I'll buy that for a dollar: Killer Elephants (Thailand, 1976)

I think that it's time I come clean and admit to all of you that my taste in movies -- and, hence, what I choose to write about -- is pretty much dictated by what I can find at the dollar store. That is not as limiting as it might sound, however, since my neighborhood has about a gajillion of those stores. So, not only can I take home most of the combined cinematic output of Sonny Chiba, Bolo Yeung and Fred Williamson for less than the price of a Denny's breakfast, but I can also, on occasion, make some fairly interesting finds.

Killer Elephants, IMHO, is just such a find, as it's a rare example of a 1970s Thai action film that was actually dubbed into English for American release. Now whether that release was originally a straight to VHS deal or if Killer Elephants had a run on the grindhouse circuit or on U.S. television I have no idea. But, regardless, it's easy to see what an American distributor of that period might have seen in the film, because it's possessed of some fairly unique and potentially exploitable charms.

Killer Elephants is a uniquely Thai take on the biker film, as the gang that Sombat Methanee leads ride elephants rather than motorcycles. Now you might be chuckling to yourself over the absurdity of such a notion, but picture in your mind Marlon Brando on a motorcycle going up against Sombat Methanee on an elephant and you might just be a bit more respectful. As such the film features lots of scenes of rampaging elephants overturning cars, toppling over flimsy grass huts and... well, that's pretty much it, but they do an awful lot of both of those things. The film's American handlers obviously cut it down to little more than its action scenes, which means that Killer Elephants is very fast paced and makes absolutely no sense. And if that doesn't qualify it for a review on 4DK (notice the Bollywood style abbreviation there?), I might as well just hang up my blogging, er, shoes right now.

The dubbing of the male voices in the film sounds like it was all done by one guy, who uniquely combines the authoritative Harvard clip of the Kennedys, the folksy, homespun inflections of Walter Brennan and the random burst delivery of William Shatner into one heady vocalese. As more male characters are introduced, you can hear this guy getting more and more desperate to mix it up, and eventually he reaches into Cookie Monster territory for his voicing of one of the bad guys. The female voices also all sound like one person, except that she says "bastard" a lot and manages to say it in a different, completely strange way every time, at one point saying something that sounds more like "Boss Turd". I thought I was past the point of being entertained by bad dubbing, but, oh, how wrong I was.

Unfortunately, Killer Elephants failed to kick off the wave of Eleph-sploitation movies that it rightly should have. It's a shame, because Sombat really does manage to cut a pretty badass figure perched atop his "ride". Anyway, I would highly recommend this one if you can find it. Did I mention that it cost a dollar?