Phi Song Nang (1989)

... aka: ผีสองนาง

... aka: 菩薩咒

... aka: Heavenly Devil

... aka: Heavenly Spell

... aka: Pu sa zhou

... aka: Two Ghosts

Directed by:

ฤทธิรงค์ (Rittirong) (credited on Thai version)

On Ma (credited on HK version)

Depending on the source you consult, this film was first released in either 1987, 1989, 1990 or 1991 and you'll also notice completely different actors listed as being the stars and as many as five different directors credited with making it! That's not too uncommon with Asian co-productions or films made in one country and then released in another, though. Often times these movies had their titles and credits completely changed to give the impression someone else had made it or that it's a homegrown production and not one from a neighboring country. At other times, the original film was re-edited and had new scenes shot with new actors for release in certain markets. Sometimes the same film was essentially made twice, with parallel productions shot simultaneously with different actors speaking different languages. And then there were the times that films were indeed co-productions between two or three countries, but completely different edits were made and completely different footage used. This understandably leads to a lot of disinformation being spread around online that blogging film nerds like me have to try to clean up.

Best I can figure with this one is that it was either a solely Thai production or a Hong Kong / Thai co-production. The latter seems more accurate judging by the mixed cast, though the film is based on a famous folklore tale that I believe is specific to Thailand. The earliest release I could find for this one was a 1989 Thai theatrical release under the title ผีสองนาง, which translates to Two Ghosts. This was released in Hong Kong two years later under the new title 菩薩咒 / Pu sa zhou, which translates to Bodhisattva Mantra. A bodhisattva is a being who has achieved a high level of enlightenment in their quest to achieve complete Buddhahood. Since that would have no meaning to most non-Buddhist Western audiences, the English title used on the HK poster is Heavenly Spell. I took a look at both the Thai language VCD release and the Mandarin language HK DVD release and the two cuts of the film are identical.

As for who actually directed this, the Thai print credits ฤทธิรงค์ (Rittirong) while the HK print credits On Ma (who is called "Gon Man" on IMDb and several other names on several other websites). Many of the same people involved in this were also involved in another obscure film called Curse of the Zombi, which was also filmed in Thailand for the same producer and features many of the same actors. The two were likely shot back-to-back.

 

Considering how frustrating it was trying to make heads or tails of the cast and crew and dig up additional background info on this title, that wasn't anywhere near as annoying as actually having to try to sit through the film itself! Yikes. Just half an hour in, after the hundredth new character was introduced and the multiple dead end story threads started piling up, I was praying that everything would eventually start making sense. An hour later I was hoping for the exact same thing. It just never happened.

While passing through the woods with some treasure, noblewoman Fang (Siu-Yin Tsang) and her unnamed sister (Wasidtee Srilofung, a Miss Thailand finalist), plus their entourage, are attacked by a group of bandits while the theme music from Halloween plays. A villager named Shao-jun (played by former Shaw Brothers stable actor Siu-Kwan Gau) tries to come to their rescue but is only able to save one of the sisters after they fall into a river. The other sister drowns, as does a servant girl (Sasimaporn Chaikomol, another Miss Thailand runner-up) who was pushed in. Apparently none of these chicks can swim the ten feet necessary to make it back to the shore. Shao-jun brings Fang back to his home, where she's visited by her sister's weeping ghost, who promises to help take care of and protect her. And that she does whenever the main bandit, Xing (Kawee Sirikhanerut), shows up there looking for her. While Shao-jun and Fang are set up as primary characters early on, they're curiously dropped from most of the rest of the film.

The locals all worship and pay daily reverence to a female spirit called the "River Goddess," who's played by some unbelievably gorgeous yet unknown actress who may have been plucked from the pageant circuit herself. She has a shrine built by the river and, if anyone doesn't show their respect when passing it, the angry ghost lures them to their doom. A teenage girl named Jiao, daughter of district officer Bing (Paen Pleumsachai), is one such victim. After she's coaxed to the river and promptly vanishes underneath the water, Jiao's parents seek the help of young wizard Master Ling-hua (Bin Banleurit), a powerful practitioner of white magic. With help from an old witch, they're able to track Jiao's location down. Ling-hua jumps into the river and does battle with a pair of sea monsters, which look huge and amazing on the Thai poster up above but small, pitiful and strangely like plastic Chinese New Year dragon heads fastened to rubber tubes in the film itself. Jiao is located tied up underwater and, after Ling-hua and a monk plead with the River Goddess, the young girl is revived.

