The Film:
Although Eastern cinema is continuing to impress in the West causing rapid growth in the industry, there is one country that has always been kind of sidetracked and overlooked. This country is Thailand. Whilst Hong Kong and Korea are reaping the rewards of success, Thailand is left by itself, in the midst of mediocracy with only the odd film being recognised such as Ong-bak and Tom Yum Goong. This is mainly due to the fact that as Hong Kong and Korea's cinema trade continues to excel, the budgets get bigger, and faces more recognisable. Although big budgets don't mean better films, it does usually mean it has more of a chance with the punters with bigger promotional pushes. Unfortunately, for Thailand, they have few big names outside of Tony Jaa and not as much producing or directing talent, leaving Thai cinema in a state of mediocrity.
Tigress In King River stars Panu Suwanno and Prangthong Changdham in a story steeped in ancient mythology. The film starts with a village being told by their leader that all the men must go to battle, with the camera focusing on one couple in particular. When the villagers return home, the wife of the man being focused upon is told her husband was shot and fell of his elephant which ran away. She goes to look for it, but is soon set upon by a gang of warriors and then something mysterious with a tiger happens. We are then thrust forwards a hundred years where British armyman Peter Bain is found out by a Chinese warlord that he has sold them dodgy weapons. He is forced to go with a gang of his hunters to shoot an elephant which is supposedly protected by a 'demon' tiger. As the hunters are getting killed by the tiger, more mysterious things start to happen, eventually bringing the film to an interesting end.
The film isn't great and suffers from a lot of the flaws I talked about in the first paragraph. The budget is obviously quite small, but the director's plans are huge, probably to much so for the budget. We are left with some very dodgy CGI work and the acting is average with some of the secondary cast being laughable at best. The script can waver a little on the side of tedious and the direction is shoddy at times with far to many camera cuts. Despite all this, the film has a certain charm to it making it an enjoyable flick, which had it had a bigger budget, could've been something quite spectacular. Hopefully, as Thai cinema starts to catch up with the rest of the East, we will start seeing some really special films.
The DVD:
Video:
Mangpong have given us the film in the original aspect ratio of 1.85:1 though it has unfortunately not been anamorphically enhanced. There is a lot of edge enhancement throughout and colours can sometimes lack a certain clarity in the darker scenes. There isn't much grain or dirt on the print, but it really doesn't manage to be anything above average.
Audio:
We have been give a choice of two audio tracks for this release from Mangpong: a Thai Dolby Digital 5.1 track and a Thai Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track. For this review I watched the film with the 5.1 track which like the video, didn't do enough to impress. Surrounds are rarely used with the LFE only being used a couple of times throughout the entire movie. There are no crackles or background hiss present which is good, but the fact the speakers fail to use the settings of being hunted in the atmospheric jungle to it's own advantage bothers me. English and Thai subtitles have been provided, but the Engish subs have occasional grammar and spelling errors.
Extras:
We get a making of featurette running eight minutes 23 seconds and a theatrical trailer running two minutes and 50 seconds. Unfortunately both are in Thai without the option of subtitles so unless you understand Thai, there's nothing here for you.
