Thunder of Gigantic Serpent (1988)

Sometimes we see something that takes our understanding of exactly what constitutes cinematic badness to new level.  In  the case of Thunder of Gigantic Serpent (1988) it is witnessing an exercise in 'cut and paste' film making which, instead of using the half-decent footage from one film to cut the costs of a new, cheaper, movie, (usually this involves splicing expensive action or special effects sequences from a relatively expensive film into a cheap B picture), takes one cheap, poorly made movie, virtually in its entirety, and splices in even cheaper, poorly made action sequences.  The film in question is one of the many dubious film 'creations' of the notorious Godfrey Ho.  A word of explanation about Ho is undoubtedly required here for the uninitiated.  Ho was a prolific Hong Kong based directtor/producer in the eighties whose specialty was to buy Far Eastern movies, often from Thailand, which either hadn't been completed or hadn't had English language versions widely distributed and re-edit them to incorporate twenty minutes or so of new footage, with a different cast.  The whole thing would then be re-dubbed into English.  The new footage, usually featuring American or European actors, would constitute some kind of sub-plot loosely linked to the original film by having characters in the old footage re-dubbed so they appeared to be speaking on the phone to characters from the new stuff and vice versa.  Occasionally, characters from the two separate films would appear to interact having, for instance, a conversation in an office - but they never appear in shot together.  The results were virtually incomprehensible and often unintentionally surreal.

Thunder of Gigantic Serpent is essentially a re-cut version of the 1984 Taiwanese film King of Snakes and for the most part follows that film's plot.  This involves a little girl in Taiwan who finds a snake an adopts it as a pet.  It is no ordinary snake, it seems, as it appears to understand her, nodding in agreement when spoken to and so on.  Meanwhile, the government's secret labs are pursuing 'Project Thunder' - a process which ca induce extraordinary growth in any living thins, in the hope of solving world hunger by producing giant chickens, giant vegetables, etc.  Terrorists try to seize the process, but it all goes wrong and the process falls int the hands of that little girl, (you can see where this is going, can't you?).  The snake (called Mosler) is inadvertently enlarged to python size, (becoming a rubber puppet in the process), while outside playing with the girl, he is struck by lightning and becomes an even bigger rubber snake, frightening the child's parents who want him destroyed.  Just as they are arguing with the distraught girl, the terrorists turn up, believing that the kid has the missing formula and kidnap her.  Mosler goes to the rescue, being electrocuted by the gang for his troubles - but he just turns into a massive rubber snake. Although he rescues the girl and returns her to her parents, the terrorists succeed in kidnapping her again, (look, if you knew that this kid's best friend was a giant angry snake, would you really risk snatching her again?).  This time they get her into their car and head for the city, with Mosler in hot pursuit.  The rest of the film follows the monster movie play book, with the inevitable model trains falling off of model bridges destroyed by the snake, the military mobilising, the giant snake ending up coiled around the skyscraper the terrorist leader is holding the girl in.  The military launch an armada of model jet planes at Mosler, threatening to destroy the skyscraper with him.  Luckily, the heroic police inspector who has been tracking the terrorists kills their leader and gets the girl out of the building before it and Mosler are destroyed.

Now, to be fair, the Taiwanese footage, with its giant rubber snake, model cities and sky scrapers has a certain charm.  It isn't subtle - you know that the terrorists are bad guys because they like slapping women and children around and the inspector and his sidekicks are good guys because they are always arguing with and berating the overly secretive and slightly sinister soldiers and scientists - but, as cheap King Kong/Godzilla type knock offs go, it actually isn't that bad.  But, of course, here we're talking about Godfrey Ho's re-edit rather than the original.  While retaining the original plot, Ho's new footage inserts Ted Fast, some kind of international special forces dude hired by the government to sort out the terrorist who, it turns out, are actually led by another new character, super-villain Solomon and his rapidly receding hairline.  Luckily, Fast seems to be good buddies with the police inspector in the original film - they are often on the phone to each other and both have a penchant for mowing bad guys down with machine guns, while those terrorist guys are always talking to Solomon on their phones, (even getting him to send a plane to attack Mosler during their getaway).  Fast's mission seems to consist mainly of chasing terrorists driving around in mini vans and mowing them down with a sub-machine gun, punctuated by the odd Kung Fu fight.

