Does any of this happen in the movie? Ah, I don’t think so
Starring Simon Reed, Harry Carter, Henry Steele, Joe Nelson, Chiang Tao, Lu Feng, Chen Hung-Lieh, Angela Mao and Danny Lee, directed by ‘Bruce Lambert’.
Pasty-faced dude
Two dice, taken from hopping vampires, will help Mr Baker, known as the Gambling King, take over the whole gambling world! But Roger, the brother of a gambler forced to kill himself, promises to get revenge, which he does dressed as a white-clad ninja!
Ninja versus vampire!
You’ve got to grudgingly admire the don’t-give-a-f*ck plotting in producer Tomas Tang’s spliced-together specials from Filmark International. This particular film sticks new vampire & ninja content (probably shot by action director Chiang Tao and not Godfrey Ho, who is always credited as director for these kind of movies) into footage from another film called THE STUNNING GAMBLING, which stars Danny Lee and Angela Mao, featuring gamblers betting their lives on the outcome of games, including a super-fast card-dealing challenge.
THE STUNNING GAMBLING, a Taiwanese gambler opus, provides much of the footage used in this cut-and-paste movie
Greek VHS sleeve for NINJA: THE VIOLENT SORCERER with misleading cover art
‘The mystic knowledge of all ages is unleashed…’
With ninjas being taught anti-sorcery magic by a priest, seemingly unconnected scenes located on a war movie set and in a rowdy barroom, green & white ninjas with the ability to vanish and reappear, and a briefly-seen female ghost called Rose, NINJA: THE VIOLENT SORCERER ends with the two ninja heroes and a good priest combating multiple hopping vampires and an evil priest in a normal-looking suburban living room.
Directed by Ted Kingsbrook, produced by Tomas Tang, starring Kent Wills, Trudy Calder, Lucas Byrne, Sorapong Chatree, Sun Chien and Jack Mackay.
Lots of people get eaten!
Master Cooper, who controls people-munching killer crocs from a golden cave, plans to team-up with Monica (Calder), the blonde sorceress who is running a ‘vampire business’. Together they hope their crocodiles and hopping vamps will take over the world, but agent Bruce Thompson (Wills) is determined to prevent this evil plan from happening.
VHS cover
A grungy-faced hopping vampire
Master Cooper dwells on his golden cave, sitting within the skeletal jaws of a croc
OMG! Where to start with this incredibly weird cut-and-paste flick?! Well, here’s just some of the things that occur… There are multiple crocodile attacks, both in the water and on land, with a high bodycount and much screaming. Monica performs seemingly pointless incantations, at one point causing several fish to spill from a vampire’s mouth, into a fishbowl, which then fly up into a different vampire’s mouth. A levitating dude loses his concentration and falls prey to a hungry crocodile. A guy vomits up maggots. A smaller man-in-suit croc does tricks for villagers. Some of the vampires are of the Chinese hopping variety, whilst others are more like zombie-vamps with green blood. Oh… and the crocodiles are actually the spirits of people who have become reptiles, so they often appear in human form too!
Witch-woman Monica has long, steel nails!
The croc footage stems from a Thai film called KRAI THONG 2 (1985) and the main crocodile, though not exactly a Hollywood-standard animatronic creation, is a pretty serviceable full-size model that munches down on many, many extras. The low tech attack scenes actually possess a pacy verve, as loads of people run, shout and get bitten or carried away. One of the reasons these reptile assaults stand out is because they are never isolated incidents: the various crocs don’t bother waiting around to pick off lone victims, they launch onslaughts against groups of people near their homes or at riverside markets. Most of these attacks involve the actors struggling in the reptile’s jaws, but there’s one particular scene that is quite gory, with limbs being bitten off, and I’m sure actual amputees were cast to portray these legless or armless victims.
A dude has his leg bitten off
A man tries to pull a victim back out of the croc’s mouth!
KRAI THONG 2 provided much of the footage for this cut-and-paste production
It’s a real WTF moment when one of the crocs turns into its human form (a young woman called Maria) for the very first time. It’s revealed that Maria is the deceased girlfriend of a local man called Jack and she says such things as “If you really cared for me, Jack, you’d be a crocodile too, and then we could both be together right away, what do you think?”
Jack makes a crocodile let go of its latest victim…
…and the croc transforms into his dead sweetheart Maria!
