by Tim May
The Man from Hell doesn’t exist.
Seriously. It doesn’t even have an IMDb page! Nor do the three actors credited, Krung Seller (or as we call him, Dung Seller), Alana Montri, and Clint Chit (Clit Shit). In fact, the only mention of this film I could find online is a short profile on an obscure website called karatemovie.com, where I learned the name of its director, Bo Curtis, who also doesn’t have an IMDb page. Seriously, how is this possible? Dan Kinem has an IMDb page, for Christ’s sake! This brief profile of the film also told me that it starred Sombat Metanee, who actually DOES have an IMDb page, which informs me that he was a popular Thai singer and actor in the seventies and eighties who appeared in over 2,000 films. Only 23 are listed on his page, so most of his movies must be lost treasures like The Man from Hell.
After a brief nightclub sequence, The Man from Hell begins with one of, if not the, funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. A woman gets raped and murdered by a gang that is obsessed with roses. They leave roses at the scene of every crime they commit and talk about the crimson flower constantly. The film has one of the funniest English language dubs I have ever heard. All of the men sound like they were voiced by the same actor, and they all wish they were Edward G. Robinson. All of the rapists lean into the camera like a ’90s rap video, all the while grunting and pulling out all the old Cagney tricks they probably learned from Michelangelo in the the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. It’s absolutely hilarious. I’d describe it more, but I can’t do it justice, so just check out the video at the end of the review.
Then the main villain of the piece is introduced getting out of a car and strutting across a beach with a “cool” walk. What makes this walk hilarious is that he’s a Singapore midget who thinks he’s Scarface (Howard Hawks, not Brian DePalma).
After this, the film turns into a relatively standard revenge movie, with the raped and murdered girl’s husband going after the members of the gang of rapists.This leads to a pretty cool action scene in a bar set first to “Baby Love” by Diana Ross, then to “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch” by The Temptations, in which one of the bad guys gets knocked out by a foosball lever. One of the thugs in this brawl looks uncannily like an out-of-shape greatest actor of all time Toshiro Mifune.
Most of the finer details of the plot are completely lost in the incomprehensible mess of a narrative. Read the back of the VHS box and see if you can figure out what the fuck this movie is about.
(Note the “Approx ___ min.” We didn’t time it, but I’m pretty sure it was over two hours, making it the longest VHShitfest movie, by far.)
The VHS was obviously a Hong Kong bootleg, distributed by a company called Wild West Video. The actual tape even had a color label, which was kind of cool. How the fuck did this tape get into the stock of Film Fest Video in Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania? It remains a mystery.
While it’s mostly a boring pile of shit, The Man from Hell does contain one of the funniest scenes ever committed to celluloid, and a couple of decent action sequences. That certainly warrants an IMDb page, no? Those of you with the capability to do such things, GET ON IT! The Man from Hell deserves to be known by the world, and the first step in this re-introduction is getting it a page on the definitive film encyclopedia. This is a crime against the art of cinema and it must be rectified.
Postscript: Please check out the video above, it’s the aforementioned rape scene and it was uploaded to our new YouTube channel. We’ll be updating that in the coming months with some cool stuff, including more clips and maybe even some “behind the scenes” material, so please subscribe to and keep an eye on our YouTube channel!