Rent Tears of the Black Tiger (2000)

Pink Dead Redemption - Tears of the Black Tiger review by Count Otto Black

This is one of the oddest movies I've ever seen! Though since it's from a part of the world whose homegrown cinema I'm not at all familiar with, maybe this sort of thing is perfectly normal in Thailand. If so, I've finally found a country weirder than Japan. As usual with offbeat movies, the General Info page synopsis was copypasted by somebody who knows nothing about the film and is so useless it may put people off renting it by giving them a very misleading impression. Though it's true that for a large part of its runtime it's a tragic love story about childhood sweethearts divided by various cruel twists of fate, with a bit of action.

Quite a bit, actually. The kind of 18-certificate action where bloody craters are blasted in twitching bodies by heavy-calibre machine-gun bullets, entire brains are literally blown out of exploding heads, and people are reduced to mince by rocket-propelled grenades. Which characters who appear to inhabit the 1920s shouldn't really have access to, but hey, it's that kind of movie!

Imagine a scenario where Wes Anderson wrote a script, got all the sets built, and then just as he was about to start filming he dropped dead and the only director available at such short notice was John Woo. You might end up with something like this, though the movie it kept reminding me of most was that incredibly strange animated feature "A Town Called Panic", which is in most ways completely different, but has the same air of frantic bizarreness, and the same total disregard for making its cardboard locations and plastic characters the slightest bit plausible.

From the very start, when we hear a few bars of Ennio Morricone's theme from "For a Few Dollars More" which soon transforms into an oriental melody more appropriate for the setting, but briefly pops up again every time the black-clad outlaws ride into view, it wears its influences on its sleeve while not giving a hoot about being thematically schizoid. Outrageously over-the-top acting from everybody except the three characters who are required to have believable emotions, sets that are occasionally so stylised they're two-dimensional, and a colour-scheme that literally resembles nothing on earth add to the dreamlike atmosphere, as does the director's love of the colour pink, which pops up constantly, often in places you wouldn''t expect to see it, such as the pink lipstick the dead butch and not at all gay outlaws wear, or the pink blood they spurt copious gouts of when they die.

It's not by any means a perfect film. The wildly contrasting thematic and stylistic elements never quite gel, resulting in a movie that, like the title character in "The Thing With Two Heads", sometimes gets so deadlocked trying to do two things at once that it ends up having a fight with itself. It's often a bit too silly for its own good, causing jarring shifts between fairly plausible situations involving people we're supposed to care about and totally unbelievable screaming mad nonsense. And weirdness for weirdness' sake always works best in smaller doses than we're given here.

But you know what? We need movies like this! The kind of wildly imaginative craziness that 40 years ago we hoped Terry Gilliam might still be making now, instead of that half-baked turkey about Don Quixote that nobody really wanted except him. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the one thing you won't say after watching it is: "Oh how dreary, yet another ultra-violent slightly camp Thai spaghetti western involving rocket launchers and gratuitous dwarves. Aren't you sick of them?"