Okey, first of all, Spirited Killer 2: Awakened Zombie Battles is not the correct title. It's just the titles that Mill Creek has given this unknown thai-movie. It has nothing to do with Spirited Killer (who actually was part 4 in that series) and dosen't feature Tony Jaa. But for me it's of great interested, because this is another of Panna Rittikrais early movies.
For you who don't know about Rittikrai, he's the man behind Tony Jaa and I consider him to be one of the best movie-fighters EVER. In his early movies he had bigger parts in these ultra-lowbudget countryside-actionflicks, but later focused more on choreography and smaller parts, often as a bad guy. Not everything is good of course, and movies like this could probably only have been made in the north of Thailand for a penny or two. This is also one of the huge amount of Rittikrai-movies which have the following story: some people have some business in the jungle and discover that they have a zombie after them, a martial arts-zombie! In this movie it's more complicated: our heroes is out in the forest to do some magic ritual for their dead grandfather. Nothing special with that, but at the same time, not far away, is a bunch of gangster trying to move the spirit from their dead leader to a new leader... and not far away from from them is a couple treasure hunters who finds a chinese dead guy with a treasure under him.
So of course the worst happens. All magic rituals in the area is waking up the dead gangster AND the dead chinese guy and they start hunting down everybody that happens to be in the forest! After a while Panna Rittikrai shows up and uses black magic to take the power from the zombies to transform himself to a super-fighter!
This is wonderful Thai-trash. The story is zero and everything is filled with cheesy fighting (some of it is quite good, but nothing unique), a splash of silly gore and a lot of slapstick! We have fart-jokes, we have speeding-up-footage-jokes and "crazy" voices on some of the characters. I like the rituals and the visual effects is primitive. During one fight an instrumental version of Europe's The Final Countdown starts, but the rest of the soundtrack is stolen from John Carpenters Prince of Darkness!
I guess it's not many people who actually can stand these movies, but I do. It's not a good movie by any means, but it's okey entertainment for idiots like me. The Mill Creek-release is not bad at all. You can find the movie in the Spirited Killer Trilogy and the quality is better than I ever thought they would be. Miles better than any crappy thai vcd's, and the aspect ratio is correct - but you have to maybe squeeze the TV-screen a bit, change from 16:9 to letterbox or something like that. Try it and you will get it right sooner or later.
After BCI went down the drain Mill Creek took over some titles. and it's great that they released this trio of movies. Spirited Killer is also out on single release from BCI, but it's a crappy movie anyway, so get this box if you're interested in getting it cheap.
For you who don't know about Rittikrai, he's the man behind Tony Jaa and I consider him to be one of the best movie-fighters EVER. In his early movies he had bigger parts in these ultra-lowbudget countryside-actionflicks, but later focused more on choreography and smaller parts, often as a bad guy. Not everything is good of course, and movies like this could probably only have been made in the north of Thailand for a penny or two. This is also one of the huge amount of Rittikrai-movies which have the following story: some people have some business in the jungle and discover that they have a zombie after them, a martial arts-zombie! In this movie it's more complicated: our heroes is out in the forest to do some magic ritual for their dead grandfather. Nothing special with that, but at the same time, not far away, is a bunch of gangster trying to move the spirit from their dead leader to a new leader... and not far away from from them is a couple treasure hunters who finds a chinese dead guy with a treasure under him.
So of course the worst happens. All magic rituals in the area is waking up the dead gangster AND the dead chinese guy and they start hunting down everybody that happens to be in the forest! After a while Panna Rittikrai shows up and uses black magic to take the power from the zombies to transform himself to a super-fighter!
This is wonderful Thai-trash. The story is zero and everything is filled with cheesy fighting (some of it is quite good, but nothing unique), a splash of silly gore and a lot of slapstick! We have fart-jokes, we have speeding-up-footage-jokes and "crazy" voices on some of the characters. I like the rituals and the visual effects is primitive. During one fight an instrumental version of Europe's The Final Countdown starts, but the rest of the soundtrack is stolen from John Carpenters Prince of Darkness!
I guess it's not many people who actually can stand these movies, but I do. It's not a good movie by any means, but it's okey entertainment for idiots like me. The Mill Creek-release is not bad at all. You can find the movie in the Spirited Killer Trilogy and the quality is better than I ever thought they would be. Miles better than any crappy thai vcd's, and the aspect ratio is correct - but you have to maybe squeeze the TV-screen a bit, change from 16:9 to letterbox or something like that. Try it and you will get it right sooner or later.
After BCI went down the drain Mill Creek took over some titles. and it's great that they released this trio of movies. Spirited Killer is also out on single release from BCI, but it's a crappy movie anyway, so get this box if you're interested in getting it cheap.
1 comment:
Sorry, but I think that this movie is really part of the "Spirited Killer" movies, as its title is "Plook mun khuen mah fad phee kad", and the others in the series begin with the same three first words, no ? it was recently put on YouTube with this title but in Thai characters of course. Best, Jean-Claude (jcmichel1940@gmail.com), France
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