The film focuses more on the crocodile spirits in their human form later in the story, in scenes mainly based in the golden cave, referred to as Sea World. This is the location where two croc-demon guys, one called Donald and the other named Stephen, fight one another, with Stephen hurling small, stuffed-looking crocodiles at Donald!
Okay, now THAT is what you call a poster!
The film reaches dual climaxes, one involving Jack as a croc-fighting hero with a special spear & dagger, the other finale boasting a showdown between Bruce, vampires and witch-lady Monica, who suddenly develops a fake-looking, throbbing belly, from which bursts a slimy human head!
Bruce Thompson versus Monica!
The zombie-vampires leak greenish blood when they are stabbed
This dumb, fun Tomas Tang production, often mistakenly credited as a Godfrey Ho film, is utterly batshit crazy, filled with so much incident, including a croc biting the head off a water buffalo, a machine gun assassination attempt, and a crocodile with diamond teeth, that the film actually makes other cut-and-paste epics like SCORPION THUNDERBOLT look like coherent, perfectly normal movies by comparison!
At one point one of the crocodiles glides through the air!
Directed by Joe Livingstone, produced by Tomas Tang, starring Robin Mackay, Nian Watts and Harry Myles.
Japanese VHS cover
Tom, an anti-drug agent, is mortally wounded whilst taking on narcos, who are using Chinese hopping vampires as weapons and as a means to smuggle their heroin shipments. Tom dies on the operating table, but it is decided to transform him into an android… enter the robo-warrior!
We can rebuild him! We have the technology!
Narco villain
Dastardly priest
ROBO VAMPIRE, a cut-and-paste movie courtesy of producer Tomas Tang’s Filmark International, closely resembles the kind of productions made by director Godfrey Ho, the king of such chimeric flicks, which is why the film is very often falsely attributed to him. So who is ‘Joe Livingstone’, then? I don’t know the answer to that, but the owner of IFD Films & Arts Ltd, Toby Russell, assures me that it isn’t Mr Ho. So let’s move on…
Hopping vampire
A scab-faced vampire with a mouthful of his victim’s flesh!
Much of the footage in ROBO VAMPIRE, especially the hostage rescue mission sequences, is sourced from the Thai actioner PAA LOHGAN (1984). The new spliced-in material is all the hopping vampire and robo-dude stuff and, interestingly, these additional scenes are actually better lit than the original movie footage, which usually isn’t the case.
At one point robo-warrior levitates!
The main character, a stomping, low tech, silver-suited dude with a big gun, is not actually a vampire, as you might have expected considering the film’s title. He’s just a cut-price android, though he does skirmish with many scabby-faced, hopping bloodsuckers throughout the film’s running time.
Android versus vamps!
In one action sequence, the robo-warrior battles armed bad guys on a beach, where they attempt to immolate him, but when this fails he is assailed by vampires that pop-up from the sand. This is a shoddily-shot, gloriously cheesy set piece that ends with a tin foil-covered dummy, representing the android protagonist, being blown-up by a rocket launcher! But don’t you worry, the tech guys weld robo-warrior back together again pretty quickly and easily.
Such amazing special effects!
Though the jungle-based rescue subplot is a mainly underwhelming series of shoot-outs, fights, some water torture and explosions, with far too many characters being introduced into the story, a lot of the other incidents in the movie are quite memorable, including drugs being hidden in a real dead cow’s slit-open belly, romantic interludes between a ghostly woman and her gorilla-faced super-vampire lover, a bloody eye-poking, fireworks being fired from the ape-mask-vampire’s sleeves, and a fight between the now-topless female ghost and a priest! Once the she-spirit defeats the evil holy man, our android hero then scorches the gorilla-vampire with his machine gun, which is now in flamethrower mode (cue burning dummy on a wire)!
The female ghost
A gorilla-faced vampire! Yes, you heard me right: a gorilla-faced vampire!
Another shot of the girl ghost
Weird, cheap, trashy and cheerful nonsense.
You don’t mess with a flamethrower-wielding android!
In Lab 707 scientists are working on the Thunder Project, experimenting with a formula that can make plants and animals grow to large proportions. This formula is never really shown, though: it seems to depend more on using a see-through box and electricity, rather than vials and fluids.
