Hanuman And The 5 Kamen Riders

Hanuman and the 5 Kamen Riders (Hanuman Pob Har Aimoddaeng) (1974)

Runtime: 103 minutes

Directed by: Sompote Sands/Shohei Tojo

Starring: Kan Boocho, Akiji Kobayashi, Tanyarat Lohanan, Yodchai Meksuwan, Pipop Pupinyo

From: Chaiyo Productions

OK there's a lot to unpack with this. I explain it all below:

As has happened before, I went down a rabbit hole because of Letterboxd; I was searching for something and stumbled upon information new to me. In this case, I looked at the filmography of Thai director Sompote Sands. Many of his film's posters: pretty outre. Examining the plots to most of his films: really outre. I mean, even weirder than what I'll describe below.

I looked at one in particular and I chortled as not only was this was an unauthorized usage of the Kamen Riders characters, but they outright stole plenty of footage from the Toei movie Five Riders vs. King Dark. Yes, they used like half of the film without Toei's authorization; I know little about those manga characters but at least it was a property I had heard of before. He also did an Ultraman movie and get this, he claims that when he was in Japan to learn about the film industry, he was one of the people who came up with that character. Most everyone says that claim is hogwash and that's been the subject of lawsuits.

Oh, and apparently some Canadians made up their own dialogue for the film and subtitled it and held some pubic screenings. The copy that's on YouTube has subtitles and skimming through it beforehand, I was not sure if that's where the subs came from, as the film is that peculiar. Turns out, it's not, although comedic lines occasionally do pop up, so that may not be a 100% accurate translation either.

I don't want to give everything away but here are the highlights:

* The movie also uses Kamen Riders' King Dark as a villain. That's a giant metal creature with devil horns and red eyes which can shrink down to human size... that element was added here. For some reason he's also cross-eyed. His henchmen are dudes dressed in all black that wear ski masks. King Dark loves drinking blood-obsession is a better term-so he gets it from young women & children. That actually is canon to the series.

* The Riders are referred to as “Ants”. I suppose they are like Ant-Man in a way...

* There are Lake Monsters; I'll admit they (Toei, I mean) were creative in creating ones that were highly bizarre. I am not sure why one of them had a crown made of green leaves, though. It should have been a crown made of flowers so the creature could have gone full Lana Del Rey while having a dragon on its shoulder that belches out smoke.

* Suddenly, we literally go to Hell, where graphic tortures are described and shown via paintings. I presume this was made for families, so yikes. Hell is shown as a spooky place where random Thai dudes (some dressed colorfully) judge people. Three criminals are being judged; they are real A-holes, not only stealing the head of a Buddha statue for some reason but also killing a kid. If you're wondering what a Hanuman is, he's a Buddhist superhero that can also change size and looks like one of those demon statutes you see outside of some Thai temples. After a The Last Jedi-esque moment, he kills the trio in increasingly gruesome ways. One of the criminals does factor into the plot later.

* There are earthquakes in Hell.

* King Dark orders the kidnapping of a professor so they can finish the building of... Franken Bat! Yes, Frankenstein's monster as a bat. Franken Bat was in Five Riders vs. King Dark.

* A fetish video happens as the professor refuses to help, so... his feet are tickled? Then the person doing the tickling gets PEED ON because of an involuntary reaction???

* BTW, one of the monsters in official canon is named Genghis Khan Condor; no, really, and we get to see him. There is also a similar creature that I'll describe as Michael Keaton as Birdman.

* It is rather obvious when they stop using the Japanese footage as the attempt at them making their own monsters... it is men who wear cheap masks of four different animals, red shorts, and that's it. Somehow, I did not think this was impressive, nor was the Thai version of the Ants. Their martial arts ability drastically went downhill; I mean, it's at Dolemite levels.

* The ending, it has a shocking bit of violence.

* At least the Thai countryside looked pretty.

What a bizarre experience this was, and from Google, the director put even weirder moments in his other films. There's one on YouTube that wasn't subtitled and I had to use Google Translate to tell me it was 1973's Tah Tien, where a frog is human sized and not only do we see it smoke a giant rolled-up cigarette, but later on some dude spies on nude women bathing in a river and he hands off his binoculars to a gorilla (only a minute later does he know it's an ape) and the primate actually uses the binoculars to look himself.

What a weird dude Sompote Sands was, in other words.