Wtf-film: cult cinema and video reviews

a.k.a. Chorake
company: Chaiyo Productions
year: 1981
country: Thailand / USA
director: Sompote Sands
cast: Nat Puvanai, Tany Tim,
Angela Wells, Kirk Warren
producers: Robert Chan
and Dick Randall
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Plot: A doctor and his friend hunt down and kill a giant sea-dwelling crocodile after it devours the rest of their immediate family and goes on a rampage through the waterways of Thailand.

This has to be the best known (at least as far as the Western world is concerned) of all the films made by Sompote Sands’ defunct Chaiyo Productions, thanks largely to the participation of exploitation producer extraordinaire Dick Randall (The Pod People, Slaughter High, and For Y’ur Height Only to name a few).  Crocodile had the good fortune to be dubbed into English and given an international release throughout Europe and in the United States, where it earned the ire of the American Humane Association for its un-simulated animal violence.  It was even officially released to DVD here, albeit in poor quality, in 2002, having been previously made available in video rental shops on the EMI label.

A rip-off of Spielberg’s Jaws but with Sands own peculiar interpretation of Japan’s giant monster films to guide it, Crocodile is a strange bit of ’80s exploitation nonsense.  The majority of the crocodile effects appear to have originated with the Thai / South Korean co-production Agowa Gongpo from 1978, another film about a mammoth crocodile pestering Southeast Asia whose effects were handled by Chaiyo Productions.  The reasoning behind Crocodile‘s own giant monster is, naturally, atomic testing in the Pacific.  Just how big the beast may be is difficult to gage, as the full-scale props rarely match up with themselves, much less the footage of a live crocodile wandering aimlessly about miniature sets.

I’ve not seen Agowa Gongpo and can’t speak for how much rampaging giant crocodile footage was produced for it, though it obviously wasn’t enough for Sands to wrap a second film around.  Viewers will note that Crocodile‘s crocodile attacks the same riverside village twice, setting the same buildings afire and sending the same Western tourists scurrying to their deaths in the water.  Sands also lifts judisciously from his earlier non-monster disaster effort Pandin Wippayoke, crafting a montage out of the typhoon and earthquake based destruction effects found there to give Crocodile‘s opening more punch.

To Chaiyo and Sands’ credit, most of the miniature effects work on display is quite good – at least comparable to that seen in the Shaw Brothers-produced The Mighty Peking Man a few years earlier.  The earthquake and typhoon effects from Pandin Wippayoke fare especially well, as does the crocodile’s attack on the reverside village.  There’s a nice mix of full-scale building collapses and miniature work there, as well as some neat shots of a crocodile-created maelstrom of blood, debris, and human bodies.  Footage featuring a real crocodile crisscrossing miniature village scapes doesn’t fare so well, with the shaky and out-of-focus photography indicating that the effects crew had no idea what direction the critter was going to head off in next.

There are a few genuinely fun moments to be had along the way.  One involves a group of scuba divers laying a giant underwater bear trap for the giant crocodile, a plan that backfires when said crocodile sends the trap sailing through the tree tops like an enormous saw blade.  The confusing non-excitement of the ending ocean battle is punctuated with ludicrous shots of the monster doing impossible Free Willy-esque jumps out of the ocean and over a boat.  The fun is tempered somewhat by the fact that none of these moments are likely to be original to Crocodile, but in the land of Sompote Sands one has to take his amusement where he can.

The drama that surrounds the piles of culled effects footage is of Sands’ typically abysmal standards.  Crocodile is nothing if not an exercise in economy, and much of the non-effects runtime is taken up by lengthy shots of ambulances carrying victims of the crocodile attacks from one location to another.  The primary dramatic impetus is provided by a sparsely written tale of revenge, in which two doctors resign their positions in a city hospital to hunt the crocodile after it eats their families while they’re vacationing.  Dialogue is so sporadic and unfocused that viewers will often have to wait until the scene after the one they’re watching to find out just what our characters were up to.

Side stories are few and, thankfully, brief.  The owner of the boat the doctors charter appears, initially, to be of some import – introducing himself by showing the tattoo of an eagle he has on his chest and repeating some crap family legend about a monster being killed by a bird.  He gets drunk, falls off the boat, and is devoured before any good can come of him.  A performer in a crocodile show and his manager are present for two scenes and for no reason other than to pad the running time, as neither do anything at all.  Especially odd in the dramatic department is the last-minute arrival of a news photographer, who pulls up to the doctors’ boat while they’re out to sea.  The annoying newsman turns out to be an unlikely hero, strapping lit dynamite to himself and jumping into the gaping maw of the crocodile at the film’s end.  Only one of the doctors appears to survive the ordeal, though Sands never lets us know for sure.  As far as he was concerned the film was over as soon as the crocodile went kaboom, story be damned.

Crocodile is seriously marred by a couple of Sands’ usual shock scenes.  A perfectly good sequence in which the crocodile molests a herd of water buffalo is punctuated with a shot of one of them urinating all over itself while clenched in the monster’s jaws (just in case you didn’t catch that it was dying).  The American Human Association seems to have been particularly peaved by a brief crocodile show sequence, in which a showman happily lifts one of the reptiles up for the audience to see before plunging a knife deep into its neck and eviscerating it as it squirms, still very much alive.  Sands may not gloat over the dying animal for so long as Lenzi or Deodato would in their cannibal efforts, but it’s a gruesome sight all the same.

I’ve not seen the VCI DVD of Crocodile from 2002, but online appraisals show it to be a pretty pathetic affair (fitting, really, for the film at hand).  The transfer is widescreen but non-anamorphic and apparently sourced from tape, and extras are minimal.  The out of print disc currently demands high prices (from $27 to over $100) at Amazon.com, so I’ve linked in to the less expensive VHS release above.  If you’re going to see this one you may as well see it cheap.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Crocodile turned out to be just another dull, stupid, poorly-conceived Sompote Sands film punctuated with amusing effects tidbits of highly variable quality.  I don’t know why I keep watching them, other than out of some kind of morbid car-wreck fascination – rest assured that I have more fine Chaiyo productions lined up for future coverage.  See Crocodile for the effects work if you must, but my best advice is to simply avoid it and give your well-worn tape of Alligator another spin instead.  Not recommended.