Puzzlingly, despite being isolated from the main action, Fast seems to have preternatural knowledge of what's going on elsewhere - he phones the inspector, for instance, in order to warn him that the military needs to be mobilised because the snake is heading for the city.  I mean, how would he know?  He's in a different film, for God's sake.  Fast - who spends his scenes wandering around in full camouflage gear and a beret - is played by the elusive 'Pierre Kirby' a Ho regular who vanished from the movie scene as quickly and mysteriously as he appeared.  Allegedly a British martial arts expert who made a living delivering yachts around the Far East, the story goes that his disappearance was the result of his being murdered by pirates who seized one of the yachts he was delivering.  In truth, nothing is really known about 'Kirby', not even if he was British, as in his film appearances he is dubbed by an American voice artist.  The truth about him seems to have been lost in the mists of time.

These new scenes add nothing to the original footage other than slowing it down and confusing the casual viewer.  Ho even undercuts the original ending by inserting a new final scene to wrap up his sub-plot.  In the original, having seen her beloved pet snake (albeit grown to gigantic city destroying proportions) blasted to death by the air force, the little girl is more than a little traumatised, blaming everyone, from her parents to the Project Thunder scientists, (I must admit, my main thought at this point was the years of therapy that poor kid had ahead of her having seen her pet turn into a giant, being kidnapped by terrorists and then witnessing the shooting of the terrorist leader and the death of Mosler, all in a twenty four hour period).  The inspector, though, knows who is really to blame - the army general who directed the anti-snake operation and Project Thunder and punches him out.  Cue closing moral about man meddling with stuff he doesn't understand.  At which point you expect the credits to roll.  But wait!  There's more - we abruptly cut to Solomon, who is trying to make his getaway in his MkIV Ford Cortina (or is it a Ford Taunus?  I think it was right hand drive, which would make it a Cortina - the left hand drive versions were labelled as a Taunus).  Glancing in his rear view mirror, who does he see?  Yes, it's Ted Fast.  There's just time for a quick martial arts battle between the two before Ted gets a pistol and guns down Solomon - and that's it as 'The End' flashes up on the screen.

OK, to be absolutely fair, Thunder of Gigantic Serpent must count as one of Ho's more comprehensible creations, mainly because the main source material was stronger than usual.  Then again, maybe I only think that because it was one of two Godfrey Ho films I saw in one evening. I have to make clear here that it wasn't my intent to do so - I'm not a masochist and generally run a mile from Ho's messes.  But he often hid behind fake names - in the case of Serpent, the credited director was 'Charles Lee' - so it wasn't until Ted Fast started popping up that I realised what I was watching.  But it was still better than the other Ho film I saw, the utterly bat-shit crazy US Catman in Lethal Track, in which a Thai action film is spliced together with something to do with a bargain-basement Batman wannabe (he was scratched by a radioactive cat which gave him superpowers which weren't clear as to their nature), running around with a sidekick, beating people up in a quest to stop some crazy preacher and his cult from doing something bad (I was never sure what, though).  The two plots never really come together, but people in different films keep talking to each other on the phone and lots of things get blown up in Thailand, (in what seemed to be a pilot project for a terrorist global takeover).  After that, anything would have seemed like Eisenstein.

In the final analysis, Godfrey Ho is one of those hack film-makers who probably would have been forgotten had it not been for the advent of the internet.  Unfortunately, the bad film cultists there raised him to the level of a bad movie auteur, ensuring the continued survival of his films.  Personally, I find it difficult to find any merit in his seemingly random assemblages of footage, with frequently barely constitute an actual film.  The fact that they are bad is hardly surprising - with Ho's approach to film-making, how could they be anything else?  They exist on the level of those deliberately bad movies which think that they are being 'ironic' or 'camp' by knowingly winking at their audiences over their slipshod construction.  True 'bad' movies were never intended to be bad and were usually made by people actually trying to make a proper film.  Any merit Ho's films do have comes from the original donor films, to which his only 'artistic' input was the re-dubbing, and which were made by film makers thinking they were making something good.