However, the River Goddess was injured in the fight and now needs to replenish herself. She pops up in the woods in her snake-dragon form, bites and kills a man, which angers his witchdoctor mentor (Suchao Pongwilai) and their other followers, who vow revenge. The witchdoctor seeks advice from a talking skull (?!) that tells him he has to combine a snake staff he's already in possession of with a "Yang element" before he can do battle with her. And then the wizard and his followers curiously disappear from the rest of the film never to be seen again. Not enough useless characters for your tastes? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet! The film also cuts back and forth between these three plot threads and some old man in the village rehashing all of the things we're watching to two other guys.

There were a number of things that left me scratching my head here, including whether or not these storyteller bits were meant to be set in the present day while the other stuff (or at least SOME of it) is in the past. The folk tale this is based off of is set the early 1800s, yet most of the other trappings seem pretty modern. Speaking of the folk tale, major liberties were clearly taken with it here. The original story has two murdered sisters haunting the lake. In this one, only one sister dies yet there are two dragon-snake monsters so we're to assume the River Goddess has transformed the dead sister into one of her minions or something. And then a second helper of the River Goddess, who appears to be the ghost of the servant of the drowned noblewomen, shows up toward the end. It's basically impossible to keep up with any of this!

Since apparently there wasn't enough going on already, we then next meet another evil black magician named Master Mao (played by director / writer / production manager Ma), who is actually an underling of yet another evil black magician called Grand Master (Tse-Lin Yang) and they are all somehow in cahoots with both the River Goddess and the group of bandits. Two remote magic duels take place; one between Mao and Ling-hau, and a second between Grand Master and Ling-hau, which include a flying cardboard bat monster, cobras, whipping, arrows, someone eaten alive by piranha and lots of laser lights shooting out all over the place. Most of the fighting is over a treasure chest filled with jewels that had sunk into the river.

There have been multiple VCD and DVD releases for this one. The Taiwanese DVD from Scholar comes with English subtitles. There was also a full screen, VHS-transfer Malaysian DVD release from YesAsia which is the one I viewed. It comes with English, Malay and traditional Chinese subtitles. Amazing how a film filled with things you should like, and usually do like, can end up being so tedious, isn't it?

★1/2

Baby Blood (1990)

... aka: Evil Within, The

Directed by:

Alain Robak

The miserable Yanka (Emmanuelle Escourrou), who works as a tiger tamer's assistant in a scuzzy French circus, is trapped in an emotionally and physically abusive relationship with controlling circus owner Lohman (Christian Sinniger). However, she's soon offered a chance to escape... though not in the way she may have expected! The circus has recently acquired a leopard from Central Africa which, late one night, explodes and unleashes some kind of snake-like prehistoric parasite. The being sneaks into the sleeping Yanka's trailer and enters into her womb from between her legs. After finding out she's pregnant, she packs a suitcase, steals what little bit of money she can find and runs off to the city. With help from a taxi driver, Lohman manages to track her down to a derelict building in a crime-ridden neighborhood but he doesn't quite get the happy reunion he imagined. Instead, she promptly brandishes a knife and stabs him to death. As for the parasite that's embedded itself inside her womb – which communicates with her internally in a way that only she can hear – orders her to then slit his throat and drink his blood. After all, it's a growing baby and needs its nourishment.

And so begins the strange, brief and (eventually) strangely symbiotic relationship between Yanka and her unborn "baby".

