Jing Jork Phee Sing (1985)

Look at the cover, hype or what? The eighties in Thailand, at least the first half, was a dream for drive-in cinemas. They took the print and traveled from village to village, showing the latest Sorapong Chatree-movie and sold moonshine and food at the same time. Those where the days! So there was an enormous production of junk-cinema released all the time, mostly action with Chatree pointing a big gun at the audience from the colorful posters. Jing Jork Phee Sing has no gun on the poster, but Chatree gets a chance to kick som ass and transform into the silliest werewolf in a long time.

As usual I had no subtitles when watching this classic, but the story seem to be about a gang of polices (or something like that) and they are hunting a gang of bad guys in the jungle. They could also be a gang of people hunting a dangerous dog and are running into a bunch of baddies all the time. Anyway, a witch (with a huge chin!) and a magician (with a blonde wig!) is also involved and they have camp out in the jungle with a small army of henchmen. Our heroes (they could be two different groups actually...) hide in a cave, and wake up a couple of gory looking zombies that are wiped away with some of Chatree's magic. After some mindless action and long scenes of people walking in the forest (and also skinny dipping and not less than two attempted rapes) a black dogs comes to the meditating Chatree and with red lasers from it's eyes transforms him to a werewolf. But more zombies are ahead...

I usually has no problem understand the storylines in these old Thai movies, but here it was confusing. The quality of the VCD was also crappy. so it's easy to mix up the characters after a while. It's a quite typical lowbudget movie from Thailand, a lot of running around in the countryside, to many storylines and cheap and funny effects. Sorapong Chatree is a very good actor who obviously never said no to a movie. One day he could star in masterpieces like Gunman, and sometimes it was movies like this. He's a competent hero and shows up some good fighting skills in the end, which was a nice touch to the final. The last half hour is also the funniest, with a good zombie-attack, fighting, action and a strange happy ending where everyone become friends!

The zombies look silly and gory, and one of them suddenly has long rubber-arms (you can kinda see it at one of the screenshots down below), but there's not much graphic munching I'm sorry to say. The infamous werewolf is a sight to behold. This black dog comes up to Sorapong, shoots some red lasers on him and we're treated with a very, very, very, very primitive transformation-effect where pieces of fur shows up on Sorapongs face one by one like a very bad stop-motion effect. They he suddenly is a beefed up version of Paddington the Bear, walks out of frame... and that's more or less it. He's not even transform into a werewolf in the end-fight!

Jing Jork Phee Sing is retared, silly fun. I'm not sure I can recommend it to any other than fans of really obscure asian movies!