With Jess Franco: From Bangkok with Bullets, Severin presents a pair of movies by an iconoclastic filmmaker that are set in the Thai capital. Shot back to back in 1984, the films have been restored from 4K scans of their original camera negatives. The two-disc package comes with around two hours of extras: a pair of informative interviews with Stephen Thrower, author of a two-volume study of Franco’s films, an interview with assistant director Carlos Aguilar, and two episodes of the ongoing In the Land of Franco series (parts 14 and 15) that explore film locations, though neither deal with the Bangkok films included here.
Trip to Bangkok, Coffin Included is Franco’s sardonic riff on espionage thrillers, in many ways a throwback to his Attack of the Robots from 1966. Notably, both have plots centered around mind-controlled murderers doing the bidding of a Bond-style supervillain, and both contain significant amounts of affectionate parody. Trip to Bangkok takes a fairly subversive approach to the material, especially when it comes to the portrayal of the film’s antagonist.
British Secret Service agent Colonel Daniel J. Blimp (Howard Vernon), a doughty and cranky figure with an impressively upswept moustache, comes to Bangkok to investigate a series of political assassinations that have been perpetrated by blind men. Once there, he has to team up with much a younger agent, Philip Sanders (José Llamas), and Trip to Bangkok turns into a buddy-cop movie, as the two proceed to harangue each other while taking on the henchmen of Professor Tao (Trino Treves), the vision-impaired leader of a cult that professes peace and love while possessing something of an alternative agenda.
Tao isn’t your conventional cat-stroking Blofeld type. Most of the time, we catch sight of him pathetically supine on an altar, exhibiting his psychic skills, quite authentic as it turns out. Tao’s motivation proves to be actually philanthropic. Fearing a nuclear holocaust that he’s seen in a vision, he has set about eliminating the men he believes will be responsible for Armageddon. Interestingly, Trip to Bangkok never attempts to disprove or debunk his hypothesis. Indeed, he ends up escaping Blimp and Sanders’s clutches in the end.
An ancillary pleasure to be gleaned from Trip to Bangkok are the many referential in-jokes that Franco peppers throughout. Most significantly, Blimp’s name is a nod to The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, the 1943 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger that Franco held in high esteem. A reference to Peter Welbeck pays homage to the pseudonym that producer Harry Alan Towers used when writing most of his collaborations with Franco, and it’s rather touching that the name prompts a nostalgic and elegiac response from Blimp. And Franco himself turns up in a cameo, playing a hotel receptionist, as was his wont.
Trip to Bangkok isn’t all fun and games. Along the way, Franco takes a few earnest potshots at the deleterious environmental effects of global tourism, including the way it fosters the “geography of nowhere,” as destinations lose their local flavor and come to generically resemble each other. Franco posits this development as a consequence of colonialism, a fact that also crops up when Blimp continually insists that he’s Irish and not British.
The next film, Bangkok, Date with Death, can best be seen as a parody of private eye franchises like the Lemmy Caution films starring Eddie Constantine. Here the requisite gumshoe is Panama Joe (Christian Borck), a man quick with his gun and even quicker with his wits. Going for a self-reflexive flourish, Franco’s script explicitly makes the point that Joe’s exploits have already appeared in other books and movies, a fact that forms part of his seduction technique.
Franco signals that the film operates in a parodic, pop art vein from the start by employing a series of speech bubbles, amusingly and hastily scrawled felt-tip marker on carboard, to identify the archetype (or is that stereotype?) of the primary characters. The byzantine plot, chockablock with the anticipated double- and triple-crosses, unfolds at a surprisingly leisurely pace, not helped by the excruciatingly long and badly staged opening maritime kidnapping of heiress Marta Flanagan (Helena Garret) orchestrated by Aminia (Lina Romay, Franco’s muse and life partner), a bandanaed pirate armed with a samurai sword.
Bangkok, Date with Death features some patented Franco trademarks, like frequent slow zooms and a penchant for filming on or through reflective surfaces like plate-glass windows and rippling lakes. Along the way, you’ll also encounter heartless torture by salon hairdryer, some unconvincing kung fu fighting (including a protracted beachfront battle royale), and Romay doing a swimsuit-clad shimmy in front of a massive Decap dance organ. Thematically, the film questions the legitimacy of authority, with Panama Joe entirely susceptible to bribery, and Marta’s millionaire father (Eduardo Fajardo) the real brains behind her kidnapping, all the better to fleece her even wealthier boyfriend (José Llamas).
Jess Franco: From Bangkok with Bullets is available on May 26 from Severin Films.
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