Cool Gel Attacks (Review)
Cool Gel Attacks
aka Kradeub aka กระดึ้
2010
Directed by Jaturong “Mokjok” Phonboo
Alien goo monsters from space crashed into the Earth and start sucking the moisture/warmth from people. It’s up to two rival families to put aside their differences and save the planet. Cool Gel Attacks is a cool, refreshing burst of fun scifi monsterism in a world where fun romps are sorely lacking.
The cool gel monsters look like cool gel packs that you wear when you have fevers to cool down your body temperature. This method isn’t that common in the US, but at least according to this film, is the bee’s knees in Thailand. Ask anyone there, and they’ll tell you that they’re gellin’ like a felon. They eat melon because they’re gellin’. Magellan wishes he was as gellin’.
The beginning is a montagy showcase of a bicyclist who finds a mysterious gel thing on the road, which becomes a national phenomenon until scientists figure out it is just the insides of one of those cool gel packs. But by then, people are touching it for good luck and trying to determine lottery numbers.
You might think this is all fun and games, but it is 100% true! One woman even cooked up one of the gel packs and fed it to her kids to make them more intelligent. No word on what horrible brain damage eating the gel packs did to those poor kids. And now we know how the Thailand ET film will end! Just kidding, I have a Thailand ETish film that will get reviewed soon, and no one eats the alien. UFO interest has spiked up since the national headlines, and Thailand is becoming a minihotspot for alien activity. Aliens will even call you on the phone or communicate with you telepathically, as the many totally true alien stories from that link tell us.
Director Jaturong “Mokjok” Phonboon is a comedian who directs films on the side, and gets a bunch of his comedian buddies to star alongside him. Thsu, many of the goofy, silly Thai films you see when you go search on eThaicd have his fingerprints on them.
|
The Magnificent Five (Review)
The Magnificent Five
aka Phra-dek-seua-kai-wawk
2006
Directed by Bhandit Rittakol
The Magnificent Five is a 2006 action comedy where a group of mismatched heroes band together to rescue children sold into slavery. They learn to work together and laugh and love and all that other crap, all while shooting bad guys. Set in the distant past, Magnificent Five incorporates a Swashbuckling style that seems inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean films while being completely different in plot development and characters.
It is sort of interesting to see the character of Captain Johnson, as he is a totally evil colonial trader dude. It is not that far out of bounds, he could be just the same as the evil British and East India Tea Company characters from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, if one were to ignore the history of Thailand and colonialism in South Eastern Asia. As you may or may not know, Thailand was the only country in the area that was never colonized, but the colonies surrounding it were played off of each other by Thai rulers. Thus, unlike films from places such as Indonesia, there is not a whole ton of films where patriotic nationals fight off oppressive colonial forces against long odds. So is Captain Johnson an evil symbol of colonial aggression, or just a handy stereotype to make a bad guy out of? You make the call!
Like many Thai films, the exact translations and spellings of character names is a jumbled mess. So I will be going with a set translation of everyone’s name, but also listing the alternative names for each of the characters. Maybe one day I will bother to learn enough Thai that I will have a set translation scheme preference, but my crippling laziness will probably prevent that from ever happening.
|
