Three laughs: Thunder of the Gigantic Serpent

It is hard to rate some trashy films. Films can be really good entertainment in spite of themselves, and it is an even better pleasure to find some trash that keeps surprising you than watching most quality films. My friend says that he knows a trash film is worth something if it gets three laughs out of me. I mean proper, good belly laughs when you can't believe what the film is showing to you. That's as good a rating as any for these movies. Any film that has these three laughs has a special place in my heart.

Thunder of the Gigantic Sepent (Hong Kong, 1988)
Director: Godfrey Ho (as Charles Lee)

If Bruno Mattei is known for combining two movies' worth of stolen ideas into one movie, then Hong Kong's maestro Godfrey Ho does that literally. He used to buy film stock and combine multiple films into one with English dubbing. Mostly these are Ninja pictures, which have main characters that never meet, and more abandoned plot threads left unexplored than the last seasons of Lost and Game of Thrones combined. But Ho really did also test out which movies sold.

Case in point he bought out a Korean giant monster movie and combined it with a spy thriller. The end result is Thunder of a Gigantic Serpent, a title which sounds like an euphemism of farting before having to go to the bathroom. As you can imagine, much of the pleasure of this film comes from trying to combine a gritty crime thriller leaving plenty of corpses behind, and a silly family comedy of a pet snake growing into impossible size. But you know, some of the Godzilla movies were pretty violent, too. Somehow it all stays together.

Three laughs (SPOILERS):

1. The titular Gigantic Serpent starts out small, as a tiny snake that befriends a little girl. As the girl is asking on what to call her new pet, the snake waves its head first horizontally in disapproval, then vertically when the girl comes up with a name. She decides to call it Mozlov. The snake is in parts played by a rubber hose on a string, other times by an actual snake. Either way, the boneheaded way of having it nod or shake its head gives out a giggle each time.
2. The dubbing in general in this film is kind of hilarious. The main little girl sounds like a British lady talking with a very soft voice. The main bad guy seems to try out a voice somewhere between Cobra Commander and a cartoon vampire. The voices of his minions, gangsters and criminals are trying to sound as tough as they can. This includes swearing, which works to further destroy the illusion that this is supposed to be a family movie. "He lost the fucking formula!"
3. Once Mozlov the snake gets electrocuted with a groth ray, we enter the phase of the rubber puppets. The snake has a really irritating parrot-like scream. The sitcom-like comedy of a little girl trying to hide a huge snake in her room seems to have some Freudian undertones. I also love the scenes of the snake helping the girl out to win a roller-ski race pushing her around are to be seen to be believed.

One must add that the titular Thunder the Gigantic Serpent makes once the gangters start to threaten the little girl, is as underwhelming as they come. Just rattle a few bridges and skyscrapers and that's it. But being denied of your expectations is all part of the charm of these VHS-era clunkers. I wish we could have had a proper dvd or blu-ray release of this.