Demon Warriors (2007)

In a weird way Demon Warriors is a perfect sibling-movie to Dynamite Warrior. Both movies deals with stuff that feels very local, very thai, they have clumsy narratives and is both naive and very grown up at the same time. The difference is that Demon Warriors is very dark, rainy, moody and sadistic, while Dynamite is colourful, wacky and over-the-top.

Opapatika is some kind of demon (I think) or ghost, that gains superpowers after the human takes suicide. So it's the human that transforms into a Opapatika. We follow a couple of opaptikas, one that can read minds, one that is immortal, one that always find the way to kill an opponent and so on. All of them is very, very brutal. An older opapatika want to kill them all and eat them, so he can live forever. Yeah.. something like that. I think so anyway...

The story was confusing, and the storytelling itself was sometimes abstract and almost to vague for me to understand. I can see the action, and violence, but have a hard time understanding WHY people are doing what they're doing here. Maybe that's unimportant, because it's a movie that deals with philosophy and violence and the question if it's maybe better to be a human than be an immortal...

Well, fuck that. Because the main selling point in this movie is to watch the opapatikas kills as much people as possible. Not a bad selling point actually, but the last half of the movie get's even more fragmented and confusing and that takes away the power of the fast edited brutal action. Because this is one of the most brutal thai-movies I've ever seen! It's not the same kind of stylish action as in Born to Fight or Ong-Bak for example, this is fast and dark, and very very bloody. We're talking tsunamis of blood here! Heads ripped off, limbs cut of, blood sprays everywhere, squibs, stabbings and even more blood. I never seen so many cut throats in one movie. So the violence is fun and very graphic, and the first three action-sequences is very good - but then it seems like the editor and director got tired of doing the advanced editing and everything just get more generic and... repetitive. The ending is a bit of an anticlimax because of this, which is damn pity.

The worst thing though is that it's hard to get cheap. I bough the US release on ebay, and got it a bit cheaper, but still more than I use to pay for this kind of movies. The thai release is with no subtitles, and you need subtitles to this movie. So if you're not sure, wait until the US release is a bit cheaper.

It's a good movie with some nice acting, and at least it looks fantastic. So even if the movie has a lot of weaker spots, it also is very entertaining. But don't expect anything close to the work of Panna Rittikrai or Tony Jaa.

This is something completely different.