, Lei-fing finds herself drugged and in some catacombs beneath the temple decorated with sculptures of beautiful women where a second, facially scarred man who appears to be out of his mind emerges. As it turns out, the tea house owner who announced himself as Bat is merely an impostor and the deranged guy being kept in the underground lair is the original Bat. And the man impersonating Bat was also impersonating the tea house owner (whom he killed before the security bureau even arrived) and is actually Iron Palm, the man rumored to have killed Bat five years earlier. Got that?

Meanwhile, in another city, Qi Xiao is trying to enjoy a relaxing dinner but keeps getting interrupted. Iron Palm's daughter, Dongcheng (Ling Chi), arranges for Ghost King (Shen Chan), leader of the murderous Hell Gang, to try to kill him. After winning their fight (which turns out to be a test of his abilities), Dongcheng hires Xiao to try to locate her father, see if rumors that Bat are still alive are true (hint: we already know the answer to this) and also get revenge since her lover (Jason Piao Pai) has been killed. Two comic robbers then show up for yet another quickie swordfight before running off. Finally, Lei-fing's father, Lei Xun (Yong Wang), and her fiance, Han Shen (Kuan-Chung Ku), show up asking if he had anything to do with his daughter's disappearance (hint: we already know the answer to this, too).

Having already been killed and dismembered, Lei-fing's temporarily reassembled ghost returns briefly to remove her head and leave it on her father's doorstep before her body falls apart. Qi Xiao joins the grieving, vengeful father and fiance in their quest for answers, which leads them to Leng Qiuyun (Fei Ai) aka the "Thousand-Faced Scholar," who was the only other man to survive the fight with Bat five years prior. Unfortunately, Qiuyun refuses to give out too much information as his beloved Ximen Luoye is in danger and hiding out somewhere. Ximen Luoye also happens to be a dead ringer for Lei-fing (and is played by the same actress). Few people are what they seem here and most of them have some kind of ulterior motive that's eventually revealed. As if there's not enough going on already, there are also two swords called "Bat Blades" that, when combined together, give out a clue to the whereabouts of a hidden fortune in jewels.

Our heroes face multiple hurdles along the way, including endless duplicitous characters, endless swordfights (one even taking place over a lake of acid), surviving a booby-trapped island with moving bamboo, toxic water and a spike pit, discovering secret passageways, enduring Taoist black magic spells and much more. The titular bad guy turns isn't even the primary focus here, as his character is bat-shit crazy and laughing like a loon the entire time. Having this perverted sex predator / killer of teenage girls as the film's primary comic relief is a bit odd to put it mildly.

There's action, adventure, fantasy and horror aplenty in this very busy wuxia and a lot to appreciate from a visual standpoint. Since this is from Shaw Brothers, the sets, props and costumes are all on point and the lighting choices are great. There's a nice autumnal look to the outdoor sets with use of pastels and lots of swirling fog and bolder color choices used in the underground lair. In other words, this is always a joy to look at. However, that's not quite enough to make up for the awful, redundant dialogue and a plot that's a headache-inducing mess. We have characters falsely claiming others are dead, characters pretending to be other other characters, characters faking their own deaths, almost no character who is what they seem and far too many characters with individual motives to even keep track of here. It's such a convoluted mess that you may be like me and just stop caring altogether.

There are a number of DVD releases with English subtitle options. The most common is the Celestial Pictures release that's part of their "Eastern Masters" collection.

★★