Terrorists attack the army-run lab facility to acquire the formula, there’s a bloody shootout, but several scientists run into the countryside with the special case, which gets lost after a car crash, and is discovered by a young girl called Ting Ting. She decides to put her pet snake Mosler in the see-through box, switches on the case’s ‘lights’, and the serpent is electrified… and then it begins to grow!
Ting Ting and her (big) pet snake Mosler!
THUNDER OF GIGANTIC SERPENT is a cut-and-paste IFD Film Arts movie that uses lots of footage from the earlier Taiwanese monster movie KING OF SNAKE (1984) with added film material featuring martial arts actor Pierre Kirby.
Now that’s what I call a poster!
Mosler on the loose!
We get a cool scene early on where we see the scientists experimenting on a frog, making the amphibian grow much larger. The model used here is pretty decent.
Frog experiment…
For several scenes we see Ting Ting having fun with the semi-large Mosler: they play hide and seek, play catch with a ball and the snake also helps Ting Ting win a rollerblade race against a couple of other kids. Mosler, it is revealed, can understand what Ting Ting says and reacts to her by nodding or shaking its head. It also makes a sound like a parrot (or maybe it sounds like a screeching chimp?)
Meanwhile, we are introduced to military agent Ted Fast (Pierre Kirby). Ted Fast: now there’s a heroic name! Tough Ted is sent on a mission to hunt down the terrorist group’s leader Solomon (Edowan Bersmea).
Don’t mess with Ted Fast!
Some cops and army dudes in red berets also feature in the story, so we get various cops/Ted Fast/gangsters/army confrontations.
The army wears bright red berets
There is a bunch of shootouts, then we get a scene where the terrorists try to capture the snake, but their electrified trap makes Mosler grow much larger. Now the huge serpent makes a deep, roaring sound like a lion!
We get a couple of scenes where the terrorists (who come across more like gangsters) threaten Ting Ting’s family and they eventually kidnap the girl. Then we get some monster action with a plane-vs-snake sequence that ends when Mosler smashes the plane with its tale.
Mosler vs plane
The film does get rather preoccupied with terrorists and cops shooting it out with each other, but then we get some more monster snake action! Yay! First Mosler attacks a road bridge and then destroys a train bridge, including the train crossing it. Yikes! The formerly nice and playful Mosler is now a large-scale killer!
The army watches as Mosler approaches a bridge
The snake proceeds to break a dam, causing mass flooding and more deaths. Jeez, Mosler is a real psycho-killer now!
After some Ted Fast martial arts action we cut back to Ting Ting, who is being held captive by a bad guy in a tall building, and then Mosler returns once more, to attack the west district of a large city.
Crowds and the Mosler puppet are featured together in some simple but acceptable matte shots. The populace run in panic! Flames and screaming! Mosler wipes out a disco! In an earlier scene with the military we are told that the west district has been evacuated, but there are civilians everywhere in these shots!
Mosler starts wrapping itself around the skyscraper where Ting Ting is being held prisoner and jets finally arrive, shooting at the snake, which glows around the edges of its body each time it is hit (maybe because electricity had been used to enlarge it?)
I like it when monsters coil around buildings, don’t you?
Here come the fighter planes
Neon-glow around the snake when it gets shot
After one of the jets crashes into Mosler’s face, the huge snake falls to the street below and dies. Ting Ting cries. Oh, that poor, mass-murdering snake!
Poor Mosler…
There’s a final showdown between terrorist leader Solomon and Ted Fast: “Go ahead, shoot, make my day, punk!” And then the movie finishes!
THUNDER OF GIGANTIC SERPENT, as with GAMERA: THE GIANT MONSTER, features a kid who continually pleads for her ‘pet’ monster to be left alone, even after it causes untold destruction and death! Mosler, it must be said, does start off as a rather nice critter, but after it goes on its binge of dam-busting and train-wrecking it becomes rather difficult to regard the great serpent as anything but a menace.
The effects are not of Toho quality, that’s for sure, but I enjoyed Mosler’s rampage through the city, ending with the model military jets attacking the puppet snake whilst it is coiled around the skyscraper.
“Go ahead, shoot, make my day, punk!”
Frolic Pictures double feature DVD cover
‘A terrible legless creature’!
The film is also known as Terror Serpent
Devoted to every kind of movie and TV monster, from King Kong to Godzilla, from the Blob to Alien. Plus monsters from other media too, including books and comics.
Monster Zone 