Synopsis
During a cruise, a gang of oriental pirates abducts Marta, the daughter of billionaire Flanagan, who asks the adventurer Panama Joe for help.
1985 ‘Bangkok, cita con la muerte’ Directed by Jesús Franco
During a cruise, a gang of oriental pirates abducts Marta, the daughter of billionaire Flanagan, who asks the adventurer Panama Joe for help.
Bangkok, City of the Dead, Bangkok, cita con la muerte
The Year/s of Franco - appendix vii
My mans back on his pulp-orientalist bs, a second-unit quickie spun from the same budget and personnel as Trip to Bangkok. Where that film had some modicum of imagination (robot assassin army!) and amusement in Vernon's turn as the doddery detective, this is more in step with the martial arts nihility of Judoka Shadow minus the mild chalky rush to be had from the narcosis of its manic shapelessness. It's a stock millionaire's daughter-for-ransom set-up encircled by an excess of pirates, agents, investigators, oligarchs and lousy whitebelt manservants, against an exotic Thai backdrop, complete with talking parrots and sudden fade-outs as if to commercial break just like a cruddy early 80s PI serial,…
Sometimes I will wonder what Jess Franco could have done if he didn't do twenty movies in one year and instead took that money and just focused on one or two films. However, if he did that then he wouldn't be Franco and we wouldn't have nearly two hundred films to go through. BANGKOK, CITA CON LA MUERTE is a film that is mildly entertaining but the lack of money keeps it from being anything more.
You've basically got a kidnapping plot that gets drawn out over 87-minutes as there's really no budget for large action scenes so the majority of the running time is devoted to scenes where the good guys have discussions with the bad guys who then…
Full disclosure — I watched this in Spanish with no subtitles. That said, the plot was easy enough to follow.
It’s a garish kung-fu spy caper, sort of a cross between Blues of Pop Street and Trip to Bangkok...Coffin Included, but with the added bonus of Lina Romay as — wait for it — a pirate queen. It’s fun to see Lina without her familiar blonde Candy Coster wig, and she has the best scene in the film, dancing around in a skimpy leopard print swimsuit in front of some sort of weird mechanical music machine.
The fights are terrible of course, and the library music score is a bit by-the-numbers, but it’s bright and colourful and fun, and Franco goes mental with orange filters over the lens.
Features the usual Franco players, including Jose Lamas and Antonio Mayans, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.
Hi-camp orientalist nonsense in the fun, self-referential mode of Franco's early-80s stuff.