Another example of an Eastern made film that was a commercial blockbuster in its native land but to Western eyes seems downright Jorodowsky-esque. PHRA ROT-MERI (roughly: PRINCE ROT AND PRINCESS MERI) is a 1981 Thai iteration of The Twelve Sisters, a myth that’s been widely disseminated in Southeast Asia (and adapted for film in Cambodia in 1967, 1968 and 2000, in addition to being the subject of multiple Thai TV series). This film, co-directed by the late Thai trashmeister Sompote Saengduenchai, a.k.a. Sompote Sands (1941-2021), was insanely popular in Thailand despite playing fast and loose with the details of the myth.
It begins with twelve young girls, sisters all, being abandoned in the wilderness by their penniless mother and father. The adults promptly get crushed by a giant ogre, from whom the girls take shelter in an abandoned castle. They end up rescued by Mrs. Giant, a big breasted ogress who assumes the guise of a pretty lady and turns the girls into fully grown women. But Mrs. Giant only wants the ladies’ eyes, inspiring the gals to escape their confines and head back into the wild; there they meet a handsome prince who marries the sisters and makes them part of his kingdom.
Mrs. Giant, however, intervenes by seducing the prince. She also provides a watermelon that when eaten by the sisters induces pregnancy, which causes the prince to conclude that his wives have been unfaithful, and leads him to imprison them in a vast cave. There Mrs. Giant gets what she most desired all along: eyeballs, with all the ladies rendered eyeless but one, who for some reason is left with a single orb. Before long starvation sets in and the sisters take to cannibalizing their stillborn offspring.
A male ogre who’s been tasked with keeping watch over the cave snatches up the one surviving baby and, after divine intervention causes the ogre to grow breasts so it can feed the child, raises it as his own. As often happens in this film, the kid grows VERY quickly, becoming a boy named Phra Rot who uses an “Angel Chicken” to raise money in cockfights so he can buy food for his cave-bound mother. Another growth spurt results in Phra becoming an attractive young man, in which form he falls in love with Mrs. Giant’s daughter Meri. This sets up an existential conflict that, in contrast to the original Twelve Sisters myth (which concluded with Phra and Meri both dying) ends happily.
PHRA ROT-MERI is essentially the Thai equivalent of the Hindi devotional film model. Such films (which included classics like HAR HAR MAHADEV and SAMPOONA RAMAYANA) tended to be populated by gods and goddesses, with supernatural phenomena taken as a given. What is most interesting about them, and PHRA ROT-MERI, is the “reality” on display, with characters who frequently appear and disappear, shapeshift and undergo sudden growth spurts. In this universe the twelve sisters at the film’s center never leave each other’s sides and sleep in a line, while erotic content is VERY discreetly handled (the massive breast motif aside) and the laws of physics and biology are suspended, with certain characters growing to impossible sizes without having to obey the square-cube law and plucked-out eyeballs eventually returned to their owners’ faces, where they immediately regain their sight.
Sompote Sands, a director whose filmography includes anti-classics like TAH TIEN, HANUMAN VS. 7 ULTRAMAN and MAGIC LIZARD, was quite inspired here. He and co-director Neramit (who corralled the actors while Sands handled the technical aspects) turned out a film that, irredeemably loony though it might seem to western eyes, was by traditional Sands standards polished and stately (the camera stays still throughout and goes easy on the zoom lens).
Even the barrage of low budget special effects, a prerequisite in Thai fantasy (or tokusatsu) cinema, were given some care—with, for instance, the miniature buildings the “giant” ogres destroy constructed with exacting detail. Of course the corresponding shots of normal-sized people on the ground dealing with the destruction don’t match, but this is an industry, let’s not forget, that tends to pass off emulsion scratches as special effects and features “monsters” that are made and moved around by hand. In other words, the effects here are about as good as they come in the tokusatsu world.
This is all contained in a grandiose-by-Thai-movie-standards 126 minute whole. It’s no exaggeration to call PHRA ROT-MERI the 1980s Southeast Asian equivalent to LORD OF THE RINGS—if, that is, LORD OF THE RINGS were a crazed low budget hallucination.
Vital Statistics
PHRA ROT-MERI
Apex Films/Chaiyo Rangsit
Directors: Sompote Sands, Neramit
Screenplay: Neramit
Cast: Dam Datsakorn, Toon Hiransap, Duangcheewan Komolsen, Supansa Nuengpirom, Ampha Pusit