One sign of a clever screenplay is not blatantly providing background information on characters through dialogue or exposition yet still managing to provide a wealth of information through plot detail and circumstance alone, and that's precisely what we get here. Very little is blatantly spelled out about Yanka, yet we still end up knowing quite a bit. She's one of those lost, adrift souls in the world; goalless, aimless, sporadically depressed and someone who hasn't really done much of anything in her life aside from get by. She has no home, she has no friends and there's no mention of any family. All of that makes her the ideal host for this particular creature. 

More time, though not an excessive amount, is actually spent on the mythology of the organism. It's been around even longer than humans, only stuck in an extremely slow-moving evolutionary stage, and has just now made it to the point where it can inhabit a human host to move to the next phase of its development. After it's able to achieve rebirth through a human, likely picking up human traits during this process, it will then find its new home in the ocean, where it will continue to grow and multiply. Eventually, and we're talking millions of years into the future, it will emerge from the waters and take over the planet. Despite being physically undeveloped, it is intelligent, manipulative and intellectually and emotionally advanced.

After setting up its premise, the film takes on a sort-of road movie feel, with our protagonist temporarily settling down in a new city, getting a new job and preying on various men for their blood to feed the lifeform growing inside of her, before moving on to somewhere else. On one of her stops, she gets a job as a waitress and is pursued by a truly pathetic guy named Richard (Jean-François Gallotte), who's been stringing along a frustrated buffet line cashier (Roselyne Geslot) yet asks Yanka to marry and have kids with him after just one brief fling. Her next stint as a taxi driver offers up an ever greater opportunity to procure victims. Others are easily seduced, like a man lured into an alley, or just happened upon as need be, like passersby and paramedics. She even hijacks a blood mobile at one point! The men in this movie are played in an almost universally negative light, culminating with Yanka almost getting gang raped by a bunch of rowdy footballers on a bus!

Escourrou, a completely unknown actress here in America who probably wouldn't pass muster as a leading lady because she's gap-toothed and very voluptuous (what would probably be referred to as "fat" by some viewers nowadays), seems to merit more comments about her looks, teeth and weight than her acting abilities, which is both unfair and unfortunate because her actual performance here is pretty strong.

A number of well-known French performers also show up in cameos, including highly acclaimed and heavily-awarded filmmaker Jacques Audiard (A Prophet; Rust and Bone) and comedian / director Alain Chabat (who also does the French voice for the animated ogre Shrek) as victims, Jean-Claude Romer (who co-wrote LITAN) as a man whose truck is stolen, Cannes-winning actor / director Yann Piquer as a vagrant, professional prankster Jean-Yves Lafesse as a truck driver and even an appearance by Chimbot, the canine star of the memorable black comedy Baxter (1989), which was co-written by Audiard.

Despite being screened out of competition at the Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival in 1990, the film ended up winning an award anyway when the jury went to see it; the first time that's ever happened. Wes Craven viewed the film there and offered the director the chance to direct The Hills Have Eyes Part 3, which he passed on because he didn't like the script. Hills 3 would instead be retooled to become Mind Ripper, which was eventually filmed in 1994 in Bulgaria by another director and with Craven serving as producer. Robak's only other genre contributions were shorts contributed to the horror anthologies Adrénaline (1990) and Wacko (1994), which is rather surprising considering this film's success. And it seems to have only grown in popularity over the years.

Numerous, slightly cut versions of this were released here in America in 1994; one with its original French language audio accompanied by English subs and another with an English-dubbed track. A-Pix Entertainment was the original VHS distributor and that was followed up by a DVD from Anchor Bay in 2006 and then a Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in 2019. The good news, and where I disagree with many other reviewers, is that I don't at all mind the English dub and find it actually quite good. As an added bonus, Gary Oldman (!) does the voice of the creature in this version, which is much better than the more tinny / electronic-sounding voice used in the original French version. On the downside, there have been some changes for the worse in the soundtrack department on the English version.

The German release Baby Blood II: Welcome to Hell is not a sequel to this but instead a re-title of the American film The Unborn II (1994). The actual sequel, Lady Blood (2008), which again starred Escourrou (who also co-wrote the film), did not receive the same kind of international release as the original and came and went with very little fanfare. I've not seen it but it's reputedly not very good.

★★★